Photo: Pixabay on Pexels.com
She knew
It had always been
A barter:
Heartbeat
For
Hope.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Barter in 11 words
Fair Exchange
Muse and Flow
It’s a Wrap
Photo: Monica Silvestre on Pexels.com
“It’s a wrap,” she said, and rose, and massaged the small of her back, which after all those hours of sitting felt as if sharp clamps had been tightened through it. Her back was never quite the same since the car accident. Or was it since the Shingles? Or the bad fall? Or the earlier things that were best left unremembered?
It wasn’t only her spine that bowed under the spasm. Her muscles were responding to a lot more than just the time spent in the chair.
He looked up, annoyed and uncomprehending. “Wrap, how?”
“In all the ways that matter,” she responded. It felt like ions since a soft hand on her back would melt the stress away and deepen her breath and make sleep nestle in so close she could smell it.
Decades? Years? Months? Too long.
“Living up to your rap of being cryptic, I see,” he muttered.
It was meant as a jab, but instead made a small peal of laughter form like a pearl inside her belly.
“I guess I am,” she noted, one hand still kneading the tightness in her lumbar area, the other held close against the urge to pat his head and make it better.
She’s moving on. He’ll have to find someone else to do all that for him now.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS prompt: Wrap/Rap
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The Way Of Stars
Photo: Sue Vincent
They were like stars, swirling low and high across the sky, marking the path of time and soul and light and dark and what will come and what had been.
As the murmuration rose and swelled, so did the sorrow in her chest, as did tears, and longing, and gratitude.
Her grandmother had told her once, that murmurs were a way of making stars. Flocking in elegant waves across the heavens, to the places far above, where movement wasn’t labored and where breath no longer hurt and where hearts beat in the unison of souls that know all separation is only an illusion.
She held on, remembering, her tears a stream to feed flowers that would grow to feed the small things that would feed the starlings that would murmur to make stars to house beloved souls. And she thought of how the murmur in her chest – which made sound and sobs – ached and expanded as the birds’ wings wove and rose and dipped and dove.
For it was like being seen.
The starlings’ dance a last hello, a soft goodbye, a blessing on the wind.
For Sue Vincent’s Write Photo: Murmur
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The Skylight
Photo prompt: © J Hardy Carroll
She always loved that skylight. The one thing she’d insisted on when they’d rebuilt the old farmstead. Every day since, the sun streamed in or the rain puttered on or clouds swam above, transforming the indoors into a moving tapestry.
They’d kept the bones of the building, but the roof had been rotten. It needed redoing.
Like her bones.
She lay on the flagstone floors, sauce dripping onto her from where she must have upset the pot as she’d slipped and fell and something in her broke.
The skylight her only companion. The light fading. The day still long.
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
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Fuzzy Ewe
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
The hands of this artist
Young in years
Rich in view,
Made a cute fuzzy ewe
From what could well escape
Notice by
Me and you.
Note: Dedicated to my super talented and beloved niece, Aviv, 7 years old when she made this earlier this year. You never cease to amaze me! XOXO
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Fuzzy
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They Live In You
-
Luanda, Angola; by Jorje sa Pinheiro
“Why is the top of that mountain rusty?” he asked.
His grandmother’s hand tightened gently around his wrist, then released it, almost in apology.
“For your ancestors,” she said.
He looked at her, uncomprehending. She had a way of speaking without saying everything she meant or with saying more than she meant and then cloaking it so it was still a tangle of implied meanings. He didn’t always know which it was. Or both. Her lined face was held up in what looked more like grief than awe.
“Grandma?” he asked.
“This rust is the mountain holding up the iron bled by your great-grandfather’s chains and the chains of those before him, and before, so many generations that the rust of those shackles rose up. It is the blood of the mountain and like the blood in your veins, it is them. They live in it. They live in you.
For the What Pegman Saw challenge: Angola
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After-Party
Prompt photo: Pixabay
They were going to put them there to remember, they said. To frame the recollections of the community, so none of what had happened be forgotten. That’s what they said.
It was meant as a memorial of sort, they said. A referendum of the eye. Intended to draw the faces upwards and lend a sense of a somber chaos, carefully controlled.
Perhaps it was all that. Yet it was so much more.
For the installation was also meant to keep the chairs out of reach. To take away the possibility of seating. To have people stand and look and move on, rather than linger or make themselves oh-too-comfortable. Again.
Because it was the idleness – those in power believed but did not say – that had led to the gatherings and speeches and protests and that weekend party-turned-riot. People got too comfortable in using public spaces as if those were a right rather than a privilege. They sat. They lingered. They huddled together and began to think they should have the power to decide how they passed their spare time, where and who with they sat. Mutiny, it was.
The police were sent to squash it.
And put all the chairs up.
For Donna’s Sunday Photo Fiction prompt
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Delicately
Photo: Amitai Asif
She flitted gently by his head.
The slight bow noted, the sorrow that was there
But perhaps not heard.
She knew he had to hold himself up
All this time
That it was the only way
He’d learned.
And yet she could discern the hidden
Effort that it took
To rise against the gravity,
In times where drought of hope
Returned
Again and again and again.
She understood the energy required for
Making the Herculean appear effortless,
To constantly correct
The wobble under
Winds and strain.
She hovered for a moment
Letting a space of permission
Manifest
Before she landed, feather-weighted and,
Delicate
On his chest.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Delicate in 106 words
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Blue Belle
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
She hangs out next to the couch, wrapped around the floor lamp like a hand in a hand. She’s been there a long time. She lived on other floor lamps before this one, till their time had come and she welcomed a new one. She makes friends with them all, says goodbye to those who lost their spark. Perhaps she thinks of them, sometimes.
She hangs out next to the couch, wrapped around the floor lamp like a protective palm over a young hand. She watches little fingers wrestling beads onto threads, listens as small mouths make words out of thoughts, witnesses big hearts in tiny chests writing grand ideas into evolving minds – theirs and mine.
She hangs out next to the blue couch. She hears the unasked questions that stay behind worried parents’ lips. The questions children ask, sometimes for the first time. She understands. She does not prod. She just knows. They look for her, especially after a long break, reassured to find her there, still wrapped around the floor lamp like a comfy hug.
She’s been there long enough to find the right time to catch their eye.
With a quiet smile.
Blue Belle on her perch by the couch. Patience in her heart, twinkle in her eye.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS prompt: Blue (first blue object you see)
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Light Ahead
Photo: Sue Vincent
After weeks of gray and thistles and ceaseless wind that scraped her raw, there was light.
She could scarcely believe it at first.
The cloud cover had been so complete for so long that she’d began wondering if there was even a real sun still behind it. The revolutions of soupy daylight and inky nights felt equally murky as every step became oppressive. She had waking dreams of being lost inside a massive warehouse, a mouse in a maze, endlessly seeking an exit yet seeing none.
She wondered whether there was still use in trying. She was oh so tired.
Now there was a break. The sky spawned a cavity and the leaden heavens began to dissipate. She could discern a layer of ease in the distance.
And light, streaming like caressing fingers ahead. Showing the way home.
Note: Dedicated to the all-too-many who are staggering through their personal wilderness, caught in the molasses of gloom, and thinking of giving up — keep on, hold on. There’s light ahead, and we’re leaving it on for you.
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto challenge
Na'ama Yehuda 
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