“For all the Gods!”
“What is it?” I startled. This was the closest I’d heard Papa get to swearing.
He lifted the milking-pail to reveal a wet stain on the earthen floor. A defiant fat drop fell, confirming.
It was our only pail.
I emptied the soup-pot into our bowls. “I’ll scrub this, Papa. It’ll cool and do till the morrow, when I’ll take the pail to the tinker. He’ll repair it for my comb.”
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Tinker in 75 words
Photo: Mahima on Pexels.com
When she leaves, there will be time enough for all the things that should have happened and yet didn’t. When she leaves, a space will open to allow what was yearned for but manifested not. When she leaves — in a week or month or year or decade — a leaf would turn to let the newness grow.
When she leaves.
Yet for the time being she remains.
She has no choice. Or not a real one.
She plods along the rutted path made by the heavy feet she’d dragged so many times before. She does what must be done. She smiles. She nods. She cooks. She holds.
She finds in every day a small reminder of the hope. A sliver of a dream. A memory of what is yet to come.
It sustains her.
It has to.
It’s all she has.
Until she leaves.
For the SoCS writing prompt: Leaves
They walked around, eyes wide, not touching anything.
“It’s like a museum,” Lilly breathed.
“Only with ghosts,” Samantha shuddered.
Lilly shot her a warning glance and slid her eyes toward Mikey. As it was the boy woke up screaming every night.
This was the first intact house they’d seen. Well, almost intact. It had a roof, walls, and shutters that had protected some of the windows. It even had a wood-burning stove. They needed the shelter more than any ghost might, and Mikey didn’t need additional terrors.
She forced a smile. “Let’s find some water and make tea, shall we?”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
“You know,” she said, “this will be home.”
I looked around. Marsh and bog and semi-dry patches that high tide or rain were sure to turn completely water logged. It looked a misery.
“It will, too,” she added, even though I hadn’t said a word. She always knew to read my body’s thoughts, even when I voiced no words and moved not a muscle.
Some days it made me hate her. For my utter lack of privacy.
Other days I felt indebted beyond measure for not having to find ways to explain when words had never been accessible enough to match my thoughts with meaning. And for being seen by her when no one else seemed able to or cared to try.
“Wanna know how?” Fiona pushed a heavy lock of hair off of her eye and I knew then that she already had a plan, and that the plan was sounder than the muddy ground we stood on. I knew that gesture, that flowing move of clear-eyed determination that carried with it more than just a touch of crazy. For neither one of us was sane, but Fiona was nuts enough to get us out of scrapes I did not see a way out of. Somehow my sister, younger by three minutes and wiser by ten decades, thought ahead in moves others did not appear capable of anticipating. It had saved us, more than once, of certain death.
She was about to do so now.
“How?” I asked, though I knew she didn’t need me to.
“Stilts.”
She yanked a twig out of the soggy ground and scratched a diagram into the patch of godforsaken earth in the end of nowhere anybody, that an hour earlier I did not know existed, let alone that it belonged to us by ancestry through crumbling deeds that no one since an ancient relative had made use or taken any heed of.
“They thought the place too wet,” my sister noted as the outline of an elevated house rose like a phoenix from the lines she etched into the dirt. “But not Friar Felix. He saw the same potential that I see. The fish and clams and seaweed. The crabs. The cattails by the spring that makes the stream that gurgles out to the sea. A place to be.”
She glanced up at me and the hazel in her eyes reflected the sun’s rays along with something far older. Like a memory not of hers that nonetheless also held on to our own desperate need for belonging.
“I don’t know if he knew, Finley, but Friar Felix had bequeathed the deed to this land to his sister’s children, and to their children’s children in perpetuity.”
My sister turned her gaze onto the water and her voice dropped to a whisper in the wind.
“We are those children’s children’s children, Finley. This is our home. It will be home. You’ll see.”
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto Challenge
Photo: Adi Rozen-Zvi
It does not matter
Where you are:
Jungle, mountain
Old or new,
Plastic, wood
Or bamboo, too.
There is play here
To be had
If you wish to …
And you do.
For Terri’s Sunday Stills: Playground
“Lush, ain’t it?” The sixteen-year-old shivered in her short jacket.
Frosty patches dotted the monochrome shrubbery. She nudged one with her sneaker. “So, why exactly did you choose this godforsaken nothingness for your midlife crisis? Couldn’t have been the view, or the amenities.”
It’s fixable, Branden thought but said nothing. He’d worry more if Lizzie didn’t quip. And anyway, he knew she knew why they’d had to move.
Lizzie sniffed. He offered a tissue but she leaned into him, seeking a rare hug.
“Mama would’ve loved it here,” she whispered. “Even if we hadn’t lost everything to the medical bills.”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers Challenge
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
“Essentially, it should just be a matter of putting one foot in front of the other,” Dan noted, raising a mischievous bushy eyebrow and staring meaningfully at the assembled group of aspiring hikers. “Only that for some of us this might be an impossibility, seeing that … well …”
The participants laughed.
The six youngsters had barely five feet between them, let alone the assumed two per beating heart.
Dan had none.
“So,” the bearded guide waved a muscular arm over the skateboard that supported his legless torso. “We do something better.”
He pointed at each of the youngsters and their varied modes of conveyance. “We glide, we slide, we roll, we hop, we drive. We do whatever is necessary, and …” he chuckled, “because lunch will be served at the end of this path, we best get started or we’ll also end up doing it hungrily.”
For the SoCS challenge: ends with -ly
Photo: Amitai Asif
They gazed forlorn
Into the light,
Into the lumber
Burning bright.
All that they’d known
Before this plight,
Now kept them warm
Through heartache’s night.
*Dedicated to all who’d lost homes, lives, memories, and loved ones in fires and other disasters.
Photo: Priscilla du Preez via Unsplash
They did not need a rink when the lake made one for them. They did not have a coach but their skates learned to guide them. They were one with the ice as the pucks flew around them. They played in the cold while the old mountain charmed them.
original fiction, rhyme and photography
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