Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
Sunshine above
Tasty gold below.
A horse in a city field
Is contentment aglow.
Photographed worlds away
And a mere year ago.
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Animals
Tasty Gold
Timeless
Heads Up
Photo from Morguefile
“I never got a chance to get ready!” Tuttie moaned, trying helplessly to wriggle so her mane fell as it ought.
“Shush! I’m trying to watch.” Tussock grumbled.
“Tuttie, your tuft looks fine!” Tilly quipped.
“No, it doesn’t. It’s all blowing in the wind.” Tuttie retorted. She was ever so particular about the way her threads flowed.
“Of course it would move,” Tussock bristled and tried to stand in attention as the clouds flew on the breeze. “When has it ever not been windy here?” Tuttie was annoying, but it irritated him even more that Tilly always perked up to soothe her fussy sibling’s fronds. She should get s spine instead of bowing to every mood. And why did he have to get planted right between these two, anyway?
“You in the periphery, stop swaying like a bunch of leaflets and stand up taller.” Topknot’s voice meant business. “Heads up now. It is almost time.”
The assemblage quieted. It was time for the sun to cross the horizon at the top of the tallest tree. A yearly passing when their ancestors’ fluff could climb aboard the golden orb’s mighty ship, and be carried to their eternal rest beyond the sea.
For the Sunday Photo Fiction prompt
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Blessings and a Whisper
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
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Weighted
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
The weight of the world
On his shoulders.
His heart thumps a fatigue
In his chest.
Eons stretch
Since certain with brawn
He sought
With his strength
To impress.
For Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: open topic
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Warp and Heft
Photo: Sue Vincent
“All houses bow with time,” Agnes fanned herself. The heat lay on the garden like a leaded blanket. Even the shade of the great oak offered only small respite, though their stifling rooms would be far worse.
“Yet not all houses must endure an Edmund,” Joan giggled behind her fan before frowning at her serving-woman for daring a grin. That girl ought to learn her place! Mockery of Edmund’s evident over-fondness for sweets and mutton was for his equals only to indulge in. It would not do to have the servants ridicule their superiors, or who knows who they would dare disrespect next!
At least the obstinate girl had manners enough to blush crimson and lower her eyes.
Agnes tilted her head mildly. “The estate out-dates our dear cousin by two centuries.”
“And may or may not last this one if he does not move his quarters,” Joan deadpanned but only with half-a-heart. Her wit was wilting. She wriggled two fingers and a woman stepped forward with a glass of mead and a linen square to dab the sweat off of her mistress’ forehead. Her own coif and underarms were dark with moisture. Joan sniffed the sachet at her wrist.
Insects buzzed. The minutes lingered. The house brooded heavy against the colorless sky.
“I wish the air would move,” Joan sighed. Her embroidery lay disused in her lap.
“I wish same.” Agnes’s ivory skin bloomed pink patches in the heat. Her needle, too, lay indolent. She gestured with her fan toward the horizon past the house. “Perhaps these clouds would soon shift the wind before them.”
A distant thunder rumbled as if in answer.
Behind the ladies, one of the serving-women squeaked.
Joan frowned.
“What is it, Marianne?” Agnes inquired, not unkindly.
“The house, My Lady,” the young woman’s curtsy was tense and her finger shook as she pointed it at the lattice work on the third story.
“What about the house?” Joan hissed. She found Agnes far too tolerant of serving girls’ dramatics.
A loud groan answered and the air itself seemed to shimmer. Or warp. Or weave.
A silence fell.
Joan felt the hairs at the back of her neck stand on end.
The insects. They’d stopped buzzing.
Even before her thought completed, lightening split the sky and sliced the roof, the latticework, the heavy beam, the second story window, and the chevrons on the wall, knifing deep into the ground.
Another bolt seared her eyes as it hit the oak.
Sudden wind rose and the air fled, taking with it any memory of the burning house against the raging sky.
For Sue Vincent’s Thursday Photo Prompt: Monochrome WritePhoto
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Towering Time
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
Windows blink
Sun and shade.
Emptied glass
Peers ahead.
While the dome,
Ivy wrought,
Towers time
Boggles thought.
For Travel with Intent’s One Word Sunday: Tower
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Tut’s Trough
Photo prompt: Sue Vincent
“It’s been here since time before time,” Marty’s voice rose in self-importance.
“I don’t think Mammoths would agree,” Donna deadpanned. She was tired and the tour-de-woods was becoming tedious. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Marty. She did. Or at least, she had … before he’d unleashed his inner Know-it-all in what he appeared to consider some form of seductive foreplay. It did the opposite for her.
