Over Barricaded

December 7, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Professional Development, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: Barricade, Consequences, coping, Creative writing, Flash Fiction, Micro-fiction, Protection, Trauma, Weekend Writing Prompt, Writing Challenge, Writing prompt 13 Comments

Photo: Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

There was a wall in there.

A barricade against the world.

He’d built it, bit by bit, from hurts and slights and bigger woes.

And hid.

Within.

Where he thought he’d be safe, and from where he could watch from a distance, reassured by barriers and gates and locks and elaborate booby-traps that made sure no one got too close.

There was a wall in there.

And a moat.

Alligators, too. For insurance.

Only that they had become hungry with the years, as less people even attempted to get near him, and therefore there was less bait.

So that he was, in many ways, imprisoned.

He’d been young when he’d built the wall, and he didn’t plan ahead. So needy of a solid barricade he’d been, that he never made a way to unlock the gate.

For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Barricade in 136 words

Fortified

November 22, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Current events, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: CCC, Creative writing, Flash Fiction, Fortified, Historical fiction, Micro-fiction, Photo Fiction, Resilience, Resistance, Secrets, Shelter, Trauma 10 Comments

They’d fortified the ceiling.

So they said.

The old structure needed periodical reinforcing.

So they said.

The thickness of the walls supported their claims. The deeply recessed windows. The heavy coats of paint on ancient plaster.

‘Twas all a ruse. Of course.

The false ceiling hid a warren of crawl-spaces and narrow hiding places. A stream of escaped slaves was followed by a flood of those fleeing Nazi persecution and thereafter a steady trickle of modern-day refugees.

The ceiling hid them all. Young and old. Broken and defiant. Desperate and bewildered. Men and women and the all-too-heartbreaking child.

Some stayed a night. Others for longer sheltering. Hilda had stayed the longest. A girl on arrival, she was almost a woman at war’s end. She emerged educated. In silence. In stealth. In compassion.

She became the guardian of those who followed.

Fortified with hope of one day needing it no more.

For the Crimson’s Creative Challenge

Note: Dedicated to all the heroes who — often at tremendous risk to themselves — had managed to shelter the needy, the desperate, the voiceless, and the vulnerable during times of injustice, persecution, violence, horror, and hate. To all who do so still. May we one day need to do so no more.

Warehoused

November 20, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: 100WordChallenge, Adversity, Captivity, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers, Making do, Micro-fiction, Tenacity, Trauma, Writing Challenge 56 Comments

Photo: © J Hardy Carroll

The cells were small. Sturdy enough to keep them separated. Aerated enough to keep them alive. Near enough to let them marinate in each other’s misery.

What the jailers did not foresee, however, was how they were just close enough to offer comfort. Fingers laced through fencing let them hold hands. Almost.

Oh, they moved to corners when anyone came. Pretended to hate each other. Endured each other’s fake bullying that so amused their captors.

But in the silent moments they sat close, back-pressed-through-chain-to-back. Their ‘caretakers’ warehoused them like animals, but the children’s defiance held: they remembered they were siblings.

For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers

Slivers Of Dreams

November 15, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Current events, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Poetry, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: Childhood memories, Creative writing, Dreams, No More War, Poetry, Posttraumatic Stress, Sleep, SoCS, Soldiers, Trauma, Writing prompt 8 Comments

Photo: Marina Shatskih on Unsplash

All those dreams that he had

As a child

Snug

Under covers

At night,

His tattered teddy

In arms.

His dreams

Parsed out

Into slivers

When

Under stars

At war,

His battered rifle

The only thing

He could

Hug.

For Linda Hill’s SoCS prompt: Dream

Fading

October 17, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: Fading, Fear, Flash Fiction, loneliness, Micro-fiction, peer-pressure, Photo Fiction, Photo prompt, Trauma, WritePhoto 32 Comments

Photo: Sue Vincent

They didn’t tell him he’d be seeing things.

They didn’t tell him how cold he’d be, or how alone, or how desperately he’d miss even the smallest comforts. Like a hue that wasn’t on the scale of dirty-white to sort-of-gray.

Maybe he was dying.

Was this how it would be?

He’d ask.

If he could.

They didn’t tell him he’d be unable to speak. Or that the voice he’d make would go unheard, unseen, unnoticed.

He blinked.

The stag was still there.

Perhaps real, perhaps conjured by the wish to flee combined with the worry about antlers being helplessly tangled as one tried to get away.

“You watch out,” he mouthed. Or said. Or yelled. “Don’t be fooled. Don’t be like me.”

The stag stood still. A statue. Another tree?

Then in one split second it bounded, disappeared.

Come back, he whispered. He’d never been so lonely.

He wept. He thought he did. He was so cold.

He looked at his hands. They blurred. He, too, must be fading.

Eternity.

The shadows crept near. A rumble of garbled monster-speech.

He heaved.

“Good trip?”

“He’s kind’a out of it.”

