Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
A moment
For the memory of
A different kind of home,
Where sun sparkles
On the water
And you feel your soul
Fold along the crease
Of rolling foam,
And where your spirit
Sings the song of places
It has long known
How to roam.
Photo: Mihai Surdu on Unsplash
It was partially because they needed to find something to focus on, and the months ahead stretched barren of anything worthy of looking forward to; and partially because they believed they had some yet-to-be-discovered organizational talents and this could be a good way to shine a little spotlight on them; and partially because they knew it was the last thing Mayor Perry would expect. The latter reason alone was worth the effort. Especially when it would be something he won’t be able to admit he was against and may even end up having to endorse.
So they planned a parade.
They enlisted friends’ cars for floats and roped in small sponsorships by neighborhood stores and minor celebrities. They tempted bands and cheerleaders from local middle-schools with free exposure and offered same for the martial arts students from George’s Judo (which, not to be outdone, was followed by the dancers from Teens’ Tap and Ballroom Ballerinas). They raised money (and attention) by holding bake-sales on stoops and organizing a popup donate-your-merchandise shop on the sidewalk in front of the library. They printed flyers and pinned them to bulletin boards then convinced store owners to tape some into their display windows, by telling them every one else already had.
Peer pressure worked.
Most people didn’t ask too many questions about why a “Celebrate Ourselves” parade was necessary, where it had been born or by whom or to what end. The general theme seemed good enough, and it probably didn’t feel right to be against celebrating who one was and what they belonged to and were included in.
They ordered “CO” shirts, stickers, and visors in neon-green, complete with an abstract sketch of a float-turned-banner-turned-thumbs-up to ‘carry’ the letters as the parade’s logo. They uploaded photos of themselves handing shirts to firefighters, visors to grinning grandmothers in the park, and an assortment of the stuff to slightly bewildered parents at the playground. The stickers were a hit with the kids.
They videoed themselves delivering a shirt to the mayor’s office, then sent the video to the local news, who shared it under the title: “The Mayor Celebrates ‘Celebrating Ourselves.'” Social media amplified it.
By the following morning the mayor was accosted by a reporter on his way out of the gym. The insistent young woman shoved a microphone in Mayor Perry’s face and asked whether he’d been asked to be the Grand Marshal.
“Not yet,” he mumbled.
An hour later they were in his office, neon-green shirts on, tailed by the reporter they’d tipped ahead of time for an “exclusive follow-up scoop.”
Soon enough a statement was issued and the news headlined: “Mayor Perry to Lead CO Parade.”
Sponsorships streamed on: The gym the Mayor belonged to. The bank. The local hospital. The Aerobatics Club.
Requests came in for satellite parades in nearby towns.
The national news picked the story. Talking heads nodded and argued the pros and cons.
Mayor Perry marched, neon-green shirt and forced smile on.
By the following year they ran for office, with the CO logo strategically in the background.
Celebrating themselves was fun.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS and JusJoJun writing prompt
She could feel them.
That’s why she came.
Why she took every opportunity she could to escape the drudgery of sewing and hoeing and weeding and feeding and washing and threshing and mending and tending and all the multitudes of tasks that never seemed to end and somehow only multiplied.
“It’s life,” her mother had sighed, when as a young child Mayra had burst into tears of fatigue and frustration when yet another basket of wash needed to be scrubbed. “We rise, we work, we eat, we sleep.”
Mayra, a dutiful daughter, had just nodded and sniffed and bent to her work. But inside her a restlessness rippled. She was expected to grow up to be like her mother: solid and stolid and capable. The capable part she was on path to mastering, if painfully slowly. But solid she wasn’t, in her wispy willowy frame, and stolid she could not be, when her feelings and thoughts bubbled in her mind like an ever boiling pot that used embers as if they were coals.
She would boil over. She would.
If she didn’t manage to find a chore that allowed her to put some distance between herself and the village and to reconnect with the souls amidst the stones.
They calmed her. They reached around her with fingers as wispy as her hair and plucked the edges of too-sharp words and smoothed rough irritation off of her being.
Most people avoided the stones. “They are haunted,” they whispered, as if that was a bad thing.
Mayra said nothing. Perhaps it was something in her that needed ghosts to sooth the places that she felt would otherwise burst and cause harm. Perhaps her difference drew her to what others knew to keep away from.
Still she came.
In secret. To avoid blame.
It was only when she was about to wed that she realized it had been her mother who’d conjured errands out of thin air for her, so the child could manage some relief.
“For some, this is life, too,” her mother smiled.
It was a rare transformation of the face that often showed so little beside focus on the thing at hand, and suddenly Mayra saw the girl her mother had been, reflected in the sky-hued eyes.
“You, too?” Mayra whispered.
Her mother’s eyes twinkled. The berries. The mushrooms. The bark. The herbs. The kindling that could not wait till the morrow to collect. All those times when her own pot was set to almost overflow atop life’s embers, hot as coals.
“I did, and I do. It is our grandmothers there, helping you.”
