Indefinitely

October 1, 2022Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Current events, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: 100WordChallenge, Adversity, belief, Creative writing, Current events, Deceit, Faith, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers, Micro-fiction 39 Comments

Photo credit: © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

They didn’t know when Power would return.

When they’d be allowed to leave.

Only that it would have to.

Because it had been promised. And they’d been raised to listen. And believe.

The grid was down. The streets were bare. The shelves that once were filled to the brim were naked in the lanterns’ glare.

It mattered none.

When they had faith.

Power had said, before he left, the back of the car packed with goods he “had to take to the needier elsewhere,” that they were meant to wait, “indefinitely, if need be.”

An test of faith.

Till death.

For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers

Water Line

June 8, 2021Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: belief, CCC, Faith, Flash Fiction, Folklore, Micro-fiction, Monsters, Photo prompt, Protection, Reality check, Self-awareness 13 Comments

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She took herself onto the cliff each morning. Obedient. Observant. Obeisant.

Obscure as her faith seemed to those who did not understand, she nonetheless kept fast to her beliefs. To her practice. Those who shook their head did so due to limits in their vision. Their blindness did not diminish the veracity of what was, to her, as real as the rock she sat on.

She did not belittle other people’s inability.

As she wished they did not deride what they declared her “foolishness.”

To her, it was a line she drew. Of kindness. Or on harder days, of patience.

A mirror to the line that stretched across the water to reflect the passage of the Glories. The empyrean beings that took pain to skim the water in her favor.

In all their favor.

As protection.

From the monsters of the deep.

The ones she knew. The one she’d seen.

For Crispina‘s Crimson’s Creative Challenge

The Seeing

April 30, 2021Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: belief, CCC, Creativity, Death, Family, Flash Fiction, grandparents, Life Lessons, Micro-fiction, Visitor 27 Comments

“When I die,” she’d say, “I will not be truly away from you.”

Both sides of the statement used to worry him when he was little.

“Will I see you?” He once fretted. It was the day they had buried the pup who did not last the night. The runt who never whined and did not wriggle by the time the sun awoke. They’d laid the tiny bundle under a small mound of dirt in the yard. And it was lost to sight.

“In a manner of speaking,” Grandma had replied, untroubled. “For not all seeing is done with eyes.”

He did not understand her then.

Or when she died.

He wasn’t sure he understood her still, with many years passed.

Her absence a hole in his heart.

Then he came across the giant burl.

And he felt her in it. Waiting. Smiling. Seen.

He carved her out.

For Crispina‘s Crimson’s Creative Challenge

Teaching Without Telling

May 14, 2020May 14, 2020Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Ancient, belief, Creative writing, Flash Fiction, Historical fiction, History, Micro-fiction, Persecution, Photo prompt, Seeking help, Witch Hunt, WritePhoto 18 Comments

Photo: Sue Vincent

If only she could get there …

The mist and tears obscured her view, but she trod on, insistent and desperate for the safety of the circle. It had saved her ancestors. It had become a thing of lore.

But if the magic still held, she would be helped. The spirits that guarded the stones would weave protection over her. Bar the weapons. Shun the anger. Ward off those who wanted to do harm.

She tripped twice, the cold air breathing malice on her nape. She fought the urge to curl upon the damp ground and give up. She gathered up her tattered courage and wrapped the threads of memories around her shoulders. The incantations of her grandmother, sang softly into the cauldron, stirring soup and stories, teaching without telling, showing without spelling out what was forbidden to be known.

In the darkening damp she mumbled some forgotten fragments. “Help me, Nana,” she sobbed when her knees skinned on a stone and her breath caught.

“Rise, Child,” she thought she heard. She wanted to believe.

She rose. She stumbled on.

If only she could get there, she would be saved. The spirits will protect her in the mists of old.

The pitchforks. The firebrands. The mobs in their lust and calls for blood in smoke? They would not be able to see her. Not once she crossed into the circle. Once there, she would be scooped up, sheltered, danger gone.

For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto

Ethera

December 26, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Meditations, Muse and Flow, Poetry, Reflections, Writing Tags: belief, Flash Fiction, Folklore, hope, light, Micro-fiction, Mystery, Poetry, spirit, winter, Winter Solstice, WritePhoto 18 Comments

The Offering: painting and photo © Sue Vincent at scvincent.com

Photo prompt: Sue Vincent

She was Ethera, and she came at the peak of the longest night, on the cusp of the broadening daylight.

She was Ethera. A human. A spirit. A soul. Sometimes one. Often all.

She’d lived among them, flesh and blood and hope and heartache. She’d hungered and shivered and grew and raised and danced and cried and plowed. There had been nothing in her that foretold what she’d become once she passed the veil to the realm of Nether. Where summer did not come and winter did not grip the land and where the prayers of people held substance, unlike bodies, which did not.

