Renessa Norton
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Stories (26)
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A Man Called Ove. Runner-Up in Critique Challenge.
Old man. Grump. Bloody youngens these days. Society is doomed. This bloody cat again. Why can’t everyone just leave me alone? Can I just die in peace already? This food is pretty good. Cat’s alright too, I guess. Suppose I have to save the neighbourhood myself. Life ain’t so bad.
By Renessa Norton3 years ago in Critique
Hector the Protector
“Hector! Come hither!” bellowed the drawling screech of King Aloysius. Hector jumped at the booming voice of his master, and scuttled through the stone hallways of the King’s Court, tripping over his pointed, belled slippers, landing squarely at the feet of the King. As he stumbled to stand, his hat brushed His Majesty’s nether regions, causing the servant to stutter his apologies.
By Renessa Norton4 years ago in Fiction
Life by Chocolate
December 11… two weeks to perfect a dessert and blow everyone’s champagne-soaked, Yuletide minds. I had spent the weekend trawling through the internet, pulling out long-forgotten, dust-bound cookbooks from cupboards I might open thrice per decade. I had even taken to social media, begging almost strangers for their best recipes. Finally, I had it narrowed down to four - a sticky date pudding, creme brulee with raspberry coulis and two very different chocolate cakes. I silently thanked the generous employment contract I had negotiated for myself which included seven weeks’ paid holidays per year. This allowed me to take a full month off over Christmas as I got to work planning my culinary magnum opus.
By Renessa Norton5 years ago in Fiction
The Fallen
It was a sound that Sarah had heard countless times. 10, 9, 8… A sound that typically indicated that something exciting was about to happen. New years, or… when else did anyone actually count down out loud? Now that she thought of it, it made sense that she wasn’t excited. New years’ eve had never held much appeal to her. It was just another day, except more disappointing somehow. It held so much promise but rarely, if ever, did it result in any palpable change. People swearing to change their lives without being willing to change themselves or their outlook on life. And then the bad habits just gradually became worse because they had repressed them for a week. If you want to know what I mean, take a look at peoples’ fingernails on the 10th of January each year - it is as though a ravenous toddler mauled them with fresh, strong baby teeth not yet cursed with cavities or fear of a chipped tooth.
By Renessa Norton5 years ago in Fiction
The Sun God
It was so rare that the sun would shine in Springville that when this glorious event occurred, everyone would drop what they were doing and bask in the glow from above. If it fell on a work day, businesses would shutter, sending their staff home to take advantage of the miracle - the exact opposite of a snow day, which tended to not garner much attention in this town.
By Renessa Norton5 years ago in Fiction
Lemon Lane
Lemon Lane. 1798. A little girl was ignoring her mother’s insistent calls to come along, and instead was dropping pebbles into the stone well set by the side of the laneway, delighting in the “splooshes!” and “splashes!” that followed. A rotund woman rushed out into the road, her large middle still donning her paisley apron, slightly smudged from bleach destroying sporadic pigment in the pattern. She untied a ribbon which was binding cloth together tightly, and a pigeon fluttered out into the daylight, faltering in the sudden shock of sunlight before regaining its ability to simply flap its wings and be off, far away from the world it had just left. The little girl abandoned her mission of filling in the well and instead delighted in the sight, eagerly awaiting the matron’s next magic trick, but when the door slammed shut tight again, she begrudgingly ran to catch up with her ever-patient mother, who by this point had taken a seat on the stoop of a nearby building.
By Renessa Norton5 years ago in Fiction
Golden Girl
Five weeks. That was all it took for them to replace me. I had walked into my boss’ office on 1 September to tell him I was done unless he paid me what I was worth, and by 10 October, some other woman was adorning my television screen with my old job title decorating her name. Miranda St John. Even her name seemed to be made of money. I examined her perfectly coiffed hair, the immaculate nails she was brandishing animatedly, and the tailored blazer hugging her shoulders. And I understood the message my old boss was sending me - I wasn’t worth what I thought, but she sure as hell was. I highly doubted she would have rolled out of bed for twice my measly ‘wage’... if you could even call it that.