To be fair, she’d always claimed men’s minds could be just as attractive as their bodies.
The key being ‘as important’ she sighed to herself, not the sole importance.
Marty, oblivious, nodded. “Mammoths didn’t need troughs,” he added pedagogically. “They weren’t domesticated.”
Donna slapped at some buzzing insect on her arm. The noise ceased. She’d slap away Marty’s patronizing tone, too, if she didn’t so abhor violence. These days.
The very thought stirred guilt. It wasn’t his fault she was there. It wasn’t his fault she was broken and that time hadn’t ever been kind to her kin.
She forced herself to breathe and glanced at the moss-covered structure in an attempt at interest, only to be mortified when the first thought through her mind was how much it resembled a sarcophagus and how peaceful it would be to lie in one for all eternity.
Or until some form of grave-robbers came.
She shuddered.
“You okay?” Marty’s voice filtered through her distress. “You look as though you’d seen a ghost!”
How little you know, Donna thought. “I’m fine,” she said.
The line between his eyebrows smoothed and he gestured grandly toward the vessel. “Some say it is haunted,” he leaned close to her and whispered a mockery of suspense, “for how this simple trough tricks the vulnerable into thinking it resembles King Tut’s tomb.”
For Sue Vincent’s Thursday Photo Prompt
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Worn, Not Weary
Photo: Amitai Asif
I am worn,
But not weary.
I’ve weathered many
A winter,
Warmed multiple
Frozen hands,
Filled long lines
Of empty
Stomachs
With stews and soups of
All kinds.
I’ve seen good times
And not so,
Heard voices
Soft
And too loud.
I’ve dried the wet
Off of feet,
The tears off
Of cheeks,
Eased the sorrow of
Broken hearts.
I am worn,
But not weary.
Grab a spoon,
Find a bowl,
And take a seat
By my side.
For the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Weathered or worn
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The Pillar
Photo: Sue Vincent
The youngsters always met by The Pillar.
Their parents had. Their grandparents had, and the great-grands before that and on and on till time before time. It was a rite of passage of sort. A congregation-point for those just past the threshold from children to adults.
There was no timetable for how long it was before a set of youths made way for those younger still. Yet the time never seemed to be very long, no matter the outward circumstances.
In olden times such changeover was marked by many youths’ marrying shortly after adult bodies and responsibilities were taken on, as it was believed that matrimony was the lead to sensibilities. Any youths lagging behind in house-making would soon enough stop visiting The Pillar anyway, perhaps as it would feel unseemly for them to be seen hobnobbing with total greenhorns to the adult world.
In modern times, with childhoods that stretched well beyond the bounds any elder would consider reasonable, and with less children in town to nip at the heels of those frequenting The Pillar, youths nonetheless rarely mingled by it for much longer than they would’ve in the past. Just their chronological age had shifted some, from puberty to closer to the end of high-school.
Looking back, few could tell exactly what about The Pillar had drawn them to the location. Sure, the isolation allowed for some actions full-fledged adults would likely frown on (though they’d done the same — and sometimes worse — themselves), but there were plenty other isolated places to find privacy in. Blustery in winter and mosquito-swarmed by summer, the field where The Pillar stood was not exactly the height of comfort. Still by tradition or something more, the youth were drawn to it like moths to light.
It was the fairies, some whispered, magic of the Fair Folk, conjured so they could feed upon the newly discovered energies of youth, necessary to the Fairies’ sustained immortality. Others pooh-poohed the folklore, perhaps unnerved by the notion that anything but their own will had caused them to view as irresistible what later on looked quite the dreary spot.
“It was just the adventure,” the latter would grumble. “Every child in town grew up dreaming of being old enough to go to The Pillar. Of course we wanted to finally do so.”
Still they could not explain what had made them suddenly wish to visit it. Or why it had just as suddenly lost its charm.
When pressed, they’d shrug that “it’s been there as long as anyone remembers.” As if that was explanation enough.
Lore or not, the youngsters always met by The Pillar.
And there The Pillar stood. Slanted by age or forces beyond comprehension. Till another age of the earth would come.
For Sue’s Thursday Photo Prompt: Timeless
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The Balance
Photo: Sue Vincent
She did not understand where the castle had gone.
Tumbled walls
Like broken bones.
But the well was still there,
And the sword
Wrapped in stone,
Had waited stored
Well ensconced.
She took the hilt
Spelled the spell
And the blade pulled out
Clean
Glowing green,
Showing
All was still wrong
Just as all was still well.
She took a deep breath
And exhaled.
Because though
Times had changed
At least the balance
Remained.
For Sue’s Thursday WritePhoto Prompt: Blade
Na'ama Yehuda 
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