Dodo Au Go-Go

As I sit here, winter in the tropics means a warm day without humidity. Leaves sing noisily in a strong breeze. I'm sitting in Dodo-Land - aka Mauritius - after a very long absence of some double-digit years. I'm older, everyone I know is older, and the island has changed much in that time. I want to jot down my initial impressions now, before the memories fade and disjointed sensations of newness fall into a temporary familiar.

It's my second day in Mauritius. I'm still jet-lagged. Yesterday, I was too tired to be awake and too awake to sleep, as my brain and body struggled to join the dots across timezones, places and the past and the present. Of getting no sleep the night before starting the trip to the airport at 1:30am, and hoping that the new proposed second airport for Sydney will go ahead soon, without planes dumping fuel over the Blue Mountains conservation/heritage area. Sitting in an empty airport with lines of light in the hours before the world has started to turn properly.

As of 2016, I own a Dr Seuss book.  It's the first one I've ever owned.  Yes. The first. I was an adult before I ever even heard of Dr Seuss. (In my defence, I grew up on an island, and although I definitely wasn’t short of books – I had the Mr Men and Little Miss books, the Ladybird books and hundreds of Enid Blytons among others – but Dr Seuss wasn’t one of them).

There was a Twitter hashtag which did the rounds recently: #tweetjustyourvoice. The idea was to use record an audio of your voice with a visual that didn’t include your face, and then post it onto Twitter so that your communities of tweeps (Twitter folk) get to hear how you sound. I would have probably continued on my merry way, happily ignorant of all things connected to this hashtag, except that it got embraced with gusto by the FridayPhrases community , with a certain FridayPhrases host (the very persuasive @AdeleSGray ) inviting me to take part. If ever there was a hashtag designed to wallop me well out of my comfort zone, it was this one. Why? Thank you for asking. There are several reasons.

A little while ago, in early February, my favourite Twitter-based microfiction game ,  @FridayPhrases , generated the following  #FP  effort from me: Her suitor cuts her at the opera, blatant, cruel. She is publicly silent & slips a snake onto his coach. He likes games; she doesn't lose I quite liked it and thought there might be scope for a longer story sitting in between the words, waiting for the telling. But even better, the brilliant @HopeDenney2 quite liked it too. When we realised we both thought it could be developed into a longer story, we, of course, had to give it a go! So we did, and we each came up with very different interpretations. Hope's story is immediately below, and mine is further down the post. Enjoy!

One of the joys of playing FridayPhrases is when I fall in love with the little idea/image/mood composed for an  #FP micro-fiction  so much that I can't let it go straight away and I end up playing with it for ju-u-u-st a little bit longer. Sometimes, it escapes my head and ends up on paper as a piece of flash fiction.

I go on about this all the time : I'm a huge fan of the Twitter microfiction game run by @FridayPhrases , where the aim is to write stories on the optional theme in Twitter's 140 characters or less, using the hashtag, "#FP". Last year, I made a list of my favourite FPs out of all the ones I'd written in 2014. I'm doing the same again this year. As per last year, it's interesting to see the common threads throughout my year's FPs.