(Photo: Karen Forte)
The fog cocooned her.
A swift blanket
Of numbing
Penetrative chill
The sun could not
Expel.
And yet
A butterfly’s wing
Flicked against
Her cheek.
A kiss
Of warmer
Days.
A promise for
What what could,
In a heartbeat,
Thaw frost
Into bedazzled
Hope.
For the dVerse quadrille challenge: swift
For Carol. On your birthday in heaven. Butterfly kisses galore.
Photo: Sue Vincent
Her people came from the place where the mist rests on the turf and the ladder to and from the heavens can unfurl. It was where they all still lived.
It breathes, mist does. The fog kisses the lungs in moisture like that from which all of them had come: the womb, the sea, the ocean sky.
Alana still dreamed of days before her mind awoke to awareness. Cocooned inside her mother, growing to the beat of steady drums and gurgling songs.
“Wombs are portable heaven,” her grandmother said, the peat spade matching her words thump to thunk. “All is created. All is attended to. All is removed that no longer belongs. It is magic personified.”
And magic has a price, Alana thought. For all things do. Sometimes it sends a mother back to heaven. Sometimes it sends back both if the ladder into heaven leans in too close.
Her grandmother, Meara The Midwife, had delivered her into the world. As she had practically everyone Alana knew. Nana also helped ease the passage of women, including that of her own daughter Nola – Alana’s mother – back into the mists of old where breath was no longer needed to sustain the soul.
“It is a blessing to be from the land of mist,” Nana’s strong arms tossed a steady stream of peat blocks for Alana to stack. “Even if blessings can carry a cost,” she added, pausing for a moment to rub the small of her back, and to regard the ten-year-old.
The child’s auburn curls escaped the confines of her kerchief and any ties and ribbons one tried to wrestle them into. She was a quiet one, even as a wee lass, green-flecked eyes like moss on peat and cheeks like peaches in cream. Observing. Taking in.
She’s one for the mists, Meara thought, but never said. One did not make words for such things. Not for anyone. Let alone for the granddaughter one wrestled back from heaven’s ladder. Born too early, this one was, and at the same time too late for her mother’s life to go on.
Meara sighed and smiled small reassurance at Alana, whose features tightened in response to her grandmother’s exhalation. A mist child indeed, this one. Reading others in the smallest of breaths.
Nola had been this way. Sensitive. Perceptive.
Secretive, too. In many ways like the babe she’d borne. Half of her time spent in dream and memories of mist.
Meara shook her head to clear her own. She pointed her chin toward the ground. “A few more of these and we’ll head home. Let us see if we can get there before this bank of fog rolls down to completely mist up our path through the bog.”
Cape Disappointment (Photo: John Westrock on Upsplash)
The damp timbers creaked under her feet as she wondered if the fog would lift. She half-hoped it would not.
She was still small and timorous when her uncle had brought her here for the first time. “And you won’t be disappointed,” he had laughed, the lines about his eyes creasing in merriment.
It was only later that she understood his joke. It still made her smile.
Indeed, she loved Cape Disappointment. Even in the fog. Perhaps especially in the fog, in its unique magic. She’d read that almost a third of a year’s hours are spent in fog on the headland, masking rivers, hugging sand.
A gust of wind dripped cold into her collar and she laughed. Her uncle used to shake a branch onto her. This felt like a gift.
“You were right, Uncle,” she wiped a tear. “This place did not disappoint. Neither did you. Not once.”
For What Pegman Saw: Cape Disappointment, Washington, USA
Ko Samui Tropical Trio 1; Photo: Naama Yehuda
Ko Samui Tropical Trio 2; Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Ko Samui Tropical Trio 3; Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
As the storm rolled in
And rain took hold,
Mountains cowered
Under fog.
Note: The above photos were taken within minutes of each other last August in Thailand, as I took an afternoon walk on the beach and a fast-moving tropical storm sped in and essentially cloaked the mountains.
