New Year

Day One – 100 words

January 1, 2024 By Ellen

Day One You have arrived, inevitable as hunger. A stranger with a suitcase of mysteries, neatly folded. But we aren’t friends. Yet… Does it matter if my welcome is cool? Or my star-lit arms opened with fanfare? Will you execute a plan, detailed and deliberate, or will cruel whimsy buffet me? Must I barter with […]

Resolution – 100 words

December 31, 2023 By Ellen

New year: new you. What’s wrong with the old me, the current me? The me that hurt, and worked on it, and fell apart. Put back together. Kept going. Achieved the things that, with your try-harder, get-better whip cracking, you want me to leave behind. In the old year, like the broken bauble and the […]

Quitters’ charter – 100 words

January 12, 2023 By Ellen

Quitters’ charter No to caring about bulges – yes to a body that lifts weights. No to suffering for weeks then quietly giving up – yes to climbing more hills. No to being more like her – yes to ‘who cares? This is me’. No to finishing books that bore – yes to ‘this looks […]

Year’s end – 100 words

January 1, 2023 By Ellen

Year’s end I wept at false summits, legs aching, throat dry How much further? One more step, another. Surely now, that’s the peak. There. This time. Standing, gasping, hands on hips Lake glints. The path behind me dips And twists, and I can’t see the rocks that tripped me The spot where we ate […]

Dispatches from the bunker… just after the famous football game where you think it might turn out fine in the end

January 6, 2019 By Ellen

Well, happy new-year-new-you one and all. It’s still peachy here. You know why, don’t you? It’s because we’ve just been off for a few days of ‘sod it, it’s Christmas’ and the cold hard realities are just mustering themselves ready to pounce. So to celebrate the fact that true hostilities haven’t yet resumed, it’s time […]