FCG mentorship and short stories. 

My Dearest Readers, 

I trust you are keeping well and soldiering on, I’ve got some good news! I was accepted onto the For Creative Girls mentorship scheme programme. Yipeeeee. For the last two weeks, I’ve been meeting every few days on Zoom with my mentor Tobi and fellow mentee Aisha. 

My dear Readers, it is so much fun. Tobi and Aisha are both copywriters working in Lagos and we have a right old giggle. However, Tobi also sets us regular mini tasks that are aimed to get our creative juices flowing. These include writing short stories around stimuli such as pictures. It’s the first time in about nine months that I’ve been writing for the sheer joy of it. I love adland but forgot how to felt to write with unbridled joy and no client. Bliss. 

If you care to read on and delve a little into my imagination, please proceed. 

Sailors warned of the woman in scarlet. As drunken songs on colonial Caribbean islands would have it, she bewitched old Governor Jones into loving her. Throughout the verses and questionable harmonies, the tale goes that a priest was called out to the West Indies all the way from England when the Governor’s colleagues became suspicious about her herb garden and need for moonlit walks. 

The priest tried to summon whatever demonic presence out of her that he could find but nothing came forth. Rather than look an embarrassment to the church, he took her out on a rickety rowing boat to admire the constellations, and pushed her overboard. 

To be brought back to life, a sailor pure of heart must pull her out from the depths. Yet knowing that sailors are so few pure of heart, she knots her hair into a crab pot and gently lets the current take her where it may around the shallows waiting to be pulled up. 

The hard plastic orange bus seat vibrated with every twist and turn of the hilly city. Masha and Yulia held each others hands tight as the adrenaline from the last five days slowly began to fade away. As the sun sank in the sky like a heavy ripe plum, the red light cast itself over San Fransisco Bay. It felt kind, it felt heading “home”, wherever that place may be. Yulia lent her head on her older sister’s shoulder with her eyes fluttering into the crescent that would soon be the centrepiece of that nights sky. Masha sighed fondly, never in life had they had so little with the hope of finding so much. 

There is a place. Yes, there is a place. I watch them every Friday at 6. When the two worlds brush over one another like an eclipse of rabbit holes. When mortality quietens its roar and the realm of possibility lies sparse and wide like the pages of a book yet unwritten. I have seen Heaven. I know its inhabitants as all those who left before I will. A crack, a sliver of light that falls across my eyes as thought God cast it as a spyglass for me to see what He can do. Tomorrow I stroke my Mother’s hair and when she asks me if they speak English where she is going, I tell her “always”.

There was something romantic about the way that the old Roman building was falling down. As though it had been the bones that hold up a body for other people to love in. Naja could almost hear the echoes of other busy lives that had made noise before her here and the shutters were thrown open for the building to breathe.  It was a special night, the city was still lying thick under a hush but soon the horns would be blaring and the vendors would be shouting their wares for all to hear. However, that was tomorrows promise. An old radio in the corner spluttered to life as she searched her way through the channels all chattering rapidly in Italian. Eventually she stumbled across a jazz band crooning on and on in the way only a trumpet and saxophone are allowed to. Pulling Benny close to her they danced, stepping their feet from side to side. This was all they knew how to do but for half an hour the music floated its way over Rome and Naja knew she must kill him.