Photo: A.Katz
As the sun’s last light
Paints mountains
Red,
May worry find a safe
For stashing
Dread:
That morning might
Not come
Again,
That homes might turn
From hope
To strain,
And children’s cries
Will sound
In pens,
As they wake
More memories
Of pain.
For dVerse Quadrille Challenge: Sun
He kept it all these years.
A memento of sorts. Something to remember things by. A penance, perhaps. Or a tribute. Sometimes he wasn’t sure which one it was. Or both.
Some nights he’d leave their bed, her light breath highlighting the heaviness that had kept him from sleeping, and walk to the garage just to look at it. To remind himself of what is real and what was possible and what should never once again take place.
Even if it could.
It was the only lie he’d ever told her, though in truth it had led to many more lies — of omission, of deflection, of withholding aspects of himself he could not let her know about. Not ever.
Or did he someplace hope to one day let her know?
For why else would he keep it?
Sometimes he thought that his refusal to do away with it was his way of warning. Himself. To not allow himself to fall into an illusion of what he was not. Perhaps a warning to her, too, to read between the lines of what he couldn’t tell her.
Of the damage he could do. Even in accident. To the ones he’d loved.
For the Sunday Photo Fiction challenge
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
She’d never have believed the vastness had she not been there to see it.
In person.
On the edge of endlessness.
The breath of eons crashing at her feet.
The spray of ancient rhythms that had been there
All along.
Through war and storm and hope and flood and cold and warm and days like this when no one but herself was there to witness it.
She’d never have believed the power that it held, contained within each curl of wave, in every roll of whitecap licking sand.
It filled her.
With awe and ache and gnawing yearning to something that went beyond her words and into thoughts unformed, or perhaps ones made of memories in utero: the hiss, the beat, the drums of hearts.
And this.
Another memory
To merge into
In endless harmony.
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto (2nd week)
Photo: Stephen Paris on Pexels.com
It has long lain
In limbo,
All voices ebbed
Into dust.
As silent letters
On chalkboard,
Watch the desks
Left to rust.
At one time
Children chanted,
Poems rose
Learned by heart.
But they’d grown
And time hastened.
School-house days
Did not last.
Now it sits,
Heart quite emptied,
And still waits
For the past.
For the dVerse Challenge: Limbo
It will be tea for one. Again.
She boiled the water in the pot they’d gotten on their honeymoon in Venice, and she spread the tablecloth he’d always said reminded him of his grandma’s parlor (and had always added “in the best way possible” when she’d frown).
She rearranged the mismatched chairs left from the two sets they’d combined when they moved in together, but then returned the plaid one so it rested half-turned to the table and half-facing the radio. Like old times. Like the many evenings when she’d mend some this or that or mark her students’ lessons, while he’d lean forward onto one palm and watch her from the corner of his eye even as his attention was on his favorite broadcast.
“I have eight favorites,” he’d often chuckle. “One for each day of the week and two on Sunday.”
“But none as favorite as you,” he’d always add, just because he knew it pleased her to be reminded that she mattered more …
She turned the burner off when the kettle wailed, a lone wolf in the night. She spooned some of the good tea into the teapot, and poured the water on the leaves to let it steep, then capped the pot and dressed it with the cozy she’d made from his favorite sweater when it had too many holes to patch and too much love to throw away.
“You don’t toss away much,” he’d tease her, and they both knew it was both compliment and understanding. They’d grown with little and later had even less, so she had learned to not let go of things too easily.
“I do keep you around, don’t I?” she’d tease back … some days only half in jest for how he’d manage to so exasperate her. Muddy shoes inside the house and socks that never quite made it into the hamper, and an infuriating tendency to not recall the milk or pay the mortgage. Never mind remembering her birthday or their anniversary.
Or the time he’d strayed from vows … and bore a hole into her heart that never fully mended.
She’d forgiven him for that. Of sort. Or as much as anyone can a betrayal. For she’d come to understand it was based less on his disrespect of her as it was on his embedded insecurities. He’d cried in shame when he’d confessed his indiscretion and she’d ended up comforting him, feeling both tender and resentful.
He’d bought her the tea caddie after that. The hand-carved thing of beauty had cost a ridiculous amount and did little to improve upon the one they’d had already … other than in how it served as a reminder for the cost of pain and of his commitment to penance.
She passed a finger over the caddie’s rounded top and felt each curve like a canyon of memories in her heart. When she’d fallen ill after their failed attempt at parenting, and the bills kept mounting, he’d almost sold his beloved radio to make payments. Yet he’d refused to discuss letting go of the caddie.
“It is worth a small fortune,” she had tried.
“And that is exactly why it is befitting of you that it stay,” he had replied.
She sighed and sat and poured the tea into her cup and watched the steam cloud the glass as the fluid rose like unabated sorrow.
It was their anniversary. The third since he’d left her, this time to where no tea caddie and no amount of tears could remedy.
“Do not hasten to follow,” he’d begged her promise when they both knew it was time. “Go on and live for me.”
Perhaps she wouldn’t have promised had she known quite how bereft she would be without him. Yet she had given him her word, and she was not about to introduce betrayal into the fabric they had so labored to repair.
