Charlotte K
Bio
I’m a writer from Sydney, Australia, with an overly-enthusiastic appreciation for platform shoes. I currently work as a journalist, but my first love is fiction.
Stories (4)
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Please, Take My Baby?
The bizarre was loud with the sound of street vendors and the stench of manure was rife. It rained earlier that morning which settled the dust, but the unsealed ground was soft and squelchy. Mud stuck to Eloise’s flip flops, weaselled between her toes, splashed her ankles — the only part of her leg she was allowed to show — and up her red harem pants. In a place with open sewage, she knew the brown sludge was more than just soil. The rubber soles of her open shoes made a slurping sound as they suctioned too and from the ground with each step. It’s dirt, she told herself. Plain, boring old dirt. Before she left home four months ago, she expected to be greeted by the smell of spices, flowers and incense at the markets across India, but she quickly realised that was a very westernised view of the place. Those aromas were definitely there when standing next to a stall that sold any of those things but, first and foremost, the air was dominated with the scent of rubbish, livestock, and excrement of cows that survived on a diet of binned vindaloo.
By Charlotte K4 years ago in Families
Two Toes, One Finger
Two big toes and an index finger was all that was left of Ramona. She had been making an earl grey, like she did every morning, when she combusted. It was late afternoon by the time Charles got home and found the bloody remains of his mother splattered all over the kitchen blinds, linoleum, appliances and the various bits of crockery collected from jumble sales over the years. It was an alarming sight to come home to, to say the least. He wondered at first if an early-rising murderer had stormed the pink cottage, knifed her to death and cackled with glee as they tossed her innards around like confetti in some deranged killing frenzy. If it was murder, whoever it was had really gone to some trouble to make sure the room was painted crimson. He stood frozen in the doorway pondering the possibilities, until he saw the finger on the kettle. His eyes darted around the space, absorbing the blood caked on the ceiling, architraves and in crevices he had never noticed before, until they settled on two dismembered toes by the refrigerator. His pupils dilated and his jaw tensed. He felt his chest tighten, his fists clench, and that thicker-than-average vein in his temple start to throb. There was no knifeman on the loose. The combustion had finally happened.
By Charlotte K5 years ago in Fiction
