Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
A moment
For the memory of
A different kind of home,
Where sun sparkles
On the water
And you feel your soul
Fold along the crease
Of rolling foam,
And where your spirit
Sings the song of places
It has long known
How to roam.
They were going to make a day of it.
Get some fresh air.
“It would do you good,” she’d said. “You’ve been cooped in for far too long.”
And he had. And he didn’t really care if he stayed cocooned indoors for a few more weeks. Or months. Or years. Or till life’s end.
But he also didn’t want to upset her, and she’d been putting up with him, moody silences and pacing through the nights and appetites that came and went in both extremes and often not for what she’d taken the time to prepare.
So he agreed. And washed. And dressed in something less wrinkled than what he’d been living in. And they went.
The air did do him good.
The open space. The light. The breeze. The views.
Until.
She’d seen them first and tried to shield him, but his mother has never been very good at hiding her distress, and he read through it and looked in the direction she was clearly hoping he would not.
His ex. The girl who’d left him at the altar, who abandoned him to do all the explaining and pay all the bills and mollify all the aunties and absorb all the pitying looks and lose face and his dignity and eventually his job.
There she was. Pressed into another man.
His blood rushed into his ears as he remembered: he had the same photo taken. With her. Wearing the same smitten look.
And he wondered if someone had stared at them, too, at the time, and considered him the next man she’d rob.
(Note: This story is fiction. I don’t know anyone in this photo and no real connection between the photo prompt and the content is intended.)
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Till time alights
To set things right
May last year’s light
Fill this year’s nights.
For the Sunday Stills challenge: Holiday Decor
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
I remember
Past winter
Of old,
There was light
Shining warmth
In the cold.
I recall spring’s
Late blanket
White bold,
Under lamps’
Glow of soft
Molten gold.
For the Lens-Artists challenge: Cold
“He never would’ve been out there without his hat.”
Elizabeth shook her head in suppressed exasperation. Of course her mother would find fault.
The older woman perched on the edge of the folding chair that Elizabeth and the fresh-faced health-carer had dragged over for her. The flickering episodes of weakness and disorientation had grown more frequent since Grandfather died. Perhaps it had been the shock of finding him, as her mother had, slumped against the edge of the bathtub. Perhaps it had been the letting go that followed endless years of caring for an increasingly ailing parent. Perhaps it was her mother taking on the role of family invalid.
The doctors certainly did not seem to know.
Or know the difference.
Not that Elizabeth could not understand the wish to let go. She could. Very much so.
Caring for her increasingly moody mother gave her a taste of what it had to have been like for her mother to endure the constant worry over and never-ending bitterness of a man who could no longer do what had sustained him. The amicable if somewhat taciturn grandfather had turned into a fussy, verbally cruel, bed-bound tyrant. Her mother’s father had to have become insufferable.
A little like her mother was becoming.
“They should’ve made a hat. It’s all wrong without a hat.” Her mother scowled.
The figure on the hill leaned into the wind. Impossibly lithe and utterly determined, it embodied how Elizabeth the young child had known him. As far back as she could remember, Grandfather never missed a day of what he’d called his “constitutional.” Rain or shine or wind or hail or mist or blazing sun, her grandfather would leave on his solitary afternoon walk, returning — like clockwork — when the sun had disappeared behind the hill.
Elizabeth would wait for him, her child’s body pressed against the stone fence that bordered the estate, and watch his shadow edge on home, his walking stick as part of him as any limb could be. At some point his tweed pants would materialize at the bottom of the shadow, and in another step or two the rest of him would unveil into certainty.
By the time he’d reach the gate, his windblown face would hold a smile for her. He’d nod a welcome, compensating with it for the long wait, for the yearning that he’d take her along (he never did, nor had he taken any of his children before that), and for the fluttery worry that perhaps the shadowed figure was not Grandfather at all, but in fact an elf or ghost or some trickster’s apparition.
She gazed at the silhouette on the hill, its stride frozen forever in the time before a stroke changed everything.
Hat or not, this was how he’d want to be remembered.
“He’d stuff the hat in his pocket when the wind was high,” she whispered, her voice full of sudden sorrow. “He’d pull it out and put it on a step before he reached the gate.”
Her mother’s mouth opened in preparation for automatic argument, but then the wrinkled corners turned down as a quiver shook her chin.
“He did,” her voice a child’s in elder’s clothing. “It is exactly what he’d do.”
Elizabeth squeezed her mother’s shoulder and the older woman placed a trembling hand over her daughter’s.
“It is perfect, then,” her mother murmured. “I’d forgotten. Take me home, Lizzy. Let us allow him his constitutional in peace, now that he can once more go about it.”
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto Challenge
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
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