Words and Pictures - Rose

This is a little writing and image game from the wonderful Pip Lincolne's Blog Meet Me At Mikes! We are given a word and have to come up with a little prose piece or produce an image. This is my first week at playing. The word is ROSE

Life on Rose Street

Rose Street emerges from the pages of children's ancient fairytale pop-up books smelling of musk sticks and we all chant together. Boys wear blue and girls wear pink.

The scent of legends, crushed petals and right next door to me Betsey Johnson is smiling as she cartwheels, revealing her rose and yellow tutu.

Further down the street behind doors covered with green briars, Victorian maidens pinch life into cheeks with nervous fingers whilst more modern damsels in distress paint roses onto their pale cheeks from Benefit Benetint bottles. They jostle each other for a better view of their beauty in the only mirror they share.

Three doors down in the toy-block gaol which has been recently painted pink, the inmates calm down as they wait for storybook happier endings. The centrefold in their magazines has rouged her nipples and wears a Victorian mourning brooch made of child's hair in the hollow of her throat. The inmate who has no name (his crime was a crime of passion) pricks his finger on the brooch and a drop of blood like a precious tear stains the magazine. The blood drips slowly down the women's naked form. The other inmates howl their fury. He will live forever. Do not despair. He will live forever.

My partner wears a rose pink shirt to the office (he's so masculine he's not afraid to do so). "Let the wolves howl," he says. "Nothing ever really dies in Rose Street."

"My daughter says she wants to go home and live with you," a mother confides to me at Rose Street Preschool. "Daisy's mother lets her wear pink tutus and Daisy's mother wears bright lipstick!" She sniffs in disapproval at my bad influence on a developing mind. Her daughter looks at me sadly as I leave the school. My daughter flies ahead of me, her immense pink fairy wings glistening through the bare winter trees.

Rose pink -she is so seductive that men and women fear the smiling fatale.

Boys wear blue and girls wear pink.

Rose Street - where neighbours make dreams and peg them out on tiny pink plastic pegs to dry. And where even the oldest fairy tale princesses live forever.