She was Ethera. Unseen by most. Perceived by some. Hoped for by many. Feared by almost everyone.

Feared though she’d rarely brought on harm that wasn’t already in the making. Feared though she heralded truth, which for a reason she hadn’t been able to fathom, so many fought against.

She passed like air. Like wind. Like the willow whispering a breeze into one’s ear come silent night.

She was Ethera. And she came bearing gifts: Of scented fields. Of sunlit glens. Of fruit blushing ripe atop the trees. Of roots awaiting the fattening of rain. Of undulating earthworms sliding through the layers of the dirt to aerate the unseen.

As she could, too, pass between the layers of being.

She was Ethera. Some thought her fog. Some thought her ghost. Some knew her as the mist that rose to hold the moments yet to come and the droplets of the feelings those would bring.

She came at the deepest hollow of the longest night, and in her palms she held a bowl of alms, collected by the people’s dreams to appease the frost and sing the morning in.

For Sue Vincent’s Write Photo Challenge

Devilish

December 15, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: belief, Climbing, Devil, Family, Flash Fiction, Micro-fiction, Spirituality, Tasmania, Totem Pole, What Pegman Saw, Writing Challenge, Writing prompt 26 Comments

Photo: Steve Bruce on Unsplash

“It was the devil made those,” Aunt Beulah’s eyebrows almost met above the bridge of her nose.

“They’re just a form of volcanic rock, cooled down in a specific way …” Jedidiah tried.

“By which you mean, the devil.”

Jedidiah sighed. There was no way to reason with his relative once her mind was set. Science would find its way to be in service of her beliefs, and any fact would somehow be turned into further proof of her conviction.

In some ways, he knew, he was no different, only that his spiritual experiences had more to do with being one with the rock, fingers holding on to crags, feet clinging to the surface, defying gravity, confronting his mortality.

“You go climb the devil’s work,” Aunt Beulah muttered. She’d raised him and saw herself in his stubbornness. “And I’ll be in the church praying for Jesus to keep you from dying.”

For What Pegman Saw: Tasmania, Australia

Kiss Bliss

November 19, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Funnies, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Poetry, Reflections, Writing Tags: belief, Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Folklore, fpj-photo-challenge, Just for fun, Kiss a frog, Photo Challenge, Poetry, Silly, Unexpected 13 Comments

Photo: Anne Toet

Time had arrived

To make the shift

From frog

To handsome

Prince,

But then the kiss

When it was dished

Kept Frog’s

Amphibian

Bliss.

For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Fantasy

Pink Sky Won’t Lie

November 7, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: belief, Dawn, Flash Fiction, Folklore, Intuition, Micro-fiction, Morning, Plans, Short Story, Warning, Weather, WritePhoto 30 Comments

Photo: Sue Vincent

There it was.

Now she knew what would certainly happen. It did not matter that the calendar had counted down the days for many weeks. It did not matter that arrangements have been made, checklists marked, letters sent, particulars organized. She suspected, she resisted, she pretended …

Till now.

“Pink sky won’t lie,” her grandfather had always said. A fisherman all his life, he’d counted on the minutia of the heavens to warn or greet his days.

She’d learned to accept his observations, no matter how disappointed she was with a last minute reversal of plans he’d made for her to go with him. “The water is no place for children today,” he’d say. And saddened though she’d be, she knew enough to respect his judgment of the weather, and knew him well enough to know that nothing she could say or do would dissuade him once he’d made up his mind.

“God may control the weather,” he’d tell her (though always well out of earshot of her grandmother, who would’ve boxed his ears for speaking heresy, grown man or not). “But to me the weather is the real God. I can’t see God, but I sure can see these skies, and I know what they tell me. I heed those clouds. I heed those waves. I heed those colors in the sky.”

And heed he had. Though heeding did not mean one could always escape the wrath of what was coming.

The waves had claimed her grandfather when she was not yet ten. A fast-moving storm that all had later said no one could’ve out-rowed. She almost stopped believing after that. Stopped taking heed.

Because if Grandfather couldn’t read the sky or if the sky could hide its meaning from him, why even bother trying? What will be, will be. Que Sera sera.

And yet, someplace, she never did stop checking the color of the heavens every morning. Somehow, she never did stop glancing out of windows, no matter where in the world she found herself, or how far from any seas or oceans.

Oh, she listened to the forecast. She had the Telly on while she got herself ready for the day. She checked the extended before she packed.

Yet she trusted few things better than what her own eyes showed her: Pink sky at night, sailor’s delight. Pink sky in the morning, means sailor’s warning.

The sky were ablaze.

It was dawn.

She considered herself warned.

For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto Challenge