For Nancy Merrill’s Photo a Week Challenge: Three of a kind
Photo: Karen Forte
He was a Shrouder, ordained from birth to emerge in mist and fog to collect Elves’ Dew from basalt rocks. Ordinary persons could not discern the quality of water imbued by the Fair Folk. Detecting the elusive shimmer took innate talent and a good amount of training to trust what one saw right on the edge between the real and imagined.
Elves’ Dew. The world’s very spin depended on it, and yet most people did not know or believe it existed.
Thornsten used to think it odd. “Do they really not see or do they refuse to?” he’d asked Boulder. He must have been no taller than the large man’s knee at the time. Four or five summers old at most, and a wee one at height even for that.
Most of them were. Smaller.
Early born. Sickly. Odd in growing. The ones already half-way here and half-way in the other worlds.
Boulder was in that sense an anomaly for a Shrouder. Six-feet-tall and barrel-chested, he could lift rocks the size of a small man and break little sweat for it. He towered over most of common men, let alone the Shrouders he was training. And yet he was a Shrouder, and perhaps the better of them. Or was, some said, till Thornsten.
“They see only in parts,” Boulder had responded. “Like black and white instead of color.”
“But you do not see color,” Thornsten argued. Boulder’s eyes had been milky gray with whitish film from birth. “And anyway, the shimmer has no hue.”
But Boulder had only nodded and said no more and left the boy to wallow in a prolonged pouting and to wrestle whatever meaning he could out of the answer.
It was the way of Shrouders to do so.
A moody tendency that some saw as obstinacy and some excused as a product of having seen the afterlife and been sent back on delayed entry.
Thornsten thought that was odd, too. How else was one to ruminate an understanding without time spent submerged in one’s own moroseness?
In any event, by the time he reached eight summers, he came to think of others’ lack of belief in Elves’ Dew as more of a matter of need for adequate technology for visualizing the mythical. Perhaps a bit like how people hadn’t believed that germs were real only because they could not see them, and so had refused to wash their hands from the effluvia of death before they tended to laboring women. It had been a costly — and for some, a lingering — ignorance. Same could be said for the stubborn denial of the reality of Elves’ Dew, when the essence was mandatory for life’s survival. Would there ever be lenses that could translate Elves’ Dew into what ordinary people saw?
He asked Boulder about it the next time the mountain breathed in their souls and let them know it was time to go collecting.
The cool air pooled around their feet as they climbed. It filled their lungs with memories of moisture. In the midst of resting clouds there shimmered pearls of Elves’ Dew. It boggled Thornsten’s mind that some could not see them when they were clear as morning.
“Perhaps a way would be found,” Boulder answered. “But we best ensure life remains viable until people evolve sufficiently to manage it.”
He bent his bulk and siphoned a few drops into a cask, careful to leave some behind for the Fairies.
“But evolution itself depends on Elves’ Dew,” Thornsten countered.
The large man shrugged in reply and Thornsten knew he’d get no more out of him at the moment.
They worked in silence for a while. Behind him Thornsten felt more than heard the other Shrouders. The small troop had been listening to his conversation as well as to the mountain’s breath.
He pouted, but in spite of him the calm of the misty fog filled his inside eye and guided his hands from rocky dent to basalt shelf to precious drops to cask.
Long moments past.
“It may be you, if anyone,” Boulder added so quietly that Thornsten wasn’t sure he’d actually heard words. Recently he found that thoughts had their own voice, sometimes.
He looked up to see Boulder’s milky eyes resting on him.
“You will lead the Shrouders, Thor, and much sooner than I had imagined.” The man’s mouth did not move but the words formed, crystalline, in Thornsten’s mind. “And it won’t surprise me if you’ll somehow lead the ordinary folk to the marvels for which they had till now been blind.”
For the Friday Fun Foto challenge: Mythical
Photo: Amitai Asif
As the fog masks the path
Take a breath
And hold tight.
May an arrow direct you
To a home
And a hearth.
For Cee’s Which Way Photo Challenge
Photo: Dvora Freedman
When life envelops
What will be
In cloaks of misty
Mystery
And fog,
Hold on
To the soft promise
In the droplets
That infuse the air
With fractionated light
And hope
For verdure
And potentiated growth.
For The Daily Post
tucked away in the mountains
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