Write about what you know, they said. But when she wrote about the hollow pull of loneliness and the fear she felt when walking alone they said no, no that is self-indulgent, and unfair on the many men who do nothing to warrant fear, even late at night when the bulbs in the streetlights are broken and the shadows run across the pavement like foxes. So she wrote about dragons and magic instead, and they praised her humor, her lyricism, and her vivid imagination.
To celebrate the conclusion of the second calendar year of our existence, Drabble editors (both of us) have compiled a list of some our favorite posts of 2016.
While we are grateful to every Drabble reader and writer for helping to make this small corner of the Internet such an unexpected success, we wanted to call out a few pieces that we feel truly accomplished what we were setting out to do when we began this blog back in March 2015.
Here (in no particular order) are ten drabbles we truly loved in 2016, enjoy:
Writing Advice by Jamie Thunder
Dear Me by Anonymous
Goodbye by Mentalist at Work
The Field by Ali Grimshaw
Vesuvius by T.N. Haynes
The Haunted Mirror by Rufus Woodward
Her Blank Page by Isabelle Andres
Q & A by Nick Dunster
The Color of Poppies by S.S. Hicks
Run by Vidur Sahdev
By Anonymous
You will fall in love with words and writing, and in the process, you’ll hear this a lot: “Don’t write like a victim.”
Don’t listen! Don’t let anyone else tell you how to express your truth.
Someday soon you will come to realize the Universe is arbitrary. Things will happen that are outside of your control, and some of those things will be painful. Yet, somehow you will make it through, I promise.
I’ve written this because I love you, and I don’t want you to ever forget that.
Love,
Your future self
By Vidur Sahdev
Tonight,
even the moon failed
to decipher
this strange paradox
of finding love,
why was it
that when
one falls in,
the other
so often
finds a reason
to run.
I can’t recall our first kiss
but I remember our last.
You tasted of coffee and toothpaste.
I murmured goodbye,
still naked, bleary eyed.
You let yourself out and drove back
to your work
your wife
your life.
I fell asleep and didn’t dream
of anything.
By Ali Grimshaw
A crack,
followed by a breaking open.
As the walls fall,
you will no longer be contained,
held separate.
Grieve and they shall crumble,
until the last stone is still
Leaving you in a field of golden openness.
Wide and light,
No need for protection
Bare
In the warm air.
Bio: Ali Grimshaw is a poet and blogger. Her blog called flashlight batteries, https://flashlightbatteries.wordpress.com/, offers hope for those struggling in the darkness and a mirror for tough times in life.
My Grandfather had a haunted mirror. He said, “If you look into the mirror very closely, so very closely, you can see the ghost and the ghost can see you.”
“Did you ever see the ghost, Grandfather?” I asked him once.
“I did better than that,” he said. “I put it there!”
My sister giggled. My mother scowled. Only I believed every word he said.
* * *
Now the mirror is mine and I look into it every day. Sometimes the eyes that look back at me are not my own. They are my Grandfather’s, and he is smiling at me.
____
Bio: Rufus Woodward lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of three volumes of weird tales.
By T.N. Haynes
They say
the aftershocks shook paint from chapel walls,
For days
Rendered pillars into powder—
a triturate of
promises/ /oaths
unmet/ /betrayed,
And
hopes/ /prayers
dashed/ /unheard.
They say a sooty residue
forever clogged the cogs of gratitude, and
Encased
a void
to forever and ever
avoid.
When the words go, the writer’s loneliness installs itself,
makes its home into her head.
She is there, silent as always
only this time the words no longer flow through her veins
No longer supply her oxygen.
She sits there still and the words are within her just as always
only this time she can’t feel them cuddling her.
can’t feel them loving her.
She can’t connect to them and see that they are there just as always
only awaiting for her to wake
By Todd!!!
From his cloud-top throne God bellows “Silence!”
All goes silent.
A drunk girl screams “Wooo!” (She’s from New Jersey.)
God clears his throat. “Ahem.”
Jersey girl shushes the already-silent crowd. “Shut up people! The creepy wizard guy is talking!”
God unfurls a tattered scroll titled, “Screenplay Idea,” and reads aloud:
“In a dystopian future, a handsome deity endows a species with a unique capacity called ‘reason!’—
… blah blah skip to Act 3 … aha! Plot twist! …
—Species then uses said ‘reason’ to invent rationalizations for its barbarism against ‘lesser’ species …”
“Bor–ing!” (It’s Jersey girl.)
Lightening strikes.
She never sees it coming.
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