Flash Fiction: Blue Ribbons

This piece was written for the 6 February Flash!Friday competition. It received an honourable mention and was called "horrendously sad" by Tamara Shoemaker.
The photo and "a fleeting moment" was the prompt.

Blue Ribbons

There should have been rain. A proper Highveld storm with black clouds, thunder, and the tick-tick of hail on roofs before the ice sting your skin as it falls and bounces on the black tar. The tears of the heavens should have beaten my angry pain on houses and cars and umbrellas.

Perhaps it should have been autumn. Yellow and red leaves. The smell of fresh compost in the back garden. The rough bark of the apricot tree beneath my hands and knees as we scaled the branches.

Perhaps it should have been spring. Cicadas and bees. Flowers and the smell of cut grass. Climbing into the neighbour’s garden to pick mulberry leaves for our pet silkworms in their empty cereal boxes. Giggling as we tore leaves from the low branches. Deep purple mulberry stains on fingers, mouths, and bare feet. You always wore blue ribbons in your hair.

But there was no rain. No leaves. No cicadas.

Only burning summer sun. The undertaker’s driveway. A face at the security gate.

I handed the woman the bundle. The wrinkled, shaking hand didn’t feel like mine. A moment ago we’d been kids traipsing through gardens. Together.

“Blue ribbons,” I said. “For her hair.”

For a moment I smelled mulberries.

Rain (Liberia, Guanacaste, Costa Rica). CC2.0 photo by NannyDaddy.

Writing updates – articles and a blog tour!

This week has been quite busy, but I did get some writing done and some articles published.

I’ve also been invited to take part in the Writing Process Blog Tour! This post will be on the blog in a few weeks.

In the meantime, here are the links to my articles and to “Moonstruck”, a flash fiction piece I wrote last week. 

I Love South Africa’s Diversity  

How to Spring Clean Your House  (seeing as how I’m busy with this anyway)

Record-setting Heatwaves in History (Also giving myself some perspective while it’s over 30 °C)

Moonstruck

Flash Fiction: Blue Ribbons

This piece was written for the 6 February Flash!Friday competition. It received an honourable mention and was called "horrendously sad" by Tamara Shoemaker.
The photo and "a fleeting moment" was the prompt.

Blue Ribbons

There should have been rain. A proper Highveld storm with black clouds, thunder, and the tick-tick of hail on roofs before the ice sting your skin as it falls and bounces on the black tar. The tears of the heavens should have beaten my angry pain on houses and cars and umbrellas.

Perhaps it should have been autumn. Yellow and red leaves. The smell of fresh compost in the back garden. The rough bark of the apricot tree beneath my hands and knees as we scaled the branches.

Perhaps it should have been spring. Cicadas and bees. Flowers and the smell of cut grass. Climbing into the neighbour’s garden to pick mulberry leaves for our pet silkworms in their empty cereal boxes. Giggling as we tore leaves from the low branches. Deep purple mulberry stains on fingers, mouths, and bare feet. You always wore blue ribbons in your hair.

But there was no rain. No leaves. No cicadas.

Only burning summer sun. The undertaker’s driveway. A face at the security gate.

I handed the woman the bundle. The wrinkled, shaking hand didn’t feel like mine. A moment ago we’d been kids traipsing through gardens. Together.

“Blue ribbons,” I said. “For her hair.”

For a moment I smelled mulberries.

Rain (Liberia, Guanacaste, Costa Rica). CC2.0 photo by NannyDaddy.

The “Weird” Life of a Bilingual

Or, a Change to the Blog

If you’ve read this blog a few times, you’ll know by now that I am bilingual. Most South Africans speak at least two languages (we don’t have 11 official languages just to show off). I’m not referring to “I can say ‘hello’, ‘please’, and ‘goodbye’”, but “I’m fluent in both”. It’s normal for me to switch between Afrikaans (my mother tongue) and English (my second language) throughout the day, as these two are the only ones in which I am completely fluent. This type of switching isn’t strange in South Africa and it’s not strange in many countries. But I have found that those who speak only English, for example, (because it’s the only language they need in everyday life) don’t always understand how life as a bilingual generally works.

View image | gettyimages.com

A Typical Day
For example, when I get to work, I’ll switch between English and Afrikaans to greet everyone. Most emails are in English, except when I know the person is Afrikaans and they are the only one who will read it (otherwise, English). Because I translate between English and Afrikaans, I’ll switch between them when speaking to clients. If it’s a new client, I’ll speak English. If I know the client and I know they’re Afrikaans, I’ll switch to Afrikaans. If I do not speak their first language, English is mostly the default. Some of my colleagues may ask me to speak to them in Afrikaans in order to practice understanding it (it’s a lot easier to read a language than understand someone when they speak at a normal tempo) or to explain any differences between translated texts (especially where idioms are used). Some of the research I do during the day may also require me to read Dutch. Most of the time you don’t really think about which language you need to use because you do it every day.

