Photo: Stephen Paris on Pexels.com
It has long lain
In limbo,
All voices ebbed
Into dust.
As silent letters
On chalkboard,
Watch the desks
Left to rust.
At one time
Children chanted,
Poems rose
Learned by heart.
But they’d grown
And time hastened.
School-house days
Did not last.
Now it sits,
Heart quite emptied,
And still waits
For the past.
For the dVerse Challenge: Limbo
Photo: Amitai Asif
Freedom
Doesn’t require
You relinquish all
Protection,
For without it
Flames become
Vulnerable
To sputter,
Or go astray
In the
Wind.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Vulnerable in 21 words
He retreated to behind the fence during low tides and sharpened his claws on the aging timbers. He nursed his rage on fantasy and fed his fury on abandoned sea-foam. Some days the seething rose a hurricane that only freezing wind subdued into a smolder. He hissed. He breathed. He knew. He waited.
The time would come.
Waiting both allayed and fanned his urgency. He scraped his restless agony into the wood, that hewed abomination they’d forced onto his bay to tame it. As if it, he, could be. Tamed.
When time returned he’d vanquish them and show no remedy.
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
There will not be another night so drenched in sorrow, bereft of even the wish for the downpour to turn hope. Yet they held to the moment right before the speeding motorbike intersected their car … and bled their child to no more.
Note: dedicated to those who know this loss, and to the hope that fewer will ever do.
Photo: Henry & Co. on Pexels.com
“Oh, but you will love this!” the seller gushed, her purple tipped pixie cut bobbing in time with the movement of her thumbs on the screen.
“Do you really think so?” the matronly woman twirled tentatively in front of the mirror, unaware that the saleswoman hadn’t even raised her head.
“Absolutely!”
“I’m worried the color is too bright,” the woman fretted and patted down frizzy wisps of hair long past the time for touching up. She smoothed the folds of the dress over her midriff. “Also, I don’t know about the pattern. Don’t you think it is too young for me?”
The saleswoman paused in her staccato typing long enough to glance at her customer. She stilled a yawn. Less than an hour before she could close, return the piles of discarded tried-on clothing to their hangers, and be free from the need to constantly reassure strangers that they looked better than they did or could.
“This color is all the rage,” the seller noted in the half-petulant, half-coercive tone she’d found tended to move her less assertive customers into feeling that to not buy the item would somehow mean they were backwards, dated, or wasting her time.
A long moment passed. More preening from the customer.
“It does not really work with my coloring,” the woman frowned. “Or is this just the lighting here?”
Not much would work with your coloring, the seller swallowed a retort. “It is all about the right combinations,” she said instead. She plastered on a smile, put her phone down, opened a jewelry box, and pulled out a small black tube.
“Here, let me,” she added, twisting an orange mass out of the bottom part of the tube and reaching for the woman’s chin. “All you need is the right lipstick.”
For Linda’s SoCS challenge: Lip
That night, when the children went missing, they fanned out, flashlights in hands and a dark crawling about in their hearts, which even the large projector brought out by the local sheriff’s office could not stop the spread of.
They looked in every corner, under brambles and in culverts and in places too small to hide a squirrel, let alone a child. The three had vanished so completely, one could have believed they had been naught but phantoms.
Yet phantoms wouldn’t have left canyons in souls, eroded deeper with the daily grief. For the kids were never found.
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
He’d come from royalty. Or at least from those who should’ve been but history had been too blind to realize their value. He’d seen promise in his older brother James: a lust for power and a need to force his will onto others. But James hadn’t shown enough self-preservation for a prince. A pity … but at least it left no issue of seniority.
Since childhood the conspiring doctors tried to claim him ill with “grandiosity.”
His mother failed to see. “We come from farmers, Thomas. Always have.”
Perhaps she truly believed her forefathers were but serfs to the O’Neills, but he knew better. He’d seen himself in the drawing, and it fit what he’d always known: He was destined for more, a royal progeny.
He’d take the island by force. It’ll make them realize it was past time he reclaimed what was his by rights, even if forgotten by history.
For What Pegman Saw: Northern Ireland
Photo: Inbar Asif
Would you sell your soul
To sorrow?
Would you reap
Hate’s awful gain?
Would you let go of
Tomorrow
So false power
Rise again?
Will your heart see
All humanity?
What will you allow,
Sustain?
Will your soles
Feed earth
Or hollow
Out it’s wealth
To drain?
Will you leave
Your soul abandoned?
Will you let your spirit
Die?
Or will you hold on
To the morrow
In a world
For you
And I?
For the SoCS prompt: Soul/sole
I will not be for sale. Not today. Not tomorrow.
Limit not my conditions. Offer no terms for me.
There’s no deal worth my special. Shelves or fly off – I’m free.
For Three Line Tales
“It’s an effing eyesore.”
“I don’t care.”
Martin balled his fists but Susan just gazed at him.
She said nothing but he knew: Raise a finger on me and off to jail you go. The judge was clear: Anger-Management or prison. Martin took the former but could swear Susan’s infuriating behavior intended to get him the latter.
He inhaled slowly before turning away. “When Sanitation fines us,” he growled, “it’s all yours to pay.”
“Fine,” she shrugged. “Though I think they won’t.”
He glared. “Why? Got connections?”
“Nope,” she patted the rotting piano. “I’ve registered it as street art.”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
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