New Bella Basura YouTube video
Words, images and voice – Bella Basura
Original voice recordist – Bob Kemp, with Maxine Mackenzie
Early 2019
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TEMPORARY TEMPLE
An Exposition
ov Thee Artworks ov
Jonny Marvel
1st -22nd December
8am – 4pm
The Edge Cafe, Mill Road
Cambridge
Photographed by
Brett Sadhwani
Austin Whiteside
Ady Maddox
Robert Shaky Freshwater
and Henry Shepherd
Curated
by Jill Eastland
and Jean Dark
December 2018
A new ocassional Flash Fiction Series from Bella Basura
Weird Winter Wishes
Photo: Phil MFU
Cambridge 2012
In my dream about Thurston Moore it was night, I was up by the Co-op convenience store roundabout and all around there was this strange snow piled everywhere, like great banks of crunchy white snow – it was like some scene from a movie.
So I took my coat off, laid it down and began sledding through tunnels in the snow on my coat. Suddenly Thurston Moore was beside me and we were streaming through these glistening snow tunnels on my coat, laughing, O we were laughing, really laughing.
Eventually as we’re approaching the telephone box at the end of my street we began to slow. And there are smears of brown on the pristine snow. I look down and it is dog shit and my coat sleeve is dragging in dog shit and Thurston Moore disappears.
And I have to walk home alone in a blizzard in my torn and dog shitted coat.
Bella Basura
April 2017
Links
The Short Answer Chapbook
The Short Answer Chapbook for sale here
Contemplating reading at the Bardic Picnic next month has resulted in this weeks dinky little flash fiction.
Carved bone. Indonesia 2013. Donated by S. Beings
Stone High
“Actually I don’t think that’s Lapiz” Said Flower-Moon to Ann, as she fished the blue bracelet out of the display case.
A proper Petromancer, Ann thought. One of those new-age Fairy-Witches that divine the future through the flinging of gemstones.
“No, it’s Sodalite. Put it back, it doesn’t resonate in the same way”. Ann put the bracelet back, and followed Flower-Moon.
Petropath! Thought Ann as Flower-Moon dowsed the incense franchise.
A low-down god-forsaken alt.med hustler – a-healin’ the sick by the layin’ on o’stones.
Watching Flower-Moon trance out in the Nepalese imports, Ann visualised a tea-break.
Bella Basura
July 2016
Back to Flash Fiction
To the Skull Collection
Do What Pirates Do
A Gratuitous Cat Photo
Bella Basura
2016
“Yohoho and a bottle of grog, me hearties” Enunciated Jonny Depp in pure mid-Atlantic Mockney, arguably the worst pirate accent in Hollywood. Amber rolled her eyes, inwardly.
He stood, elaborately piratical with black eye-liner, leather tricorn hat and sailor tattoos. His eyes gleamed intensely beneath his kiss-me-quick seaside rasta wig, he twirled his waxed moustache.
“Shiver me timbers, mi’lud, don’t send me down to the stripey hole. For I am a Pirate of the Cariby-anne and must do what Pirates do – robbery on the high seas, rape pillage cattle rustling and the smuggling of small domestic dogs into ecologically-sensitive Antipodean Continents.
Amber held up her hand. “You need to take this seriously, Jonny. Please just read the statement they wrote for us”
Jonny throws his cutlass to the floor in a fit of pique and reads the apology in a contemptuous sing-song voice “Australia is a wonderful blahblah Island with a blahblah treasure trove of unique plants, animals and blahblah…”
Bella Basura
July 2016
Written specially for the Cambridge Storytellers nautically themed Story Round.
Hosted by Marion Leeper – The First Bard of Cambridge.
Turn The Page
By Bella Basura
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
On The Other Hand
A Dialogue For Two Sock Puppets
by Bella Basura
Titus and Fuchsia – Superstar Sock Puppets Bella Basura 2015
As she picked up the phone I knew she was in one of her moods, I felt her contrarian mode leeching from the mouthpiece even before she spoke.
It had always been like that, even when we were kids and had to share a room.
She contradicted me as a knee jerk reaction.
If I said “Barbie is best”. She would say “I prefer Sindy”.
If I said “I like stickle-bricks”. She would say “Lego is far superior”.
If I said “Black”
She would say “White”.
I knew she was going to cut up rough this morning when I phoned her.
I said “Terrible weather, seems to rain every afternoon”
She said “On the contrary, it is sunny in the morning”.
I said “And it’s the new moon, I always feel a lack of energy at the new moon”
She said “oh really! I find the opposite is true. I have far more energy at the full moon”
I said “So your energy drops at the new moon”
She says “No, it rises at the full moon”
I say “2 plus 2 is 4”
She says “wrong! 4 minus 2 is 2”
I say “right, right is right”
She says “you’re wrong, baby sister, wrong is wrong.
Wrong wrong wrongwrongwrong wrong”
The results of the Short Tale Shrew Spring Micro-Fiction competition was announced today. The remit was to write a 100 word story on the theme of Rebirth, the winning entry was In Microcosm by Matt Wyles. Read it here
Although my story – Film Night At The Rebirth Convention – didn’t win, I was given an “Honourable Mention” and had my story printed on the Short Tale Shrew website. (You can find it if you keep scrolling down from the winning entry.)
Here is my 100 word response to my (nearly) winning story, it’s called…
Last Rose
by Bella Basura 2016
…ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred!
Exactly one hundred English words – remit met, mission accomplished.
A mere smear of short story, a literature in miniature, a fleeting of fiction.
I am giddy in my 100 word hubris – I dream fame for my flash-fiction, imagine professional success, a regular column in a weekend national, a steady income for writing. Sold out fold out, international filler, syndicated, vindicated, a meme beaming out virally into an endless network of recognition,
a cyber celeb,
and known in print, media-whore, desperate.
I think I’ll approach Short Tale Shrew in exactly 100 words.
See what they think.
A Complete Unknown.
Photo by Bella Basura 2011
No Direction Home
By Bella Basura
Speared awake by shafts of stupid sunlight falling across my hangover face. My eyes are cracked open to an unfamiliar room. Washed up, face down, stranded at the high tidemark of last night’s intoxication.
Lying on a bare mattress, fully clothed, in a curtainless unoccupied room, no furniture.
Sitting up dizzily, I view dozens of big see-thru plastic bags piled against the blank walls. Evidence bags wadded full of incrimination.
Where the hell am I?
Lured by voices in the corridor, I turn to see a sign on my door.
In childish scrawl it reads “Welcome to the Plague Room”.
The Short Answer – Flash Fiction Anthology by Bella Basura
Gallery – Photos, collages, talismans
Skull Girl Grimace
Photo by Bella Basura 2015
Ennui
By Bella Basura
I passively follow Qwerta to the beach, golden sand tumbles onward in rolling dunes, down to the sea. Momentarily I glimpse a vista of the deep oceanic horizon, blue with distance, then we dip down into a hollow, a machete is thrust into the sand.
Qwerta grasps the machete, but it stays fast, Excalibur in stone. She tugs, tugs, her maximised stealth leeching into the landscape. Sudden Manga wingedsnakebat creatures attack her kneecaps. She soaks the sand, beating out her life in numerical units. FAIL in red. Disappeared.
I pick up the machete and mouse-click back to the encampment.
Flash Fiction Anthology
Image Gallery
Bella Basura online 