Photo: Lancaster Ohio 1938
He was enthralled.
His fate decided
By those who bought
And sold
The humans they preferred
To see as lesser than,
In order to exact a price
For their own
Self-aggrandizing,
Once freed,
His slavery was still
Held against him
In deliberate inequity,
His struggles mocked
As ‘proof’ he hadn’t been trying
Hard enough.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Enthrall in 54 words
“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
Photo: Mahima on Pexels.com
When she leaves, there will be time enough for all the things that should have happened and yet didn’t. When she leaves, a space will open to allow what was yearned for but manifested not. When she leaves — in a week or month or year or decade — a leaf would turn to let the newness grow.
When she leaves.
Yet for the time being she remains.
She has no choice. Or not a real one.
She plods along the rutted path made by the heavy feet she’d dragged so many times before. She does what must be done. She smiles. She nods. She cooks. She holds.
She finds in every day a small reminder of the hope. A sliver of a dream. A memory of what is yet to come.
It sustains her.
It has to.
It’s all she has.
Until she leaves.
For the SoCS writing prompt: Leaves
“It is looking at me.”
“What is?” I was dozing off in the delicious sun on the first dry weekend we’d had in a while. The lush grass under me felt springy.
I thought the word was so apt. Springy. The double meaning of the season and the bouncy vivaciousness of it all.
“It is looking at me.”
I inhaled slowly with more resignation than irritation. I might’ve known this would not go as I had envisioned. While I was content to lie still and let the sounds of the birds and the hiss of the breeze and the faraway whir of a tractor in someone’s field fill and nourish me, Marlee had been tugging on grass-blades and clucking her tongue and shifting positions every three seconds.
She’s always been flighty. A flit-bit full of frown and furrow, forever on the edge of tumbling from one thing to another.
I loved it about her. She was the counter-weight to my molasses and the engine to my stasis. Her hypervigilance also made my idea of a relaxing afternoon where we do nothing, an utterly foreign thing.
Perhaps an even frightening one.
I opened my eyes. “What’s looking at you?”
“That.”
I raised myself on an elbow and scanned the field. There was no one there.
Marlee sat, violin-string-tight, eyes glued ahead.
I followed her line of sight. Nothing. Not even a bunny. Just a tractor that most likely belongs to the farmer whose land we might be trespassing on. I squinted against the glare – the cab was empty – there was no one there.
Marlee did not move.
Resigned now, I sat up and stared harder. A caterpillar undulated up a flower’s stem by my knee. A bird dove at the tractor, perched momentarily on a mirror, and flew away.
“The bird?” I chanced.
Marlee shook her head but her eyes remained trained on the vehicle. “The tractor,” she said. “That thing has eyes. I swear it blinked at me.”
For Crimson’s Creative Challenge
Photo: Inbar Asif
She leaned against the painted wall and exhaled a sigh of relief.
She was finally home. Hardship over. She was free. All was going to be as she needed it to be.
The freshly laundered whites fluttered in the sea breeze and the rush of waves sang in her ears. A dun puppy yipped at a bird. The baby slept at her feet.
“Have you eaten?” Grandmama called, a loving voice on the wind.
“I’m coming,” she smiled and bent to lift the bassinet.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Idyll in 84 words
Nata Silina at Supercoloring.com
“I expect loyalty,” he stated.
A silence followed.
Shock or perhaps because
There was
No honorable way to respond.
“I need loyalty,” he repeated
With the implication clear:
You bend the knee
Or you are gone,
Swear fealty to the man
Or you’re a traitor
And an enemy to be scorned.
“You will always get honesty from me,”
Came the measured return.
“That’s what I want,” twisted the retort,
“An honest loyalty.”
As if there was such thing
As honest loyalty
To one who deemed acceptable
Only what offers
Praise and supplication,
And allows no room
For truth,
Let alone for the calling out of
The Emperor’s bare bottom
Of the barrel
Governing
Or his disregard for honor
As he dons repeated sets of
Non-existent,
Yet much lauded by him,
‘New Clothes.’
Note: As it happens, the book I’m reading and which was right by my elbow as I read the prompt … is “The Mueller Report” (w/ commentary by the Washington Post; page 296 of the book, page 35 of volume II in the report). … And the rest, well, is history. And what will be …? We shall yet see.
For Linda Gill’s SoCS: open book, point, write
Photo: Pixabay on Pexels.com
“Can’t say I’ve known all along,” he said.
She snuggled deep into his lap, safe under the quilt, warmed by his heartbeat, listening to the song of the stars as they marched across the canopy of the world.
A different sky. This was.
The other half of life, perhaps. Better, even, now that she found home.
She, too, hadn’t known. Rotation, yes, but only as rounds of emptied hope.
