There was no real theme for my writing this month. I ended up screwing around with the idea of handwritten postcards with my illustrations. I wrote down scraps of thoughts here and there. I don’t know that they mean anything. Maybe there’s a thought in there somewhere that forms the backbone of a larger piece later. I don’t know yet.
These are my notes on a postcard, anyway.
08/04/25
There are ridges in my shoes where I’ve curled my toes so tightly, bracing against what might be / maybe / will be. There are fingernail marks in my palms from gripping the air and a hollow in the earth where I curled up in your winter. Made a home in memories. Old karma. Outdated, like a wind up radio in a museum that plays the same song twice.
09/04/25
Liquid with sweetness, you pour me into amber.
Ssh, don’t fight it. You don’t want me to leave. Stay perfect. A glass of wine in the evenings will help you sleep if you don’t think too much about it. Drink more, it’ll help with the Dreams (you don’t want those). If you’re good, maybe I’ll let you get a puppy / more books / another plant for your nightstand. Let me check your reading list / friends list / messages, though. Oh dear, another travel book, you will get Ideas! You chuckle as you toss it in the sink. Make sure you do the dishes while I’m out. This is what love is, my only one, my dearest darling. This is how it’s supposed to be. Everyone does it.
I push with splayed fingers against the thick, honey tar of it. The scent of love on the sheets cloying and catching in my throat. My fingernails scrape against glass windows, nailed shut, while you sleep off a night with the boys.
When the road begins to yawn again, long and wide and free to the horizon, you draw the curtains. I feel a scream building and you suffocate it with kisses. Now, now, none of that. Let’s turn on the TV, shall we? See what’s on. A puppet, wired to the box, I hang limp / suspended / with fish hooks tugging on my skin. You hum happily to yourself as you hammer white picket fence panels into our freshly mown lawn.
09/04/25
The wide eyed, three quarter moon hangs suspended in an inky sky.
The hum of an airplane overhead and the lazy roar of cars. The sweep of white headlights on cracked, black tarmac.
A skitter of doll-like feet and half-human eyes in a smudged face disappear into the hawthorn hedges with the rattling of fence panels.
14/04/2025
Prompt: midnight
– ‘Midnight is a Place’, Joan Aiken
– A black sky, spackled with glitter around a wide, white moon like a gaping maw devouring the night
– The stillness of an inhale held
– Night creatures going about their business, tiptoeing through the bushes, hooting in the trees, barking behind the fence
– Textures of shadow: deep, thick and milky black under the bushes and around the trees; thin and grey like cobwebs around the spills of butter under the streetlamps, patiently waiting, hungry; taupe and grey camouflage, trickling around the edges of things
– Headlights like camera bulb flashes
– The whoosh of passing cars
24/04/25
I stacked things in the corners. They rattle in their cage at night with the detritus of other lives and other skins. Outgrown. Half forgotten. The remembering. The exhale which turns into a silent scream. I listen to them whisper as the anxiety gets to fretting on my chest.
25/04/25
I don’t know you anymore. You are a stranger. Don’t come back.