Ladies In Waiting

July 21, 2019July 21, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Change, Creative writing, Flash Fiction, Micro-fiction, Relationships, Sisterhood, Sunday Photo Fiction, Waiting, Writing Challenge, Writing prompt 20 Comments

Photo by Arun Sharma on Unsplash

“It is time yet?”

Prissy frowned. Alia always never had an ounce of patience. “Look around. Does it look like it is time?”

Edna glared at Prissy. That girl would not recognize patience if it sat right in front of her and introduced itself by name.

“Anyone want a snack?” Deena reached into her bag and pulled out an assortment of wrinkled potato chip bags, a crumbling granola bar in a zipped bag, and apple slices that had seen brighter days.

Alia’s look of horror was so comical that even Prissy smiled.

Count on Deena to diffuse the tension, Edna thought.

They all had their roles in every little drama life presented. Whether like players on a stage or play-pieces on a chess board, she wasn’t sure. Only that they slid into their respective places with predictability that was both comfortable and disconcerting.

Perhaps not so surprising they would do so now, when it might be the last opportunity for it. Their dynamics were about to change forever.

As soon as it was time.

A door opened at the end of the hall and they all jumped.

“Alia Marquette?” a uniformed woman appeared. “Your shuttle to Mars is about to depart.”

For the Sunday Photo Fiction prompt

Be The Judge

July 20, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Creative writing, Dreams, Flash Fiction, hope, Judge, Micro-fiction, Relationships, Taking chances, Weekend Writing Prompt 9 Comments

Photo: Dvora Freedman

“You’ll be the judge of it,” he said.

He held the door for her and she hesitated a moment before slipping into the passenger seat. She buckled in part out of habit and part as security against the anticipated whiplash of yet another disappointment.

He drove in silence and she was grateful for it. They were beyond words by now, anyhow.

Roadside scenery shimmered by through a sudden squall.

“We’re here,” he said.

She must’ve fallen asleep.

“Say yes, and I’ll sign the papers,” he breathed.

She blinked. How did he find her dream house?

For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Judge in 95 words

A Bit Of Clarity

July 18, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Meditations, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Beach, Creative writing, Ebb and flow, Flash Fiction, Insight, Life Lessons, Micro-fiction, Reflections, WritePhoto, Writing prompt 33 Comments

Photo: Sue Vincent

She always went to the beach for a bit of clarity.

The movement of the water on the sand brought her back into her own breath. The rush of energy reminded her of the push of arteries, the pull of veins. The predictably irregular rhythm of the surf reminded her how ebb and flow do not mean that things will be uniform. They’ll come and go. Each unique. Each set its own and inseparable from what flowed forth before and what is following.

She could count on a wave and then another and another, on the rise and fall, the crash and wash, the small detritus that each leaves and yet is part of what had been and what will be and what just is.

Like life.

Like the muddy, murky, uncertainties of everything.

Where the one thing she could trust was that another wave will come, and that even the biggest wave retreats, at some point, in wavelets of resignation. As another one rolls in.

For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto challenge

Do Not Engage

July 17, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Funnies, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Writing Tags: 100WordChallenge, Creative writing, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers, Just for fun, Micro-fiction, New York City, Rockefeller Center, Statues, Unexpected 30 Comments

Photo Prompt © Roger Bultot

“It’s covering its eyes.”

“Say what?” Sergeant Frank was always gruff but Leon knew a warning when he heard it. He could (almost) visualize his superior in his boxer-shorts, remote in one hand and beer in the other. One did not get between the Sergeant and his beer.

“The new statue, Sir. In Rockefeller. It’s covering its eyes.”

“Leon, are you drunk?!”

“No, Sir. The hotdog man saw it, too. And a bystander.”

“Statues don’t move, Leon. That’s why they’re called statues.”

“This one did, Sir.”

Silence.

“Sir?”

Sigh. “I’m sending Marco. Meanwhile, Leon … sit tight and … do not engage …”

For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers

The Instructions

July 12, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Babysitting, Creative writing, Flash Fiction, Instructions, kindness, Micro-fiction, neighbors, Opportunity, SoCS, Writing prompt 10 Comments

Photo: Luma Pimentel via Unsplash

“I’ve written it all down,” she’d said.

“Anything you need to know is there,” she’d promised.

“It’ll a breeze,” she assured me, one hand already on the door handle. “I won’t be too long. It’s just a short gig. A few hours at most. He’ll likely sleep right through to my return anyway.”

But the baby slept through about five minutes and then would not stop crying and I had no idea what half of the terminology for baby-brand stuff meant or what “up to the spoon line” was supposed to be when I couldn’t find any spoons with lines, and no clue how to “keep a hand on the baby at all times” while also needing two of them just to untangle the tabs on the darn diaper and another two to keep the baby’s feet from kicking it away … And the clean bottles came separated from nipples, which had multiple unrelated parts that needed assembly like an Ikea cabinet from hell … And what on earth is a spit-up cloth and how is it different than a towel or a blanket?

Speaking of, how does one swaddle a baby without dislocating something in the process of making it into a mummified burrito?

And did I mention the baby would not stop crying?

“You’re a saint, Rick!” she’d said. Even kissed me on the cheek like I was some long lost brother and not the neighbor who happened to live next door and perhaps smiled a few times at the baby on the elevator.