Though her soul perhaps did know. It must have seen the edge of the world spin, and held on, to keep her whole.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Spin in 92 words
It’s been a long time since she was able to hold her head up.
She knew every crack in the ceiling. Every shade of light on the walls. Every spider web.
They kept the latter undisturbed.
“Let them be,” she’d asked when the housekeeper had come in one day, armed with an upended broom. The matronly women had frowned only to have understanding effuse her face with something between pity and compassion.
“You keep ’em company, then,” the housekeeper had said.
She’d cried a little after the woman had left the room, tears accumulating small pools in her ears. In them was the relief for the small thing she could still control to protect, and the hollowing despair for how much of it she’d lost, that she begs company of arachnids.
Months passed since.
The webs accumulated. Elaborated.
The seasons changed.
She watched the spiders, and found her own cobweb to hang on to and get stronger.
She learned how to control a torso that would no longer answer to her command. She found ways to manage the awful dizziness of gravity. She made peace with her chair and its straps as her adopted exoskeleton.
And she was strong enough, finally. To hold her head up.
A gentle sun licked the edge of the gate. The mostly overcast sky offered her pallid indoor skin a needed measure of protection. A glint danced on the fence’s wall and she practically felt it.
As tender and tenacious as a spider web strand.
“I’m ready,” she smiled. “For my first day out.”
For Sue Vincent’s WritePhoto prompt
Kate Greenway, Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes 1881
“Ring-a-ring-a-roses; A pocket full of posies; Hush-hush, Hush-hush; We’re all tumbled down!”
“She can play like this for hours,” Mary sighed.
Alice gazed at the child, who with arms spread wide to the sides, continued to spin about the garden’s green, dipping a curtsy at the final line before going back again to the first. Her pitch was perfect and her voice was sweet, but the bouncy ringlets and pinafore over a knee-high calico dress only highlighted the oddity.
It was adorable when Rosie was six years old. The girl was nearly thirteen.
“How’s Rosie’s schooling coming along?” Alice tried.
Mary’s smile faltered for a second before a placid screen unfurled over her face. “Just fine,” she breathed. “It’s coming along just fine, dear. Did you try the rose-petal marmalade? Mrs. Hannah outdid herself this year.”
It is like watching a wind-up toy, Alice thought. She never could get her sister to speak candidly about the child. None of them could. They all knew much was wrong, yet it was nigh impossible to discuss it. There’d been some concerns before the accident, of course, though Rosie had been very young then and much was explained away as the idiosyncrasies of an only child with an active imagination.
Then the accident happened and it was as if Mary had stopped the clock. On her own life as well as Rosie’s. The child seemed content enough, delayed and mostly mute outside of singing as she was. But how much did any of them know about the child’s true reality and potential, and how much was her mother’s doing, impeding her growth?
“Ring-a-ring-a-roses …”
Rosie’s singing rang in Alice’s ears and suddenly she could not stand it any longer.
“Mary,” she pressed, “I know this expert …”
Her sister raised a delicate hand. “We have all we need, Alice.”
Alice shook her head. “No, you don’t. I love you, and I know you love Rosie dearly, but she’ll be a woman soon … and she can’t stay six forever. Let me get the both of you some help. It’s not about trying to force her to do what she cannot, if she cannot … I mean, I know she’s a little …” her sister’s eyes stopped her. Brittle. Angry. Warning.
“… I … I can see she seems happy,” Alice inhaled and paused, hoping for a relenting crack in her sister’s eyes.
There was none.
“Indeed she is happy,” Mary clipped. “And we shall keep it this way, shall we?” She turned her head a tad, so that her eyes rested partially on the closed wing of the manor where the stone would forever be a bit dark, and partially on the child she’d frozen in time. The sweet girl who did not need to know more than what she’d known the day before she had tipped a candle onto paper and accidentally, fatally, set fire to her father’s study. “Now, about that marmalade!”
For the SoCS prompt: Rhymes with rosy
She planned every detail.
The dress. The cake. The decorations.
What games to play. Who to invite. The invitations.
She fretted over treats and props. The seating arrangement.
The day dawned bright. The weather fair.
The flowers gifted blooms. Butterflies came to visit.
The cake turned out close to perfect.
The dress fit well. Even her hair cooperated.
She breathed it in.
She smiled.
She waited.
The only thing she did not foresee
Was no one showing up,
And only her mama there
To wrap a scarf around her eyes
To hide the tears
As she pinned the donkey.
Note: Dedicated to all the children whose parties turn to pain. To those who are all too often left invisible due to social awkwardness, adversity, disabilities visible and invisible, social isolation, bullying, and the myriad ways indifference (let alone direct cruelty) can a child’s soul maim.
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
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