The Workshop

This story starts with an awkward pause. A beat of silence, a breath, balled up and held in the cheeks with nowhere else to go but out, in a puff of crushing inevitability.

Bernie sorely wished she never took up this post. Goblins this side of town can’t write, they have no vision, that’s their problem. South of the Marsh goblins are good for building, stonework, masonry at a push. Creative writing? No. She could not teach these goblins; they were unteachable. You can’t teach creativity.

Yet here she was, in a neat circle of little wooden chairs in a draughty hall of a questionable community centre, with a motley bunch of bulbous eyes on her. Each goblin clutching a stack of paper tightly to them, like precious treasures, treasures Bernie knew were filled with awful, garbled tripe about nothing. Harold had just shared a dreary piece about the castle at Petrified Bay, a set of sad ruins rubbed flat by time. Harold had described the brick formation in what Bernie thought was unnecessary detail.

And now everyone had shared their work but one. The one whose shiny, quivering eyes she could feel poking at her, the one whose gaze everyone tried to avoid.

Bernie cleared her throat and looked down at her notes, perched jauntily on her knobbly goblin knees.

‘Thank you for sharing, Harold,’ she said. ‘That was really very… interesting. And informative. Now, if no one else wants to share we can move right on to our next—’

‘I’d like to share,’ said a voice.

Bernie sighed. The rest of the group muttered under their breath.

‘Spencer,’ Bernie said, trying to force her wrinkled face upwards, into something that wasn’t a concerned frown. ‘How lovely.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Hank from the other side of circle, pointing a bony finger at Spencer. ‘I thought we were kicking him out, why is he still here?’

Spencer’s papers began to rattle where his leathery hands had begun to shake, but his eyes never left her.

‘Hank,’ Bernie said quietly, ‘the creative writing workshop is for everybody, all are welcome.’

Bernie knew this to unfortunately be true, because she had checked.

‘We should welcome all creative personalities. Even if their tastes… differ from our own.’

‘Differ?’ choked Hank, ‘his entry last week made poor Ethel throw up in the recycling bin!’

Ethel sniffed.

‘Yes, well,’ says Bernie, shifting a little on her little wooden chair. ‘Last weeks entry, about the… well anyway, last week’s entry is in the past. This is a new week, and I’m sure Spencer has come up with something really, really great, and not like his last one at all.’

At her last words she made sure to fix Spencer with a meaningful gaze in which she narrowed her eyes menacingly. Although she didn’t know who she was kidding, she needed all the class numbers she could get this side of the Marsh.

‘In an unrelated reminder, all bodily fluids are to be evacuated outside the premises please, if not in the toilets provided.’

She took a deep breath and looked skywards, praying to gargoyles this wasn’t about to go the way she had a feeling it might. Bernie should be North of the Marsh. She should be with the intelligent folk, the thinkers, the somebodies, sipping on beetle syrup from steel chalices, discussing big ideas and classic works. Not trudging through basic writing rules, gulping down river sludge from thin paper cups with folk that had used more books to stoke a fire than to actually read.

She sighed, regrouped, and managed a weak smile.

‘Spencer, take it away.’

Spencer jumped, and nodded, appeared to have a small internal battle where he forgot how to read and then had to get a hold of himself. He fixed his eyes on his work, flexed his shoulders, bent his head to the left until his neck clicked and then exhaled.

‘Ahem. Ok. Yes. Thank you. This piece is called…’

Bernie held her breath.

‘… The Human; part fourteen.’

Bernie’s breath puffed out at speed, as if desperate to leave the room before the reading began.

‘Here we go,’ said Hank.

‘Spencer,’ Bernie said, pinching the stubby bridge of her flat nose, ‘I thought this week we would do something a little less… fantastical. You know? Something real.’

‘This could be real,’ said Spencer.

‘Not this again,’ cried Hank.

‘They could!’ squeaked Spencer, flapping his papers at them, ‘humans could exist, how do we know for sure they don’t? There is always some basis of truth in fairytales, they don’t just come from nowhere!’

Hank scoffed. ‘And I suppose these real two-legged mammals really ride around on strapped-up, four-legged mammals, do they?’

Ethel let out an ominous burp and the goblin next to her shifted her chair an inch further to the left, shielding her papers lest they be splashed.

‘Horses,’ Spencer said, ‘those were horses. And I don’t know, that was just an idea I had. Anyway, this one is not about those, this is about cars.’

‘Oh dear.’ Bernie didn’t need this. She hauled herself out of her chair and poured herself another cup of sludge, stirring it slowly as Spencer ploughed through his piece to the horrified cries of the group. Automated metal boxes on wheels? What next?

Bernie could have picked a knitting group, or painting, how hard could it be to teach painting? But no, she had to go out on a limb and try to encourage free thinking and narrative structure. She sighed. Spencer was hiding behind his handful of papers, peeking one eye out the side and saying, ‘No, they wouldn’t be magic, they’d fill the inside with a liquid made of million-year-old plankton.’

‘Bernie!’ cried Hank, ‘Get him out!’

Ethel was crying, blowing her nose wetly into a used piece of paper, and two other members had seen themselves out.

Perhaps she needed to refer Spencer to a medical centre of some kind.

The problem Bernie faced now was what prompt to set for next week. She needed something that under no circumstances could be turned into another episode of The Human; she couldn’t afford to lose any more participants. She thought long and hard while she watched Spencer fighting to be heard under an intense interrogation about the state of his mental wellbeing.

She needed a topic that couldn’t be connected to the imaginary beast that Spencer had thought up, the one that could do no wrong, the intelligent, powerful, albeit pale and oddly smooth, mammal.

Then she had it.

Bernie came and sat back down, with an idea that surely could not be turned sour.

‘Next week,’ she said, ‘I’ve gone for something a little more…’ Bernie wanted to say safe, but instead said, ‘unusual.’

The group looked around nervously at each other.

‘This week I want you to write a tragedy.

‘A tragedy?’ asked Ethel shakily.

‘Yes,’ Bernie was gaining traction now, excited at the prospect that next week would be a human free workshop. ‘But a big one. Something horrific, something extraordinary. What about war, what about deadly epidemics? What about the breakdown of a natural environment? I want this story to be a tale of destruction, greed, corruption!’

Harold gulped. Hank nodded thoughtfully. Spencer blinked.

Bernie sat back and crossed her bony arms. There. See him make a story about humans from that!