Photo: Sven Brandsma on Unsplash
He reports first thing in the morning.
He reports again every night.
There’s little that could dissuade him
From being absolutely forthright.
He records every scene with a flourish.
His voice reflects every sight,
As with journalist’s flair
He spells data in ample delight.
He would not be distracted from telling,
The minutia has got to be tight.
After all, he is in potty training
And to him no discharging is trite.
“You’ll stand on one side of the bridge, and I’ll cross it to the other.”
Millie considered.
Sylvia could be tricky. Sometimes the spunky neighbor was a delightful friend. Other times … not so much. And that’s not counting mishaps. Millie lost tally of how many times her playmate had landed her in trouble.
Millie’s hand rose to absentmindedly rub her backside. It still sported a bruise from the last ‘adventure’ Sylvia took them on. That tree limb would never grow again, and Millie’s piggy bank was half-emptied from the fine her parents had levied.
She looked at the pond. The water lilies floated serenely on the surface. A dragonfly hovered before dipping elegantly to paint a ripple. A frog leaped and splashed and swam underneath a wide green leaf. A bird chirped nearby.
It was perfect.
“I’m fine just relaxing here on the bank,” Millie decided.
“We won’t disturb anything,” Sylvia countered, flinging a braid behind a shoulder.
Millie shuddered. It was one of the things that were uncanny about Sylvia. Millie was positive the girl could read minds.
“I brought a ball,” Sylvia enticed. “And bread.”
The ball must be Denny’s, Sylvia’s brother, and almost certainly swiped without permission. The bread? Well, that was probably not ill got.
“No ball,” Millie said, then sighed. Somehow she always gave in to what became a kind of bargaining, when she in fact wanted none of the options to begin with.
“Great!” Sylvia scampered across the narrow bridge. “I’ll toss bread crumbs in the water and make some waves. You corral. Let’s see how many frogs we can get!”
“There’s no line!” Margo pulled Adina’s hand with one of hers and pointed with the other. “Let’s hurry!”
Adina followed Margo’s finger, shielding her eyes from the sun. It’s been a long day already and they’d only gotten in a little over an hour ago. The drive. The stops. The lines for the tickets. The lines for the entrance. The lines for the bathroom. The lines to the lines …
Her eyes met the target.
What was that!?
A contraption rose ahead, metal-barred and plastic-sheathed, crisscrossed with steps and zigzagged horrors.
“Come on!” Margo danced on the balls of her feet, ecstatic.
Adina felt the hotdog that she didn’t even eat yet threaten a revisit.
No way she was going up that thing. Nope. Ain’t gonna happen.
“Must be a reason no one’s there,” she tried.
“Yeah! Because it is ‘by reservation.’ Aren’t you glad I called ahead and made one?”
For Crispina’s Crimson’s Creative Challenge
“And the man in the straw danced and danced …”
“Till the morning came and changed his chance?”
Thomas stroked his granddaughter’s head. She never tired of the story. Her favorite, and she knew it by heart. As he knew her many expressions, the myriad of small sounds she made as she dreamed each night.
She was his favorite. His only, but still his favorite. No one could convince him otherwise.
“Grandpa?” the child burrowed deeper into her blankets.
“Yes, Pumpkin?”
“Do you think the man in the straw ever wanted to be something else?”
He felt his eyes widen as he glanced down at her. Her eyes were open, too. Gone were any traces of the soft daze of moments before sleep.
“What do you think, Pumpkin?” he returned the question, uncertain whether what he’d read into it was indeed in the child’s mind, and unwilling to insert his own assumptions into what may well be a different query altogether.
There were many things to wish were different. In the folktale. In life, too. He often wondered if she so loved the old story exactly because it spoke of vulnerabilities and challenge, of facing fears and finding fault and making do and fighting on. All things she’d know more than enough of.
The child nibbled momentarily on her lower lip. “I think maybe he sometimes wanted to be the man in the spiral. Or Fire. Or the mask. Or the stag.”
“Hmm …” he nodded, hoping she’d say more, wondering if she would. There was a depth to the child. Currents he did not always understand or believe he ought to. An Old Soul, his beloved Mara had said of the newborn even in the few days she had with the child before the angels called.
“But,” the little girl sighed, curling up so her back rested against her grandfather’s thigh as he sat on the edge of her cot. “I think he knew he was the Man In The Straw …”
The pause lingered. The child yawned.
“… and that he was meant to dance and dance …” she whispered, her breath deepening, her eyes closed. “… till morning came and changed his chance…”
Photo: Osnat Halperin-Barlev
Hold your toes
And attention
On the story she tells.