“I know it is last minute but I’ve been waiting months for the opportunity … I’ll make you dinner,” she’d promised, and her relief at having a solution for the baby was so palpable that I felt guilty extricating myself from what she’d misunderstood as “yes” when at the very most I’d meant “maybe, but not really.”

“It was a breeze,” I said.

“He woke up but is now sleeping like an angel,” I assured her, ignoring the baby’s heft on my desperate bladder. I hadn’t dared to move, lest the baby woke again.

She looked tired and worried and sad and a little worse for wear, and I wondered how the gig went but didn’t want to ask after she appeared to hold back tears when I’d asked if she had a good time.

“Did the instructions help?” she asked instead.

I nodded. “Perfectly.”

For the SoCS Prompt: Instructions

Relativity

July 10, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: 100WordChallenge, Clean Energy, DNA, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers, Micro-fiction, Power, Progress, Relationships, Technology 38 Comments

Photo Prompt: Dale Rogerson

“Your grandfather must be turning in his grave.”

She’d made bitterness her trademark, so finding meaning usually entailed having to decode gradients of dismay.

He figured this one was a 67 out of 100. Enough disgust to call attention to how the “good old days” were better than modern progress, while not completely dismissing the comforts of advanced technology.

“Clean power is good for the lungs,” he cajoled, half-hoping for an argument. It was his Grandma’s genes he carried, after all.

“Pah,” she wrinkled her nose. “Nothing wrong with a bit of soot to get people appreciating real power.”

For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers

Keepsake

July 8, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: Creative writing, FlashFiction, Memory, Micro-fiction, Photo prompt, Secrets, Sunday Photo Fiction, Trauma, WritePhoto 2 Comments

Photo prompt: http://mrg.bz/n22FGA

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

Blessings and a Whisper

July 4, 2019July 4, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: blessings, Bridge, Creative writing, Flash Fiction, History, Micro-fiction, Progress, Sorrow, Survival, Timeless, Water, WritePhoto, Writing prompt 14 Comments

Photo: Sue Vincent

Lush grass now grew over the span of stones, though none had grown there in the many years when the passage of feet had mowed and flattened any seedling that had found a crack in which to nestle.

The water gurgled as it had, though, flowing like a ribbon of careless abandon underneath. Incoming. Through. Not one look back. Away.

She wondered if the fish silvering in the stream were the descendants of the ones who’d flapped among the rocks and dove out of the reach of all manner of two-legged hunters. Their instincts certainly remained the same.

Like hers.

Honed by years of flight, and generations of bare escape from calamity and disaster and all manner of two-legged hunters’ spread of misery.

For centuries the stones of the old bridge had been the thoroughfare of goods and news — both good and not — from isolated farms to the town’s market and from the town into the farms, and in that order. It had withstood war and fights and blight and playful dares and cruel shove-overs. It streamed with rain and baked with sun and creaked with ice and endured more than one direct hit of lightning. It had heard the laughter of small children and the cries of same, sometimes not much later after. Where rugged wheels and heavy hooves had carved ruts of rattling passage, now weeds took hold to cover any sign of man.

It stood deserted, and perhaps relieved, since the new and wider bridge was built a bit further downstream. The modern pathway accommodated simultaneous travel in both directions as it carried the weight of the machines that belched dark stains onto its tar.

She’d been warned against attempting to put any weight on the old bridge. They all were. “It’s held by no more than blessings and a whisper,” her grandmother had cautioned. “One step onto the wrong stone and it could collapse.”

And yet, it had outlasted both Grandmother’s life and Mother’s and seemed poised to outlast hers, as well. Perhaps blessings and a whisper were better mortar than the speeding up of time.

“And you don’t have much long to wait to outlast me,” she murmured as she walked to the water and bent to dip her palm. Cold.

As she would be, sans blessings or a whisper, before much more water churned indifferently along, passed under the bridge, and was gone.

For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto Challenge

Lost Glory

July 3, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Current events, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: 100WordChallenge, Concentration Camps, Current affairs, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers, Micro-fiction, Old Glory, Refugees, Shame, Trauma 47 Comments

“Did they tell you what you’d find there?”

Vince shook his head. His eyes sought the window and rose along the flagpole to its top. The silence lingered.

“No,” the Veteran said quietly. “We’d heard rumors, of course, but nothing could’ve prepared us for the conditions there.”

He took a deep breath. His hand tightened around his cup and his eyes remained glued to the flag outside. “People crammed into cold, bare rooms. Without necessaries. Not even a place to sleep. Frightened, sick children. Belligerent guards. I’m ashamed, Son. The flag I fought under now flies over American concentration camps.”

For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers

Future Gig

June 26, 2019June 26, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Things Kids Say, Writing Tags: 100WordChallenge, Aspirations, Confidence, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers, Micro-fiction, Photo prompt, Practice makes perfect, Talent show, Writing Challenge 48 Comments

“One day my name will be up there,” Tommy declared.

Amy rolled her eyes, but he didn’t let her dismiss-your-sibling reflex offend him. She came with him, didn’t she?

“You’ll see,” he reiterated calmly.

He’s been practicing in front of the mirror ever since he’d seen the mime in the park two summers ago. And he’s been getting good. So much so he’d sometimes crack himself up mid-sequence. He was ready!

The talent show was in three hours. He’d used all his holiday and birthday money for the entrance fees. He had $10 left to his name.

“Hey, Sis, want pizza?”

For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers