What are we to do?
They asked,
When all seems to be
So broken-up?
How can we rectify
When the mess
We allowed
Exceeds nightmare
Proportions?
Perhaps,
The measured response was,
Begin with
Cleaning up.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Rectify in 35 words
“If tied,” she said, “come by.”
“If not…?” he asked.
Her shake of head stilled any of the questions he had swirling inside his. It cooled his urge to argue. He knew it wouldn’t help. He knew it would only make what was already unlikely, impossible.
In the days that followed he found every reason to visit the gatepost. He wasn’t meant to come too close, but the nearby field offered cloves that his mare suddenly required, and there were numerous trips to town that merited taking exactly the dirt road that hugged parts of the property.
He drooped with every thread-less passing.
He couldn’t sleep.
He felt angry, worried, sick.
Till one day, as he rode by on an errand for a parcel, he saw it. A pink thread. Tied.
Her parents relenting.
They’d let him court her. Even though his father, in his drunkenness, had killed their son.
For Crispina’s Crimson’s Creative Challenge
CCC #69
No matter how much he tried to recreate the last exchange he’d had with The Tall, he couldn’t wrap his head around how he ended up in the predicament he now found himself in.
Open-eyed-blind, blunted, turned away from everything and everyone. He was but a nub of his former self.
It never should’ve come to that.
He didn’t think such drastic measures had ever been taken before against any of the garden folk. Certainly not against a gnome (shorter and tricksier than most or not). Sure, there have been tales of persecuted fairies. Of elves’ homes trampled. Of spirits sent to cemetery quarantine. Perhaps the less-than-fair Fair-Folk had to sometimes be kept in check. But gnomes? Why would anyone get even with a Grandfather of Gardens? Gnomes were made to evoke trust and smiles, not fury.
And yet. There he was. Exiled. Helplessly turned against the blank, black wall.
For Crispina’s Crimson’s Creative Challenge
Photo: Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash
There was a wall in there.
A barricade against the world.
He’d built it, bit by bit, from hurts and slights and bigger woes.
And hid.
Within.
Where he thought he’d be safe, and from where he could watch from a distance, reassured by barriers and gates and locks and elaborate booby-traps that made sure no one got too close.
There was a wall in there.
And a moat.
Alligators, too. For insurance.
Only that they had become hungry with the years, as less people even attempted to get near him, and therefore there was less bait.
So that he was, in many ways, imprisoned.
He’d been young when he’d built the wall, and he didn’t plan ahead. So needy of a solid barricade he’d been, that he never made a way to unlock the gate.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Barricade in 136 words
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
It will be the couch for me today, after a bit more lifting, hopping, sliding, climbing, carrying, skipping, and bending, than my sort-of-hanging-in-there spine is happy with.
Not that I regret any of the evasive maneuvers to ‘prevent’ a giggling toddler from stepping on my shadow … Not that I regret going down the slide (well, a little … going down wasn’t the issue, getting back up was … I swear they put these toddler-level things lower and lower to the ground … ;)). Not that I regret counting ducks and spotting turtles, tracking helicopters in the sky, crouching to fix sandals and greet puppies, or examining mini-melted-puddles on park-paths of what might’ve been a dropped ice-cream (the alternative is gnarlier…). I don’t even regret riding hippos “to Israel and also to the Zoo” (yep, New York’s got a whole bloat of tolerant Hippos in the Safari Playground — and no offense to the hippopotami for the term — I don’t make English, I just use is …).
T’was all of it a lot of fun, it was. Delightful as every time spent with this knee-high to a grasshopper of a peanut is. Love that gal to the moon and Mars and back (whether we get there on or off the back of a hippo calf). But this does not mean there’s no piper to pay.
So, I’m paying the piper today. (Hopefully only today …)
And it’ll be slow transitions on and off the couch and bed and chair. And some Ibuprofen, and Biofreeze and Arnica salve, and the duck-wobble molasses-like moving that is the package deal in a body a bit too willowy and quite a bit too finicky than its inhabitant likes to accept, but perhaps should.
Or won’t.
Because.
Life’s too short and couches got to earn their keep somehow.
For Linda Hills SoCS prompt: Couch
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
“Time to go.” Ari shook the ground-cloth.
“One more swim to the breakwater and back!” Deni pleaded.
Ari eyed the sky, the flagpole buckling in the wind, the jellyfish tumbling in the surf. “Another time,” he turned to fold their sun-umbrella.
Behind him he heard Deni’s running steps. He reached for the vinegar. That girl never did listen.
For Sammi’s weekend writing prompt: Breakwater in 58 words
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