“He said he wanted to try some!”

“Yeah, but how much did you fools dump in his drink?”

For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto challenge

Become Stone

October 14, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: CCC, Desperation, dissociation, Escape, Flash Fiction, Hiding, Micro-fiction, Photo prompt, Trapped, Trauma 8 Comments

Photo: #CCC48

She crouched and tried to still her heart and limbs so the water would not give her away in wavelets or ripples.

Her teeth chattered. She wasn’t dressed for wet and the day’s sun had little warmth, none of which reached the shaded culvert.

She strained to listen.

She did all she could think of to hide her steps, but she wasn’t likely to escape the dogs. If they brought them. Oh pray please, please, that they did not. Not the dogs.

Her breath hitched and she bit down on her lip to try and swallow the sob that rode on it. The metal taste of blood filled her mouth. She heard barking. Surely the dogs could smell it. And her fear.

She closed her eyes and prayed to become stone.

She would not feel their chains, the bites, the clubs, their touch, their lashes, if she were a stone.

For the Crimson Creative Challenge

On Delicate Wings

September 29, 2019November 12, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Good stuff!, Life and love, Meditations, Muse and Flow, Photography, Poetry, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: Be yourself, Beauty, Butterfly, Determination, Imperfection, Photo Challenge, Photo prompt, Poetry, Sunday Stills, Tenacity, Trauma 16 Comments

Photo: Na’ama Yehuda

What had happened to you

In the short life

You knew?

Your wings’ rhythm

Aflutter

To a drum

Gone

Askew?

Your beauty imbued

By what could life

Subdue,

You flit on right

Through,

Gloriously determined,

To be you,

To be you.

For the Sunday Stills challenge: A bug’s life

Read To Remember

September 11, 2019September 11, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Current events, Life and love, Meditations, Memoriam, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Writing Tags: 100WordChallenge, Current affairs, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers, kindness, Memoriam, No More Hate, Reading, Remembrance, September 11, Terrorism, Trauma 50 Comments

Photo prompt © CEAyr

“I read to remember,” she said, her voice steel and quiver. “I read because he no longer can and because I know he was, most very likely, reading at the very moment his life stopped, evaporated, in mid-word. I read because mine almost stopped in the loss of him and in the enormity of the awfulness that took him and so many.

“I read to not forget. Because there is a bigger spark in life than in sorrow, and because he never would have left us, and certainly not this way. If it weren’t for the planes.

That September day.”

Note: Dedicated to all the lost, and to all those who lost so much, and to all that has been changed — insidiously and indelibly for so many — on September 11, 2001. I was here. I remember and I understand why we remember and what we must remember about ourselves and about who we can be. May we hold truth. May we be the better, kinder, more humane version of ourselves.

For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers

Her Song To Sing

August 10, 2019November 12, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Poetry, Professional Development, Reflections, Speech Language Pathology, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: Courage, despair, healing, New Beginnings, Opportunity, Poetry, Rebirth, Self Discovery, Song, Trauma, Weekend Writing Prompt 34 Comments

Photo: Jorgen Haland via Unsplash

And so she stood

Among the rocks

That piled,

A pyre of life’s debris,

Like so much refuse

Of what had

Once been

Beloved goals.

And so she sang,

The words still raw

Against her lips,

Her livid

Scar of

Soul.

The song, she knew,

Was more than

A sum

Of her whole,

And beyond any meaning

Voice could

Hold.

And so she stood

Amidst the wreckage

Of her faith

Atop the middling shards

Of hope.

And she recalled

The seeds long planted

In her core,

Beneath the thickets

Of lost calls,

Awaiting, perhaps,

This very annihilation

As invitation

To grow bold.

(Dedicated to all who are feeling broken. May they find the seeds within their core. And grow bold.)

For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Song in 102 words

The Moon

July 22, 2019Na'ama Yehuda Anecdotes of Life, Life and love, Muse and Flow, Reflections, Trauma and Development, Writing Tags: Creative writing, Dreaming, dVerse, Flash Fiction, Micro-fiction, Moon, Nightmares, Poetry prompt, Trauma, Writing Challenge, Writing prompt 22 Comments

Photo by George Desipris on Pexels.com

“What’s wrong?” I burst into her room with uncombed hair dripping from the bath and my bathrobe hanging half-opened.

She was sitting in her bed, sheets all tangled, the pillow clutched against her chest.

When she said not a word, I felt the terror rise inside me, too.

She’d had good cause for nightmares in the past, but it’s been years since any of those had woken her in such a state. Why now?

“What is it?” I crossed the distance from the door in three steps but dared not touch her lest my hands make her remember other ones, a lot less loving. “Can you tell me?”

She shuddered as if coming back from a great distance.

“I dreamt I was the moon,” she whispered. “Vast and cold and deathly airless.

“and,” her breath caught, “I dreamt that he found his way there.”

For the dVerse prosery challenge