By Renessa Norton5 years ago in Fiction
The Betty
Many folks begin stories “a hundred years ago,” but truly, one hundred years ago, my grandfather sat barrelled against the door of this gloomy hotel room, bracing his back against the tempestuous booms radiating the thin, already splintering wood. The police had found him at last, not fooled by the vague breadcrumbs he’d trailed in the wrong directions, instead following the rhythm of his modus operandi to his favourite place in the world: George’s Hotel. George’s was an icon of its time: grand and overwhelming, fit for a king, the inside decked out in mahogany furniture, adorned in a ruby, emerald and sapphire colour palette, and what’s more, sharing my grandfather’s name. George may have been a proud man, but smart, not so much. This was always where the police found him, and as the bottom, left-hand side of the door split, it sent a shard of wood into his shoulder, puncturing his crisp white shirt, causing beads of blood to adorn his collar, freshly pressed just last night by his wife, Gloria. Incidentally, George had secured Gloria his lifelong partner in this very pub by getting her pregnant the first night they had met, creating their daughter, Delilah, in a small broom cupboard under the grand staircase.
By Renessa Norton5 years ago in Fiction
Brodor
*BANG BANG* It was 12:12am, on December 12, 1212. Frederick plucked a narrow, golden sword from his pelt before determinedly launching down the stone staircase toward the front door of the castle. There was no time to wake Nigel. If this were going to happen now, he was not going to waste any time attempting to rouse the old man from his mead-induced stupor. No, he would have to hope that Nigel’s hearing wasn’t so daft that he slept through the whole event, and that he would eventually come and be of some assistance, even if that were simply mopping up the inevitable blood fall from the flagstone floor post-battle before it stained, forever evidence of what was about to transpire.
By Renessa Norton5 years ago in Fiction
A Suspicious Snowfall
Three... two... one. Harriet screwed up her eyes, willing the school year to be over. She squinted through clenched eyes before glancing around the classroom, suspicious. The uncouth idiots who just moments earlier had been driving her batty with their bad BO and bizarre vernacular had vanished from sight leaving her in eerie silence, and blissfully alone. She glanced up at the chalkboard before her, eyes wide - in flowery cursive, it declared the date 15 December... 1908. She ran to the nearest window and saw snow tumbling down, settling fluffily on the ground below. She couldn’t recall it ever snowing before New Years.
By Renessa Norton5 years ago in Fiction
Outback Sam
It was some 12 years after we lost us that I finally conceded that I had likely loved some piece of you. Just an idle Wednesday, 8:34am, stuck in traffic, late to work once more when I was struck across the head with this blindsiding realisation. It simultaneously felt like being waterboarded and being held in your grandmother’s ample bosom, like being thrown from a helicopter with no parachute, blades chomping at you and floating down a stream in a tyre tube, like running for a flight to a funeral of your father after an unexpected turn and like putting on your pyjamas and sipping wine in your favourite armchair after a long week. In reality, I’d been hit by a car barrelling through an intersection, going 50 over the speed limit down the side of the road. Presumably my boss was more understanding of my tardiness that day. Perhaps if I’d been better at rolling out of bed, I’d have avoided all of this. But then again, I’d still be thinking I couldn’t stand you. That you were a dreadful excuse for a human being. It was a lie I had successfully sold myself a million times over like a star real estate agent. But I knew I didn’t believe it, because I effectively erased you from my life, scared that if I uttered your name, or even part of our story, that the flicker at the corners of my mouth would deceive me. And that if anyone else saw that, it would erase a decade of my truth. I was more committed to my disdain for you in the subsequent years than I was to our short lived romance another lifetime ago. But there were slip ups over the years. Sometimes they almost turned into full blown relapses. Like the time I begged a friend to drive to your house at 3am, so I could pass out beside you and awake to your embrace - thankfully a different car sat in the carport leading me to believe you had moved, so I cried the whole car ride home instead. Like the time you emailed me from your aunty’s social media account because you didn’t have your own, and I bolted when after months of discussion you announced you were moving interstate to be closer to me. When a year later I reached out to you, and the same thing happened again, and I acted as though you were crazy, despite that being how we got together in the first place, except in reverse - when I jumped on a plane to kiss your stupid face and move my life to the other side of the country. But I can’t point to a single reason I ended it with you - it’s more like a novel of heartaches that occurred over a very short period. Like the times your sister was awful to me and you left me to fend for myself. Like the time I wasn’t happy with how I looked you told me to go on a diet and exercise more when, looking back, I was already underweight. Like the time we ran into your ex and you proceeded to drink a full bottle of rum, cry and tell me you loved her, not me. Like the time you alluded to having being involved in a murder. Like the time, after we had broken up, you lost it at me for staying at a former lover’s house.
By Renessa Norton5 years ago in Fiction