It will be tea for one, again. Today.
For the Sunday Photo Fiction Challenge
“They do not remember who they are.”
The old man’s voice was somber without judgment. A skill born of patience shaped by the combined weights of history and time.
“It is why I brought them here.”
The elder regarded his visitor. His dark eyes pools of wisdom deeper than the lines upon his skin.
A silence stretched.
“They will not find it in this place,” Sorrowful Skies said finally.
Disappointment filled the woman’s face.
“They will sleep in the lodge tonight,” he added. “Tomorrow, they will walk like their ancestors. In bare feet on breathing land. Then they will remember.”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Photo: Philip Coons
Empty window
Recalls
Days of voice,
Filled up halls.
Rocking chair
Holds the space
For creaky floors
Under pace.
Tattered curtains
Still long
For a hand
To belong.
The old house
Holds its breath.
When time spins
Back again,
They will come back.
Amen.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Anticipation
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Life to hatch
Life to stall
As a change
Transforms all.
While new wings
Rise and fall,
Will it a ‘before’
Recall?
For the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Changeable
Earlier today, as I was attempting to video a particularly adorable little one, my phone froze. It would not budge. It refused even to turn off. Total strike. When it finally relented, responded, and restarted, it claimed that the MicroSD card that had lain securely in its innards, accumulating goodies, was “blank or has unsupported files.” Gulp!
Removing and remounting the tiny tech did nada. Restarting again? Zilch. Thousands of photos, videos, music and docs – more than 27 Gigabytes’ worth – gone! Some are backed up, perhaps, someplace. Many? Who knows.
I breathed. I zoomed through the phases of grief. I put the phone away. I fed the toddler some fruit. We both had a sip (and spill) of water. We chased dogs, a little boy with a ball, an ant, and three pigeons.
Back home, I tried to view Micro (it felt right to name it, after it turned my day on its head) on the computer. No luck. Not only did my laptop refuse to load the card’s info, it would not even acknowledge that Micro existed. To add insult to injury, Micro’s ordeal somehow managed to keep it invisible even as it shut down the whole card-reader drive so it would not read any other memory cards, either. Micro had suffered Total Amnesia With Driver-Scrambling Influences.
Even according to the normally super helpful remote-‘hijackers’ of computers, the poor data that had lived on Micro, is to be presumed evaporated. Oh, my phone returned to work deceptively fine. The contacts are intact. So are any WhatsApp images (normally so infuriatingly immune to living anyplace but the prime real-estate of internal storage, and now more snobbish than ever, being the only ones to have survived). It is the photos I’d taken myself, the videos I’d shot, the files I’d stored, the music I’d downloaded, that have disappeared into the abyss. Whatever caused this massive ‘phone syncope,’ it damaged only the deceptively giant brain of my little Micro, but by all accounts it did so spectacularly!
So here I am, a bit disoriented and feeling a touch of loss and more than a bit bewildered. I can’t help but worry that whatever had caused the irreversible amnesia might pay a return visit, especially as the culprit remains unexplained (and unrecoverable). It doesn’t help that certified geeks spent hours trying to figure out how one scrambled Micro-SD managed to make other cards not be readable just by association, and continued to do so even after repairs, rebuilds, refresh, and the odd time-travel of restore.
Being prone to seeing synchronicity as messaging, I’m wondering if today’s drama is a metaphor for the contagion of energy and chaos. So timely with the current snags and ripples in the fabric of memory and history.
Adieu, photos. Adieu, videos. Adieu, all manner of notes. I remember some of you very fondly. I admit to not quite knowing what many of you were. I will miss you all, anyway.
One day (soon, if Murphy has a say in it, which he tends to in such cases), I might find myself looking for an image or a file that I just know I had ‘someplace’, only to realize that it was probably part of today’s giant exodus.
In the meanwhile, I hope this data-crater becomes an opening to new energies and an invitation for new memories on Micro-The-Second. I choose to view this as (yet another) lesson into the temporary yet indelible existence of every moment, be it captured into tangible memory or not.
For the One Word Sunday Challenge: Giant
original fiction, rhyme and photography
Taotalk is a forum for the discussion of both the academic and pragmatic aspects of dao and Daoism, with participants expressing themselves on Daoist writings and pragmatics from their unique perspectives. It serves as a community for Daoists, and those interested in Daoism, to gather and talk dao.
A photographer's view of the world - words and images to inspire your travels and your dreams
Life in progress
Straight up with a twist– Because life is too short to be subtle!
A man with dyslexia writing about this and that and everything else!
Better Living Through Beauty, Wisdom and Whimsey
Life in a flash - a weekly writing blog
Aroused by Arête
Or….Identifying The Harmless Unhinged Among Us.
Thoughts on life, writing, creativity and magic
with John W. Howell
Taking the journey, bumps and all
Images brought to you by Bren and Ashley Ryan
Flash Fiction using Photo Prompts
Photography, fiction, humor, opinions, and whatever else I feel like posting
there's a poem in every day
Expressing Thought Through Photography
