Photo: Amitai Asif
Freedom
Doesn’t require
You relinquish all
Protection,
For without it
Flames become
Vulnerable
To sputter,
Or go astray
In the
Wind.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Vulnerable in 21 words
Vulnerable To Sputter
Life and love
Expert Explanation
Photo: Pixabay on Pexels.com
I’ve been expecting
The expert explication
And the
Expedient expelling
Of expired exploration
That often follows,
Quite expressively,
In the wake of expletives
And exposed exposition
By those wishing to expunge
Their exploits
From any experience
Of expiation.
Share this:
Tut’s Trough
Photo prompt: Sue Vincent
“It’s been here since time before time,” Marty’s voice rose in self-importance.
“I don’t think Mammoths would agree,” Donna deadpanned. She was tired and the tour-de-woods was becoming tedious. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Marty. She did. Or at least, she had … before he’d unleashed his inner Know-it-all in what he appeared to consider some form of seductive foreplay. It did the opposite for her.
To be fair, she’d always claimed men’s minds could be just as attractive as their bodies.
The key being ‘as important’ she sighed to herself, not the sole importance.
Marty, oblivious, nodded. “Mammoths didn’t need troughs,” he added pedagogically. “They weren’t domesticated.”
Donna slapped at some buzzing insect on her arm. The noise ceased. She’d slap away Marty’s patronizing tone, too, if she didn’t so abhor violence. These days.
The very thought stirred guilt. It wasn’t his fault she was there. It wasn’t his fault she was broken and that time hadn’t ever been kind to her kin.
She forced herself to breathe and glanced at the moss-covered structure in an attempt at interest, only to be mortified when the first thought through her mind was how much it resembled a sarcophagus and how peaceful it would be to lie in one for all eternity.
Or until some form of grave-robbers came.
She shuddered.
“You okay?” Marty’s voice filtered through her distress. “You look as though you’d seen a ghost!”
How little you know, Donna thought. “I’m fine,” she said.
The line between his eyebrows smoothed and he gestured grandly toward the vessel. “Some say it is haunted,” he leaned close to her and whispered a mockery of suspense, “for how this simple trough tricks the vulnerable into thinking it resembles King Tut’s tomb.”
For Sue Vincent’s Thursday Photo Prompt
Share this:
Moody Sentinels
Photo: Ofir Asif
Three sentinels
Stand determined.
Moody and muddy
Rooted
They brace against
The eddies
And the flow
Of oars and flotsam,
Ever mobile,
Passing by.
For Calmkate’s Friday Foto Fun: Moody
Share this:
Fury
Photo prompt © Sandra Crook
He retreated to behind the fence during low tides and sharpened his claws on the aging timbers. He nursed his rage on fantasy and fed his fury on abandoned sea-foam. Some days the seething rose a hurricane that only freezing wind subdued into a smolder. He hissed. He breathed. He knew. He waited.
The time would come.
Waiting both allayed and fanned his urgency. He scraped his restless agony into the wood, that hewed abomination they’d forced onto his bay to tame it. As if it, he, could be. Tamed.
When time returned he’d vanquish them and show no remedy.
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Share this:
A Spinning Spin
Illustration: Anne Anderson from Grimm’s Fairy Tales (London and Glasgow 1922)
He wanted her to spin
Straw
Into gold.
To make the mundane
Magic
To behold.
Though the metal
Nourished
Naught,
And left only
An empty
Cot.
Where with
Better thought
He might’ve
Got,
Riches which
Could not
Be bought.
Note: A little spin on Rumpelstiltskin
For Anmol’s dVerse poetics: Myths and Legends
Share this:
A Moment Before
Photo: Peter Gonzalez via Unsplash
There will not be another night so drenched in sorrow, bereft of even the wish for the downpour to turn hope. Yet they held to the moment right before the speeding motorbike intersected their car … and bled their child to no more.
Note: dedicated to those who know this loss, and to the hope that fewer will ever do.
Share this:
From The Other Side
April 2018 Snow. Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Last year’s snow
Gave way
To melted cold,
So blooming trees
This Spring
Unfold
To leak
New life
To Winter’s old.
Note: This is the original unedited color photo, and represents the actual light and hues on the day the photo was taken.
For Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: From the side
Share this:
Lip Service
Photo: Henry & Co. on Pexels.com
“Oh, but you will love this!” the seller gushed, her purple tipped pixie cut bobbing in time with the movement of her thumbs on the screen.
“Do you really think so?” the matronly woman twirled tentatively in front of the mirror, unaware that the saleswoman hadn’t even raised her head.
“Absolutely!”
“I’m worried the color is too bright,” the woman fretted and patted down frizzy wisps of hair long past the time for touching up. She smoothed the folds of the dress over her midriff. “Also, I don’t know about the pattern. Don’t you think it is too young for me?”
The saleswoman paused in her staccato typing long enough to glance at her customer. She stilled a yawn. Less than an hour before she could close, return the piles of discarded tried-on clothing to their hangers, and be free from the need to constantly reassure strangers that they looked better than they did or could.
“This color is all the rage,” the seller noted in the half-petulant, half-coercive tone she’d found tended to move her less assertive customers into feeling that to not buy the item would somehow mean they were backwards, dated, or wasting her time.
A long moment passed. More preening from the customer.
“It does not really work with my coloring,” the woman frowned. “Or is this just the lighting here?”
Not much would work with your coloring, the seller swallowed a retort. “It is all about the right combinations,” she said instead. She plastered on a smile, put her phone down, opened a jewelry box, and pulled out a small black tube.
“Here, let me,” she added, twisting an orange mass out of the bottom part of the tube and reaching for the woman’s chin. “All you need is the right lipstick.”
For Linda’s SoCS challenge: Lip
Share this:
Fraud Code
Photo: Pixabay on Pexels.com
She caught her sister’s eye and an unspoken understanding passed between them.
They’d perfected their “Fraud Code” through years spent in the shadow of a charlatan, and it took nothing more than a gaze for them to signal – and validate to each other – recognition of ‘another one.’
Their childhoods’ costs aside, at least they could sniff out similar quacks from afar.
For the Weekly Writing Prompt: Charlatan in 61 words
Na'ama Yehuda 
You must be logged in to post a comment.