Chapter One – Extract Two

It’s been a very, very long time since I posted my fair words on here.

I have been very busy you know.

Moved house. And expanded the word count on Four Gigs.

I’m sixteen thousand words in which isn’t bad considering I’m still neck-deep in cardboard boxes.

So I wanted to share a very small second extract from the first chapter.

I appreciate that it’s hard to understand the wider context from such a short piece, but at the same time I need to protect my ideas.

It suddenly occurred to me that a cyber burglar could nick my story.

That’s the last thing I need.

For this reason I am wary of publishing any more extracts, but I’ll see.

Anyway here it is…

 ———————–

There’s twenty-five minutes before the gate’s called. Katrin wanders into a duty-free boutique selling socks and scarves and umbrellas in bland colours. I prop myself on a bar stool a few hundred yards away and order a coffee. There’s an anxious looking woman texting on her phone, a man licking milky froth from his moustache. The amount of boxes, bags, buggies wheeling past confuses my head. It’s too busy, too noisy. An unpleasant sensation of tissue winged butterflies flutters around my insides. I’m half way through the milky cup – fingering the contents of my bag – when it hits me; the object that’s detached itself from my life.  I don’t believe it. You brain-dead idiot. The words plunge from my head, through cappuccino-lined throat, sinking into the spongy base of my empty gut. The Diary. 98’s only a week in and I’ve already lost it. I exhale a long, frustrated sigh, the breath pushing out my lips in a Jagger-style pout. I rub my forehead with the base of my palm in short firm strokes, dragging the skin up and down. Then it happens – sometimes when I’m stressed or tired or both – the flash of brightness, the sun filling my head, blinding my thoughts. My right ankle gives a slight twinge and nausea rises like high tide – saliva gathering in a shallow pool under my tongue. But I know what to do, have been doing it since I was a school girl in grey and green; I simultaneously close my eyes; pat my crown; and with one deep breath send the whole thing away.  When I regain myself, the anxious woman is staring at me, her phone placed on the granite bar. I avoid eye contact with her, with anyone. I call my stress attacks The Big Yellows – first thing that came to me when I was seven years old. And it stuck.

———————–

Be Kind. Be Constructive.

Thank you readers.

2 responses

  1. You are right, it is difficult to understand the wider context but it does make me want to read more.
    Well done for finding time to write with the move and all the work that goes with it.
    I totally understand how you feel about publishing extracts… That is why I stopped doing it! 😉 xx

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