A Merge – the New Hersenskim
To make a very long story short, I’ve decided to make a change to this blog by merging Hersenskim and my Afrikaans blog. The reason for this is that, in many instances, the posts for both are the same, especially when I post flash fiction or videos. It will therefore be easier to post once and just translate the necessary parts of the post. While there will still be posts in Afrikaans (for instance book reviews or podcasts), these can just be skipped by readers who do not understand the language.

Why am I doing this?
Except for making my job easier and giving me more time to work on a variety of posts, it is simply a good way to feel that I don’t have to separate what I could call my life in one language to that in another language because some readers will have to skip some of the posts. There are more than 7 000 languages in the world and to use only a dominant language does not contribute to multilingualism or teaching others about different peoples and cultures. This is as true in SA as it is in most countries and, as a language practitioner, I feel that I want to promote the use of all languages. This is one way in which I can do it.

Behind the Fiction: White Horses - Ghosts! Legends! Ships!

I wrote “White Horses” for one of the Flash! Friday competitions. If you haven’t read it, it’s posted below, with a look at the inspiration behind the story underneath.

The prompt - Miranda — The Tempest. Painting by John William Waterhouse, 1916. Public domain photo

White Horses

Lenie gazed at the waves and imagined Adriaan beside her. In one hand she grasped her hair; broken red strands caught on her wedding ring. In the other she clutched a gold locket her mother found after a tempest ripped apart a merchant ship.

She wanted to believe in happy endings. Like her Adriaan who would become a doctor after almost dying in a shipwreck as a child. Like the tall man on a horse riding into the waves to save those drowning amidst a wreck in roiling waves while clouds poured like devil’s smoke down the mountains.

But other endings also needed remembering.

Like those who nursed broken survivors while the rider grew weary and floundered unseen.

Like brine stinging mortal wounds.

Like shallow graves in fine sand.

Like a body never recovered.

Like those once saved returning to the sea.

Like a figure on horseback dragging Adriaan’s ship beneath the waves.

Like the briny taste of tears.

#454982721 / gettyimages.com

Behind the Scenes

I really enjoyed putting some local flavour into this story. I didn’t really know where it was going at first, but I knew I wanted to set it on the South African coast without the story sounding too locked in time and place.

Regarding the shipwreck, my first thoughts were of the book Caliban’s Shore: The Wreck of the Grosvenor and the Strange Fate of HerSurvivors by Stephen Taylor and a description of a shipwreck in DaleneMathee’s Kringe in ’n bos (available in English as Circles in a Forest), but then my brain shifted to the folktale of Van Hunks and the Devil smoking on top of Table Mountain. Their smoke, so the legend goes, causes the blanket of cloud on the mountain. From there it wasn’t a far jump (at least in my mind’s filing cabinet) to a folk hero called Wolraad Woltemade who died saving people from a shipwreck. Wolraad really did ride his horse into the waves to a wreck and perished after saving a number of people.

I didn’t want to include a ghost ship and immediately have the “Flying Dutchman” legend to contend with, so I thought about another way in which a ghost could sink a ship. Okay, and I couldn’t resist having a ghost on a ghost horse sinking ships. I also gave the characters Afrikaans names to link with the legends.

Ps. Also check out Dalene Matthee’s other works (as far as I know they’ve all been translated into various languages). And if you’re ever lucky enough to visit the Garden Route, be sure to go and have a walk in the Knysna Forest. It is truly magnificent.

Book Review: No Place for a Lady by Anne Harries

“The Boer War is razing South Africa to the ground. In the midst of these horrors are three women fighting for love, survival and justice: Sarah, an angelically beautiful nurse from England; Louise, her madcap friend; and the dynamic campaigner Emily Hobhouse.”

Perhaps I started reading the book with too many pre-conceived ideas about what the story would be like, but I just couldn’t really get into the book. Some of the melodramatic passages in the book jarred me out of the story even though I understand that the writer wanted the meetings between Sarah and Patch to be different from the rest of the book. For much of the book it also moved too slowly, while the denouement and ending was again too rushed and abrupt. The urgency I expected from a novel set in the midst of war just wasn’t there and some of the characters simply remained little more than shadows.  

That said, the book was interesting simply for being from the viewpoint of British nurses who came to South Africa and showing (some of) the work of Emily Hobhouse and other women. But the book also gives an array of viewpoints with regard to the war and war effort through the eyes of the characters as they move from Britain to South Africa to the Cape hospitals and at last the concentration camps.

All in all, I wouldn’t say it’s a bad book. The writing just isn’t completely my taste and the book didn’t stay with me after reading it as I thought it would. As I say – I might have started reading with too many pre-conceived ideas. But if you really enjoy historical fiction and don’t mind some melodrama, this might be the book for you.

Book Gnomes out of ten:  Five

Check out Goodreads for this and other books. 

Available online from Kalahari, Takealot and Amazon.