For Sue Vincent’s Write Photo challenge
“They’ll kick us out!”
Darlene shook her head. “They won’t know.”
“Dad will kill us if we get caught.”
Darlene sighed. Shirley was such a wimp. Never took any risks. Never had any fun. “We won’t.”
Shirley peered out of the RV at the shimmering pool. Darlene never met a rule she didn’t want to break, and somehow both of them would end up punished. “It says ‘Guests Only.'”
“We’re guests.”
Without a permit. Shame rose like hot bile. They were always the ones without, the ones left out.
“C’mon then,” she blinked away tears. “Last one in cleans up!”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
In the portal to
Tomorrow
Let the trumpets
Ring not
Alarm
And rush to
Harm,
But stop to the
Hubris
Of war.
In the portal for
Tomorrow
May those men
Who rashly
Spend
The life of
Others,
Know the call
Of trumpets
Often heralded
Only pain,
More gore.
Enough.
Enough.
No more.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Portal
Photo: A.L.
I chose to write this response to Dawn as a stream of consciousness piece. No edits. No pauses. No revisiting or rethinking or rephrasing. Typos and mismatched sentences and mixed metaphors and all. It is what it is. And so it is. Here goes, some ten things I am grateful for.
May every day in 2020 — and in the decade unfurling, new and brimming with what can be still be born — bring us all that we are grateful for. And the courage and power and strength and stamina and magic to dream and trust and do and move beyond.
With a heart full of tremulousness and gratitude,
Na’ama.
(Adding here a link to last year’s list. Because it made me smile to read it. I’m quite predictable to myself, I am. I am.)
For Dawn’s “The 2019 Attitude of Gratitude List”
They were going to make a day of it.
Get some fresh air.
“It would do you good,” she’d said. “You’ve been cooped in for far too long.”
And he had. And he didn’t really care if he stayed cocooned indoors for a few more weeks. Or months. Or years. Or till life’s end.
But he also didn’t want to upset her, and she’d been putting up with him, moody silences and pacing through the nights and appetites that came and went in both extremes and often not for what she’d taken the time to prepare.
So he agreed. And washed. And dressed in something less wrinkled than what he’d been living in. And they went.
The air did do him good.
The open space. The light. The breeze. The views.
Until.
She’d seen them first and tried to shield him, but his mother has never been very good at hiding her distress, and he read through it and looked in the direction she was clearly hoping he would not.
His ex. The girl who’d left him at the altar, who abandoned him to do all the explaining and pay all the bills and mollify all the aunties and absorb all the pitying looks and lose face and his dignity and eventually his job.
There she was. Pressed into another man.
His blood rushed into his ears as he remembered: he had the same photo taken. With her. Wearing the same smitten look.
And he wondered if someone had stared at them, too, at the time, and considered him the next man she’d rob.
(Note: This story is fiction. I don’t know anyone in this photo and no real connection between the photo prompt and the content is intended.)
Photo: Alev Takil on Unsplash
It wasn’t my intention to create such a stir.
Or was it?
There were many reasons to season the exchange with something less bland than the weather of stocks and performance of bonds and predicted fluctuations of the markets.
So I told them I’m leaving.
“But dinner isn’t over!” Mom’s carefully drawn eyebrows rose into a crease that would likely be frozen by Botox by next week.
“You’ve not been excused,” Dad contributed parenting.
“I’m thirty-two,” I breathed. “I’m moving out.”
“On your own?” Mom’s voice turned acid.
I glanced down. Met liquid eyes. Inspiration dawned. “Nope, I’m taking Leon.”
For Linda Hill’s JusJoJan prompt: Intention
And … dipping my pen for the first time into the Writers United prompt of “season”
“Where does it lead?” Mina crouched and tried to peer behind the metal grate. The concrete tube curved away.
“To the factory,” Josh replied distractedly. Her derriere was hanging utterly too close to the water.
“Are you checking me out?” she teased. She knew he preferred men.
“More like watching out for you,” he pouted. His friend could read his mind even when her back was turned. He loved and hated her for it.
She twisted to peek at him. “The danger being?”
“Getting wet.”
Mina laughed. Josh was fussier than her own mother. “I won’t melt.”
“Not from normal water, you wouldn’t, but there’s a reason the factory was ordered closed, and why authorities reinforced the grates on this culvert. Only God and the now-dead-factory-owners-and-workers know what’s in there. I don’t like this.”
Mina’s witty retort fizzled when she caught sight of movement, barreling toward the grate.
She screamed.
For Crispina’s Crimson’s Creative Challenge #60
Photo: Tara Meinczinger on Unsplash
“Where’s Valentine?”
I peered into the other room. “Lollygagging.”
“Again?! I thought I told him to give up that nonsense. He’s way too old for this kind of foolishness. I’ll douse him with cold water!”
“He’s not osculating, Mama.”
“Stop being a Peeping Tom …” Pause. Sigh. Flick of the hand. “What’s he doing, then?”
“Just dawdling.”
“With whom?”
“His phone …”
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Lollygag in 60 words
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