Lean in more
To inspect
Every image as well.
For no matter
The weather
Or the chatter
Outside,
There’s not much like
The keepsake
Of a big sister’s
Pride,
And the magic of
Words
In your sweet heart,
Amplified.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Keepsake in 49 words
Photo: Osnat Halperin-Barlev
Walk with me
Into nature
Where the fresh air
Flows through.
Walk with me
As we shelter
Under skies
Me, and you.
Walk with me
Hand in hand
Muddy boots
Flowers, too.
Let us breathe
And connect
With everything
That is true.
For the Tuesday photo challenge: Connect
Photo: Sue Vincent
“There’s a hole in the sky,” the child’s voice rose then hushed in part-fear, part-wonder.
“Indeed there is,” his father nodded.
The boy flicked his eyes away from the luminescent heavens just long enough to discern that his father wasn’t joking. He’d half-hoped his father would be, and his chest flooded with something like alarm when it did not seem that he was. What does it mean to have a rent in the ceiling of the universe? Would something fall through it? Would the world cave in like a shattered egg?
“Will it repair?” His voice was small.
The man put down the kindling he’d been arranging in preparation the evening’s fire. He straightened to a stand and leaned a heavy hand on the narrow shoulders of his son. Bird-like, the boy was. Fluttery and slight.
His youngest had always been a bit prone to the dramatic. The first to pick up on a change in atmosphere, the first to be reduced to tears, the first to wail at even the smallest prickling. Also the first to smile a welcome, the first to notice a green leaf peeking out of the frozen ground, the first to note the song of birds or a task well done.
He worried about such a skinless child, walking a life that did not always refrain from brushing far too crassly against tenderness. There were plenty of those who had repeatedly pressed him to be firmer with the youngster. To “toughen up the boy into a man” or “teach him how to grow a thicker skin.”
“How would I change the stripes upon a tiger?” he’d find himself replying. “Can I will a doe to become a lion?”
He could not bring himself to pain the boy as means to scar him into roughness. The child was made to be whomever he was made to be, and all a father could do was try to shepherd him toward maturity. Such as when taking the boy on this father-son hunting journey.
He squeezed his son’s shoulder and the boy raised a frightened face to meet his eyes.
“The sky will repair, Son,” he said, “though it may not go back to what it was before. For nothing can. It will move on — from day to night to cold to warmth to wind to storm. It will tear holes in clouds for sun to stream through. It will shred them to no shade. It will sew the threads together to again cover the sun. It is all as it is and all as it should become.”
The boy nodded. He swallowed down the tears that threatened, and tried to still the tremulous vibration of the world inside his mind.
“Now, as the sky does what it can,” the man handed his son a water-skin. “Let us do what we must. If you will fetch water, I will light the fire in tonight’s hearth.”
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto Challenge
“It’s where he comes to make a wish,” Johanna whispered over her swing’s ropes as the girls passed each other on the swing-set, ringlets flying in the breeze.
Marie’s eyes widened and she forgot to pump her legs. The old man looked like many others she’d seen. Or was he? She’s never known anyone grown who made wishes. In real life. Into a fountain. Like in stories. It made her wonder what other things in tales were true. Perhaps goblins? Or princesses?
“His wife died, you see,” Johanna added, impressed by her cousin’s reaction. “He wishes for her to return.”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Photo: Keith Channing
They had everything.
The Papa Chair. The Mama blanket. The two Cub chairs. The inner tubes: one small, one large. Even tin cans emptied to serve as sand pails in the refilled beach’s rectangle.
What a perfect day!
The lake awaited, wet and cool. The silty mud. The pebbles, the weeds to wade across or pull.
They swam. They flipped. They raced. They flopped.
The hours passed. The contents of the picnic basket made their tummies nice and full.
They rested till the water once more called.
Then one cub disappeared.
“Nicko!” they yelled, frantic with the possibility of the awfulness that might unfold.
“One moment!” the junior responded from the direction of the small structure. “I’m not done.”
Relief was quickly replaced by wonder only to be followed by surprise and whiff of horror.
“Nicko??!!?” the Mama dashed across the small beach to stop what was already well set into motion. “That’s not an outhouse! It’s my changing room! Go in the bushes! Not here!”
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
They looked outside the window into
Yards and yards of yard,
And knew this house will be one where
All play will thrive unmarred.
The world that spread
For miles ahead
A guard for
Childhood’s boulevard.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Yard
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