Ever After Charli; exert

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Everyone really overreacted to my revenge business at first. No one seemed to understand that it was bringing joy to my customers lives.

Dad owns a pasta restaurant. I’ll be taking over the business one day and I’m grateful for a guaranteed job, but I want to do more with my life than serve rigatoni. I run the bar at the restaurant and I’ve come to know a lot of people. One thing I’ve found is that everyone has a problem. And two years ago, I thought I could solve anything. That was then.

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Photo by Katherine Soutar

Forever Raphaella

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My life was once normal. Wonderful and ordinary. But everything went from normal to fatal in a matter of fifteen minutes.

The night everything changed was a Tuesday and mum was hosting a dinner party. I was sent to play snakes and ladders with the other parents’ kids in my bedroom at the front of our house on Small Street. I was grumpy and can never win when I’m grumpy, so I crept down the hallway to listen in on the adult’s conversation. It was about a quarter to six in the evening and they were having a debate about war, fighting over whether it was necessary or not.

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Photograph by Kat Soutar

 

 

The Thief of Maniacs (sings a song of love).

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“Tara,” I whispered. “Do you believe in all that stuff Madga was saying about past lives? About us living over and over again?” the wind whipped my hair into my eyes, I pulled it out.

“No way. A load hogwash, the lot of it. Ha! No….. Absolutely not.”

Tara picked a remaining piece of the stolen paintings’ thread from her hair and flicked it off the edge of the rooftop. I nodded in agreement as I watched it float sideways instead of down.

 

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Photograph by Katherine Soutar

Eternal Inka: Circa Wool-Wound-Up

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But the crowd couldn’t convince her to come out no matter what they said.  I sat back on the couch with Sylus and watched the lot of them all huddled in the corridor talking to Tara through the door. They all stayed there for quite some time, then Benny went to get the punch from the living room and carried it to the corridor to fill up everyone’s glasses. He spilled a lot on the carpet along the way. He was obviously not used to carrying big bowls of punch. Some of the group began to sit down in the corridor. Eventually someone started singing some of Tara’s old favorite songs and soon enough the entire party were all swaying into each other whilst singing ‘Under My Thumb’ by the Rolling Stones at the top of their lungs. 

dr soup

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ETERNAL INKA-

I never figured out why he called himself Doctor, but Soup was my favourite teacher at Lacklusters Charm School for girls. My art teacher who was convinced that nothing was good nor bad. He believed with every piece of his brain that the universe was just one big bowl of DNA soup, and that therefore eventually we would all merge, like soup does. He told me we had no control over anything at all. That the tapestry was being re-woven as we spoke, we just had to play our part. It didn’t help me very much, because all I wanted Soup to tell me was that my paintings were good enough for me to keep painting. But he would never give me a straight answer, as if it didn’t matter at all. But I loved him. He was the only teacher at Lacklusters with any sense whatsoever, and he always drew jellyfish on his hands when he was bored.

Photograph by Katherine Soutar

tara taylor vinyl

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Tara has a dream she shares with no one. She has worked hard for 14 years to achieve her dream. Now it’s almost time for her dream to wake up.

Her nasty temper hides her delicate heart, bruised from an old mistake that still haunts her. Everyone who knows her, loves her. She finds she can think clearly when she is watching shoe shiners shine shoes. She collects rainy days in jars and sings to them when no one is watching. She can paint like a madman psychic, colouring the passions of history with a calligraphic mind. She is a hopeless knitter and this really annoys her as her dream would be a whole lot easier to achieve if she could knit.

She cannot read either, though this is by choice. She doesn’t like letters, she only likes paintings. She thinks words lie and paintings cannot. Paintings may try to lie, but they fail every time ~ this she can be sure of. However, the word love is tattooed on both her wrists.

Tara drives an old mustard and maroon Mustang with a broken door. She is in the middle of an art heist one night when she meets Inka Isis Whispers; a young seamstress who wants to be a painter. Tara instantly dislikes her. Fifteen minutes later the feeling is mutual.