Heads Up

September 22, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Change of Seasons, Fantasy, Flash Fiction, Just for fun, Lore, Micro-fiction, Personification, Photo prompt, SPF, Sunday Photo Fiction, Timeless 14 Comments

Photo from Morguefile

“I never got a chance to get ready!” Tuttie moaned, trying helplessly to wriggle so her mane fell as it ought.

“Shush! I’m trying to watch.” Tussock grumbled.

“Tuttie, your tuft looks fine!” Tilly quipped.

“No, it doesn’t. It’s all blowing in the wind.” Tuttie retorted. She was ever so particular about the way her threads flowed.

“Of course it would move,” Tussock bristled and tried to stand in attention as the clouds flew on the breeze. “When has it ever not been windy here?” Tuttie was annoying, but it irritated him even more that Tilly always perked up to soothe her fussy sibling’s fronds. She should get s spine instead of bowing to every mood. And why did he have to get planted right between these two, anyway?

“You in the periphery, stop swaying like a bunch of leaflets and stand up taller.” Topknot’s voice meant business. “Heads up now. It is almost time.”

The assemblage quieted. It was time for the sun to cross the horizon at the top of the tallest tree. A yearly passing when their ancestors’ fluff could climb aboard the golden orb’s mighty ship, and be carried to their eternal rest beyond the sea.

For the Sunday Photo Fiction prompt

A Map Of Reminiscing

September 21, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Canada, Erosion, Flash Fiction, Loss, memories, Micro-fiction, Newfoundland, travel, What Pegman Saw, Writing Challenge, Writing prompt 38 Comments

Green Gardens trail in Gros Morne National Park, NL (Timothy Holmes on Unsplash)

They’d come to Gros Morne every summer. On “Dad Week.” Camp in a tent that always leaked but Dad wouldn’t replace, every patch and glued seam a map of reminiscing. They’d spend days on the meadows, walk the volcanic beach, go down to Old Man’s Cove.

Sal loved all of it. Even the chill and wet and constant hunger (for there was always more Dad aspired to catch than what he’d actually manage to). Sal never complained. He’d give up everything to breathe the ocean and make up stories about pirates in the coves. He’d even downplay the painful rash and sneezing (they never did find which wild-flower he was allergic to, and he didn’t want to, afraid Mom would say he couldn’t go).

Erosion closed his favorite trail, but not his memories.

He gazed at the ocean and wondered if Dad, whose mind was fading, still had his.

For What Pegman Saw: Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada

It’s a Wrap

September 20, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Flash Fiction, Micro-fiction, Moving on, Rap, Relationships, Reputation, SoCS, Stream of Consciousness, Wrap, Writing prompt 33 Comments

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

The Way Of Stars

September 19, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Memoriam, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Flash Fiction, Folklore, Gratitude, Grief, Micro-fiction, Murmuration, Photo prompt, saying goodbye, Sorrow, Starlings, WritePhoto 30 Comments

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

The Skylight

September 18, 2019September 18, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: 100WordChallenge, Accident, Alone, Farm house, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers, Micro-fiction, Photo prompt, Skylight, Somber, Waiting 53 Comments

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

They Live In You

September 16, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: Adversity, Ancestry, Angola, Flash Fiction, History, Luanda, Metaphor, Micro-fiction, Remembrance, Slavery, What Pegman Saw 33 Comments

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

After-Party

September 15, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Current events, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Allegory, Assembly, control, Current affairs, Flash Fiction, Freedom, Government, Micro-fiction, Sculpture, SPF, Sunday Photo Fiction, Tyranny 14 Comments

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

Light Ahead

September 12, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Current events, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: Adversity, Depression, Flash Fiction, hardship, hope, Life Lessons, light, Metaphor, Micro-fiction, Photo prompt, Tenacity, WritePhoto 24 Comments

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

Read To Remember

September 11, 2019September 11, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Current events, Life and love, Meditations, Memoriam, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: 100WordChallenge, Current affairs, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers, kindness, Memoriam, No More Hate, Reading, Remembrance, September 11, Terrorism, Trauma 50 Comments

“I read to remember,” she said, her voice steel and quiver. “I read because he no longer can and because I know he was, most very likely, reading at the very moment his life stopped, evaporated, in mid-word. I read because mine almost stopped in the loss of him and in the enormity of the awfulness that took him and so many.

“I read to not forget. Because there is a bigger spark in life than in sorrow, and because he never would have left us, and certainly not this way. If it weren’t for the planes.

That September day.”

Note: Dedicated to all the lost, and to all those who lost so much, and to all that has been changed — insidiously and indelibly for so many — on September 11, 2001. I was here. I remember and I understand why we remember and what we must remember about ourselves and about who we can be. May we hold truth. May we be the better, kinder, more humane version of ourselves.

For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers

Pharaohsaurus

September 7, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Funnies, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Things Kids Say, Writing Tags: Dinosaurs, Flash Fiction, Fossils, History, Micro-fiction, Museum, Patience, Pharaohs, Siblings, Weekend Writing Prompt, Writing Challenge 23 Comments

Photo: Na’ama Yehuda

“It looks like a pharaoh,” the boy commented.

“Hmm …” the girl leaned her elbows on the display case to take a photo. Dinosaurs weren’t Pharaohs, but her little brother was obsessed with anything Egyptian, so it was easier to agree. Took long enough to drag him out of that wing of the museum and into what she really wanted to see.

“Do you think the pharaohs saw one of these and it gave them the idea?”

She sighed. “There were no dinosaurs left at the time of pharaohs.”

“It’s not what I meant!” His nudge made her take a photo of a piece of plaster instead of the fossil bones. “Maybe they found something like this one.”

“Stop it!” She hissed. They’d be told to leave if they fought.

“Sorry.” He was, only sort of. “Is it called a ‘pharaohsaurus’?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Well, it should!”

For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Museum in 147 words