OnDusk

When it flooded people would come from all around the district to see the valley full of quiet brown water. We strangers to one another, lived on the top of the ridge, with its five houses, an old pub and two street lights.   People wondered why any of us were there, why such a grand hotel, surrounded by sprawling queenslanders with elaborate gables and six paned windows lined a road that swept down into a valley in the middle of nowhere.   There was a time long before mine, when we were the town before the town up and left and moved to higher ground across the river.   There’d been more houses but over time all but ours had collapsed, their concrete slabs freely and my guess permanently snuffed out by the lush tropical vegetation.   No one was coming back out here.   They might stop at the pub for lunch or a beer garden band on a Sunday afternoon but that was the extent of it.   Because of the floods mostly.   The rain was so heavy some ...

Black  Freescribers -- Pledge -- I am an artist. I have set myself free. I stand by my work. I write what scares me. I value my work. I am fiercely protective of my creative time. I challenge others:  I examine ideas that challenge my values. I exist – I am whole.  I can not exist in this world if I do not write. I am relentless. I set my own pace and I have no end. I have no guiding hand:  I write what I know. I need no introductions:  I speak for myself. I am most free when I write from my imagination. I am a storyteller of emotional truth. I respect those vital to me, by writing my true self. I write for the future. I am experimental: I innovate and I explore. I write for myself. I do not seek permission to write. No one needs mine. I am a writer. Twitter  @SivParker  Blog  OnDusk Siv Parker 

Light the Darkness by Siv Parker The dogs were still pups and hadn’t mastered how to creep from their baskets across the carpet to the verandah doors without catching the pile with their nails. The scratching woke me up.   Must have been about 2am.   I didn’t need a torch to scan my front yard, but I took one anyway.   I lived on a large corner block in the good part of town.   Was so bright, I could have leaned on my fence and read a book under the street lights. I saw him clearly.   There was a man standing a few metres from my front door.   Dressed in a gray track suit, he quickly pushed his hood back off his head and greeted me by name in a clear voice. He told me that he had seen some kids trying to steal my car and had come to warn me. Two things quickly occurred to me. I didn’t know him. But seconds later I took a closer look and realized that I knew his face.   Not twelve hours earlier I had been sitting i...