Short Tale Shrew

The flash fiction below was first published as an honourable mention on the flash fiction website Short Tale Shrew back in 2016.

Film Night at The Rebirth Convention

Body Limits - Bella Basura 2023. Photograph taken at Marina Abramovic exhibition at The Royal Academy
Body Limits – Bella Basura 2023.
Photograph taken at Marina Abramovic exhibition at The Royal Academy

The Delegates gathered, waiting for the ‘Samsara in Cinema’ event. Ouspensky sat broodingly alone, contemplating Ivan Osokin. A few rows behind him The Gautama and The Christ boisterously contrasted resurrection and soul-migration. In a hot-tub, left of the screen, naked therapists breath-worked their birth-traumas. Classically reincarnated deities – Mithras, Persephone, Taliesin, Vishnu, Baldur – sat rapt as the houselights dimmed. The crowded auditorium hushed as the diminutive figure of the Dalai Lama edged onto the stage. “My favourite film” He said simply. And the screen sprang into life, illuminating the film’s title “Groundhog Day”.

Throwback Tuesday Payback

This posting is part of an intermitten series of re-postings of some the earliest on this site:

Sit back and enjoy one of the earliest posts from 2019…

Drabble Blog

I recently found out that the 100 word flash-fiction/micro-stories I have been working these past three years have an actual name – “Drabble”.

The term is derived from a 1971 Monty Python book. ’nuff said!

There’s even a website to prove it.

So, ever at the rebellious cutting-edge, my newest piece – a seasonally appropriate monologue – is a variant-drabble form I’ve just invented.

It’s called a “Faux-Drabble”.

That is a piece that could pass for a drabble, but is actually 15 or so words out.

And so, I present to you Bella Basura’s First Faux-Drabble.

Cold Edges

My winter consciousness feels bound within cold edges.

I am double-thermal long-johns.

And still my ankles are frozen blue.

They  descend into hypothermic dysfunction, squishing like icy jelly when I stand on them.

 My knees feel chilly. And my elbows.

I can’t leave the house, enraptured in my unnatural attachment to a radiator. “I love You. I want to envelope you. I want to lie all over you”. I say the same to my fur-covered hot water bottle. Hot chocolate and fleecy throws seduce me. Candles and a ‘real’ fire screen-saver on my laptop too. Hygge hygge hygge my arse.

Green and pleasant, England’s winters are mild, but still my consciousness always feels bound within cold edges.

Bella Basura January 2019

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King of Potato

Emblazoned gold on unfurling crimson swags, the cracked old bone china cup read:  “King Edward VIII Coronation 1936”.

They paid cash, crisp twenty pound notes. The assistant slid the tissue wrapped  commemorative cup  across the counter. “Dad, why did he abdicate?” The youngster asked as they left the shop.

Later, they sat on a park bench. The son handed his father a small hammer. The older man placed the King Edward parcel on the ground and smacked it smartly, a single cracking strike.

“Because, Son” he explained as he dropped the smashed memorial in the bin. “He was a Nazi”.

Drabble Blog

I recently found out that the 100 word flash-fiction/micro-stories I have been working these past three years have an actual name – “Drabble”.

The term is derived from a 1971 Monty Python book. ’nuff said!

There’s even a website to prove it.

So, ever at the rebellious cutting-edge, my newest piece – a seasonally appropriate monologue – is a variant-drabble form I’ve just invented.

It’s called a “Faux-Drabble”.

That is a piece that could pass for a drabble, but is actually 15 or so words out.

And so, I present to you Bella Basura’s First Faux-Drabble.

Cold Edges

My winter consciousness feels bound within cold edges.

I am double-thermal long-johns.

And still my ankles are frozen blue.

They  descend into hypothermic dysfunction, squishing like icy jelly when I stand on them.

 My knees feel chilly. And my elbows.

I can’t leave the house, enraptured in my unnatural attachment to a radiator. “I love You. I want to envelope you. I want to lie all over you”. I say the same to my fur-covered hot water bottle. Hot chocolate and fleecy throws seduce me. Candles and a ‘real’ fire screen-saver on my laptop too. Hygge hygge hygge my arse.

Green and pleasant, England’s winters are mild, but still my consciousness always feels bound within cold edges.

Bella Basura January 2019

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

Home
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about Bella Basura
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New Flash Fiction from Bella Basura

Addicted to Tantra

Kundalini Me By Bella Basura 2013

Kundalini Me
By Bella Basura
2013

For weeks I have experienced this kind of activation, awakening of my Kundalini Serpent. It’s like I’m fully alive, in every cell fully aware all the time and I’m constantly aroused and endlessly scattered amongst  the whole of humanity, every sentient being, and all vibrating with an efflorescence of love and ecstasy.

But I’m totally useless, can’t get anything practical done, I eat by happenstance, sleep not at all, all I can do is waft trailing my aura around my flat, sprinkling  the glitter of my ecstasy across the known and unknown planes of the multi-verse.

I am kundalini-drunk, Doctor.

Bella Basura 2017

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The Short Answer Chapbook

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Psychogeography

Jean Dark

The Short Answer Chapbook – OUT NOW!

