Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
There is no
Place,
No space,
Without
Voice.
If the trees of our soul
Fall
With no ears near
To hear,
Silence deafens
Roar into
Lore.
Be the voice
Of your song.
Let the air move
Through lungs
Via cords
To record:
You’re aboard.
For the dVerse Quadrille challenge: Voice
Photo: Bibin Tom (Tulabi Falls, Manitoba)
The dream took almost a decade to fulfill.
And there it was. Reality.
She could scarcely believe it.
First there were the logistics to overcome: savings to secure, the children to raise beyond immediate dependency, paperwork and releases to organize, complicated details to ensure such international travel would even be possible.
Then there was the soulmate to find. Or rather, to have find her.
She looked around. At the deep calm. The ripples in the water. She’d pinch herself, only it would rock the boat and she had no intention to fall out. Not when it had taken so long to get in.
“You’ll have to adjust,” they’d told her.
“Some things you just won’t be able to do,” they’d said.
Well … stubbornness had gotten her through the accident. It got her through years of being a wheelchair-bound single parent.
It got her back into a canoe.
With Hugh.
For What Pegman Saw: Manitoba, Canada
Photo: Susanne Jutzeler on Pexels.com
“Where is the blasted thing?!”
I sighed and put the textbook down. Momma never could maintain a smidgen of patience in herself.
“I’ll get it!” I rose and walked the three steps that separated my bedroom from the eat-in area. The measuring tape was exactly where she’d left it, on the dinette.
Momma was sitting on the floor not two feet from the table, one chair upended and her own legs sprawled straight out. She was wearing one of her depressing “housecoats” and a frown to match. It was uncanny how she managed to unbutton her kindly outward appearance and shed it right along with her matching sets of slacks and blouse.
My friends never did believe me that the woman who was head of PTA, mistress of all bake sales, and Lady-Of-The-Smile in charity drives and Christmas fairs, was a terror to be mothered by.
“Here, Momma.”
Her red-clawed hand reached for the tape. “And scissors? Did your pea brain stop a moment to consider I will need the scissors?”
She’d decided to reupholster the chairs. Again. Her idea of seasonal decoration.
We sat on pumpkins in the fall. On holly in the winter. On bunnies in the spring. On flags in July.
The curtains would be next.
I rummaged in the drawer for the scissors.
“Well?” She growled.
“They aren’t here, Momma.”
“Like hell they aren’t! Didn’t I tell you to never ever touch my fabric scissors? Just you wait till I’m done here!”
The threat had had some teeth to it while I was younger, and though she did not lift a hand to me since I’d grabbed hers in mine to hold her away two years ago — and she’d realized that my extension at five feet nine far exceeded her five foot three wingspan — the words themselves remained. And the possibility.
I kept my distance. Safer when she had a hammer nearby.
Something glinted underneath a corner of the pastel chintz.
“Can that be it?” I pointed.
She grumbled and reached for the scissors. “Just like you to hide it.”
“Can I get you anything else?” I knew better than to take the bait or argue. And I had a test to get back to studying for.
My ticket out, it was.
If I passed, I would be leaving.
I don’t care to where.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS challenge: Where
She sat with her nose glued to the window, ignoring the roar of the engines and the bawdy chatter in her headphones.
It was cloudy when they’d taken off, with only little visibility. Now miles of forests stretched in all directions, the greenery as dense and impenetrable as her father’s face the last time she’d seen him, brooding and taciturn even by his own standards.
A glint of water sparkled in the distance and the pilot banked to the right to circle toward the lake. Suddenly she could not breathe.
It’s been a long ten years.
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Photo: Mehrdad Haghighi via Unsplash
Spattered,
Scattered,
Splattered
Like galaxies
Of reversed light
Upon the expanse
Of skin.
Concentrated pigment
On the canvas
Of the body,
They speckle
Like stars
Reflected
In the negative of film.
Beloved,
They dance upon
The nose.
A freckled
Symphony
Of brown and gold.
For the dVerse Quadrille Challenge
Photo Sebastian Sørensen on Pexels.com
No amount of soap and water could clean up this mess.
Even if I were to try, I wasn’t quite sure how I’d go about it, or if the effort was worth the results. Perhaps it’d be better to burn the whole thing to the ground and start from scratch.
I eyed the matches on the stove and looked at what I could no longer justify keeping around.
I wouldn’t miss most of it. Or so I had to hope.
My fingers struck a match and I held the small flame to the ring, amazed as always by how easily it grabbed hold and circled to make a blue-yellow-purple circuit of heat.
The fire leapt and danced and hissed.
I sighed.
It was time to wave good-bye. I needed a fresh beginning.
I set the kettle on to boil, sat back down, and hit “Delete.”
For Linda’s SoCS writing prompt: Clean/Dirty
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
“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
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
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
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