Photo: Amitai Asif
Go deep into the space within
Where sorrow holds to joy,
And find the light that shadow
Serenades
In times
Without employ.
Go deep into the burrowed
Land
Where memory resides,
And seek the song that
Dances,
Stubborn,
In your mind.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS writing prompt: Deep
Note: Dedicated to all who are struggling during these uncertain times. May you find all that you need, in health, in life, in light.
“Do you still have it?”
“Let me see,” he nodded at the screen even though he knew she couldn’t see him.
“Okay.”
The tremor in her voice told him everything: How tender she felt, how brave she was, how she couldn’t bear for him to ask directly lest it shatter what brittle control she managed to maintain.
“Got it,” he breathed. Attached. Hit ‘send.’ “Check your email.”
The line was silent. Then her voice, full of tears. “I knew it. I knew it hadn’t been a dream. She said she’d visit. From the after. Exactly this way. … And she came.”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Of all scenes
And joys and sorrows,
Of all the steps
And breaths
And sense,
There is the ebb and flow
And stillness,
That makes this
Movement
My heart’s
Place.
Photo: Hadera, Israel
The bus rumbled on the narrow road, slow behind the loaded tractor wagon. A mix of diesel fumes, damp earth, and faint notes of orange blossoms wafted through the open crack in the heavy window.
They were going to be late. Again.
She sighed and glanced at her youngest sister, automatically feeling for the change-of-uniform she carried at the bottom of her school bag for the eventuality that her sister’s car-sickness would get the upper hand.
Across the narrow aisle, a woman coughed wetly into a handkerchief and shifted the plastic baskets that crowded the small space under her feet. Those will be packed full on the ride back from Hadera, their area’s shopping center and nearest ‘big’ town.
Finally, past Gan-Shmuel, the snailing tractor turned into a field and the bus picked up speed. Houses marked the city’s boundaries. She nudged her other sister awake. “We’re getting off soon.”
For What Pegman Saw: Hadera, Israel
Note: Depicting a very true (almost daily) childhood memory …
She shivered in the early winter chill and pulled the woolen cloak around her. The wind whipped her hair – always unruly – into her eyes. Her fingers stung. The day was above freezing, but the cold damp still had a way of swimming through her clothing to steal away her body heat. Her face felt stiff and she rubbed her hand over her cheeks and chin to warm them.
She picked up her pace only to slow down again once she neared the stream. The slope was treacherous and she did not fancy the possibility of a dunking in the bone-chilling water. How different this was, she mused, from the summer days of her childhood, when along with friends she had raced down the slope with the absolute intention of being the first to splash in.
The stream had seemed bigger then. Wilder and yet in some ways tamer.
She did not know at the time the other stories it could hold. The risk it would foreshadow.
She was still an innocent then.
As if in answer to her mood, the wind picked up and buffeted the edges of her cloak around her legs, threatening to unclothe her. She pressed her lips together in determination and shook her head. Not here. Not now. Not ever.
Not again.
The stream was lower than expected for the time of year, but she knew the looks could be deceiving. It wasn’t just depths that could kill you. Or the flow.
She picked her way carefully to the bank. She stood a few yards downstream from the ancient laundering stones that jutted at the widening where the narrow brook burbled into a seemingly placid pool before splashing down in tiny waterfalls at the other end. The women still used the flat rocks when she was a young girl. They’d crouch on the stone to slap the fabric as the stream carried away the suds and dirt and the occasional bloody stain.
Moss now covered the stones and she knew it wasn’t just the change of season that had led to the greening. Women had laundered in all seasons. They’d break through thin ice to brave the numbing cold if they had to.
But no one had used the rocks for a long time now.
Perhaps not once since.
It had been a late summer day, the warm air filled with scents of aging flowers and over-ripe fruit and a whiff of sweat. There was the ‘thwack, thwack’ of scythes from the fields and the hum of bees and the calls of children and the wailing of a baby, cranky for the breast. The laundering stones were draped with wet fabric, the water foaming slightly with the soaps.
Then came the scream.
The rush.
The hush.
The wide-eyed horror.
Two small children, tangled in a vine, floated to bump against the rocks at the end of the pool, the current threatening to carry them over and downstream. Like broken puppets on a string.
They’d been playing and must have banged heads under water, or on a sharp rock, or on some other, less understood, thing. Their thrashing would have been noticed, but they must have been lost to the loud playfulness of others, or to the slap of clothing and the scrape of washers against stone. Or to how quickly they dropped.
She shuddered as the image superimposed itself on the empty coldness.
Everything changed after that. She only came here one other time since. And not with company.
The family of the man who had been a child at the time still wielded power in the town. She wouldn’t have been believed if she had told, that the dreamy boy who liked to twirl in the sun and who no one dared tease, had drawn a slingshot in mid-dance and used his spin to hurl small sharp stones into the children’s temples. The “thwack, thwack” was not only from scythes. She wouldn’t have been believed if she’d blamed him for the death of her pet rabbit, even though she’d seen him kill the trusting ball of fluff. Or for holding her down and poking her where no one should. She kept quiet and let the secret nibble holes in her insides.
It wouldn’t have brought the children back.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, bending to touch the water with her fingertips.
The bodies had long been buried, but their souls could not be. Not without the truth.
She rose and wrapped the cloak tightly around her. The clouds gathered and she saw a crack of lighting in the distance. A low rumble chased it, chastening or soothing, she could not tell.
She forced the air into her lungs and turned away.
She will be leaving again. The secret will remain.
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
a weekly flash fiction prompt inspired by google maps
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