Buy in person at  live performances or via mail order from Esoterranean Books shop

The Short Answer

an anthology of flash fiction by Bella Basura

Kali by Tim Neate

Kali
by Tim Neate

from the Introduction
“In the 1990s I spent a year grubbing around Holland and Spain on a DSS Enterprise Allowance Scheme as a self-employed author and poet. I spent the decade devouring magazines, journals and chapbooks by the small presses that were so active and plentiful back then. I particularly loved anything by Tom Vague, HeadPress,  HEAD magazine, Rapid Eye and Unlimited Dream Company. In those days there were bookshops too, Compendium in Camden and The Inner Bookshop in Oxford and London’s Atlantis. I even devoted a lot of time and energy to producing pamphlets of my own, which were an irregular source of beer money. I tried to persuade others to print my writings. Eventually I studied bookbinding to enable myself to print, bind and distribute my pamphlets and chapbooks…And then everything went online…

So, now after a gap of almost ten years here is a new chapbook of my writings – this new pamphlet has come about as a result of performing my writing at spoken word events and I need some merchandise to flog to cover travelling expenses. All of the pieces in this collection are 100 word flash fictions – a genre I specialise in. So, I hope you will put your hands deep into your pockets and buy my new chapbook, and also come to see me perform. You won’t regret it!”

Contains a dozen 100 word flash fictions

the-short-answer-etsy-1

Esoterranean Books

24 pages, hand-bound with hand-tinted cover.
Image by Tim Neate.
Buy in person – £5 – at one of my upcoming live performances
or via mail order – £5 + £2 p+p – from my Etsy shop

“The Short Answer” print chapbook – coming soon

Turn The Page
By Bella Basura

Golden Vagueness - Bella Basura 2016

Golden Vagueness
Bella Basura 2016

Unspeakable beauty, like the floating harmonic deep in keening tinnitus. Words break free, and my sentence struggles away from me, my grasp slipping a grip, like a  hand slipping  a glove. She tears from my skin and flies. Ricocheting my awareness of “I” into a bounding and rebounding silence. A silent creeping vibration, like the tap-tap tapping of a solitary black widow on her dew-luminous web, alone at night. A fly has slipped it’s shackles and fled. A silent creeping vibration of voidness, null, empty and zero.
The one that got away.

Re-posted January 2017

More Flash Fiction – The Short Answer a collection of short stories in 100 words.

Soon to be available in chapbook print version.
email:witchysticler@gmail.com for more details.

Bella’s Gallery.
 About Bella Basura
chronological archive

Brand new Flash fiction

 

Yesterday Evening I had a wonderful time performing with a stunning music and spoken word lineup at Scarecrow Corner Winter Warmer. Here is a new 100 word Flash Fiction I wrote for the event.

Horny Goat Fairy of Strawberry Fair by Tim Neate 2016

Horny Goat Fairy
of Strawberry Fair
by Tim Neate 2016

Ding Dong

This week being christmas week they had a competition at my work, there was a prize for the best Christmas carol sung over the public address system. So I had a go. Sang them my favourite carol, although I not sure I got the words right.
I went :

“Dum dum didi didi dumb
Didi dum dum dum dum dumb

I am an antichrist
I am an anarchist
I wanna destroy passers by

Cause I
Wanna be
Anarchy
Wanna be
Anarchy

And I
Wanna be
Anarchy
No dogs body
Anarchy for the UK”

And then they switched the bloody speakers off!

Bella Basura December 2016

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More Flash Fictions

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Psychogeography

Jean Dark

Strawberry Fair Scarecrow Corner

The Short Answer, Again

Turn The Page
By Bella Basura

Golden Vagueness - Bella Basura 2016

Golden Vagueness
Bella Basura 2016

Unspeakable beauty, like the floating harmonic deep in keening tinnitus. Words break free, and my sentence struggles away from me, my grasp slipping a grip, like a  hand slipping  a glove. She tears from my skin and flies. Ricocheting my awareness of “I” into a bounding and rebounding silence. A silent creeping vibration, like the tap-tap tapping of a solitary black widow on her dew-luminous web, alone at night. A fly has slipped it’s shackles and fled. A silent creeping vibration of voidness, null, empty and zero.
The one that got away.

More Flash Fiction – The Short Answer a collection of short stories in 100 words.

Soon to be available in chapbook print version.
email:witchysticler@gmail.com for more details.

Bella’s Gallery.
 About Bella Basura
chronological archive

Short Tale Shrew

Last month the short fiction  magazine Short Tale Shrew awarded this flash fiction an Honourable Mention and published it on their website.

Film Night At The Rebirth Convention
by Bella Basura.

The Delegates gathered, waiting for the ‘Samsara in Cinema’ event.
Ouspensky sat broodingly alone, contemplating Ivan Osokin.
A few rows behind him The Gautama and The Christ boisterously contrasted resurrection and soul-migration.
In a hot-tub, left of the screen, naked therapists  breath-worked their birth-traumas.
Classically reincarnated deities – Mithras, Persephone, Taliesin, Vishnu, Baldur –  sat rapt as the houselights dimmed.
The crowded auditorium hushed as the diminutive figure of the Dalai Lama edged onto the stage. “My favourite film” He said simply.
And the screen sprang into life, illuminating the film’s title “Groundhog Day”.

Soul Migration

Soul Migration – A self-portrait

More Flash Fiction

About Bella Basura

Archive