Photo: Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com
Nimble Nelly
Bought a deli
And made a menu
With mashed yam.
She wrote in cheese
Hot from the oven
And sculpted bread rolls
From cold ham.
Nimble Nelly
Writing prompt
Expert Explanation
Photo: Pixabay on Pexels.com
I’ve been expecting
The expert explication
And the
Expedient expelling
Of expired exploration
That often follows,
Quite expressively,
In the wake of expletives
And exposed exposition
By those wishing to expunge
Their exploits
From any experience
Of expiation.
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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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A Spinning Spin
Illustration: Anne Anderson from Grimm’s Fairy Tales (London and Glasgow 1922)
He wanted her to spin
Straw
Into gold.
To make the mundane
Magic
To behold.
Though the metal
Nourished
Naught,
And left only
An empty
Cot.
Where with
Better thought
He might’ve
Got,
Riches which
Could not
Be bought.
Note: A little spin on Rumpelstiltskin
For Anmol’s dVerse poetics: Myths and Legends
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Have Heart For A Better Humanity
Photo: Monique Laats on Pexels.com
When a place of worship crumbles
Into hell of gore and pain,
And the sorrows of the many
Become what connects us all again,
Know that care can conquer ugly
And that compassion outdoes hate’s disdain,
As long as we eject terror
To heed the better, deeper call,
That anything that harms our kinship
Diminishes the very core of all,
Just as anything that builds it
Can lead humanity to standing tall.
For Debbie’s Six Word Saturday
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Soul Searching
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
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When The Ice Breaks
Photo: Barni1 by Pixabay
He said he’ll be home when the ice breaks.
And every day she waited, one baby tugging at her skirts and another growing restless under her heart, and tried to not look at the field of crosses planted right outside her window. Reminders of the many who the frigid sea or dark winters or the loneliness of this place at end of the world had claimed.
Some days she hated Greenland. The endless nights. The gnawing cold. The monotony of the same few faces and the bickering that eventually picked open old scabs and gauged new hurts for the next arctic dark to revisit.
Other times she couldn’t fathom living any other place. Summer’s endless light. The sparkle on the water. Pups, babies, and not-so-babies frolicking. The wide spaces full of breath and warmth that thawed old sorrows into joy. It felt like coming home.
Will he?
For What Pegman Saw: Greenland
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The One Place
Photo: Sue Vincent
She ran and wouldn’t stop till she got there.
It didn’t matter that she had a stitch in her side or that something hard in her backpack kept slamming into her ribs or that the lower branches of some trees slapped burning licks against her cheeks.
She would not stop.
At last she saw a glimmering reflection and the slight opening in the dense woods that signaled she was almost there.
Her attention drawn to the sight ahead, she missed a crawler root and fell hard. She lay there, the breath knocked out of her and pain coursing through her body where it hit the ground. A gnarly stump poked out of the earth not two inches from her eye. It would have done real damage.
She was almost too miserable to care but her eyes still filled with tears. For the pain. For the helplessness. For the exhaustion. For so much more she could not find the words for and couldn’t afford to. Not yet.
She had to get up or she’d never move again. The backpack pressed heavy against her and she couldn’t help but remember other weight pinning her down. Unwelcome. Uninvited. More tears sprung. Then sobs that came from someplace between her diaphragm and belly button and competed with the stitch already jabbing through her chest. It was too much. It had all been. Too much.
Finally, after what seemed a decade, her breath calmed and she found strength to push up to her elbows, then her knees, then up to lean against a tree and shift her weight gingerly onto each leg.
Nothing broken. Or nothing broken that would prevent her from getting there. Her elbow throbbed and she was bleeding from scratches on her face and a badly skinned palm. There would be more abrasions underneath her pants where a tear bloomed red at the knee. But she was up, and some burden had lifted in the crying, even if it left her heart hollow with sorrow and echoing with despair.
She filled her lungs with a long breath and a tardy sob escaped to join the others but then her body shuddered one last time and she steadied.
She walked on. Not running now, just dogged determination.
The forest peeled away to reveal the clearing. The pond glowed and the purple light remained as she’d remembered. Lush greens licked the muddy banks and a clump of cattails whispered in an almost nonexistent breeze. The tree, too, was still there, just as it had been before: it’s bark missing in places, it’s silvery leaves rustling as the very breath of the place coursed through it from root to leafy tip.
“I’ve come back,” she breathed, and touched her scraped palm to the exposed trunk. Skin to blood to skin.
An echo filled her chest and she knew it knew her, and the relief made the jagged hole in the center of her self heal some.
This was the one place she never felt completely alone in.
She’d last left it thinking that her old life would not chase her to the new, and she had tried – for longer than she thought she could endure – to pretend that she no longer longed for what she had believed in and had given up. She could give it up no more.
“Will you help me?” she whispered. “I’d forgotten how.”
And the tree rustled and a ripple ran across the water and into her core, and her body softened so completely that she slid to sit leaning against the trunk. Welcomed. Invited. Warmed.
She’ll sleep. And she will dream. And she will wake to find the way back to herself. To her true realm in her rightful time.
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Unabashed Bash
Photo: Fawaz Sharif
She would not apologize for throwing a party to celebrate her last menstruation.
“Oh, but I will have a bash, if only to bash the preconceived notion that we women have any reason to be bashful about our body’s machinations,” she declared when her husband paled at the idea and her sons bloomed into a matching shade of pink.
“We gals bleed for a good chunk of our lives,” she pressed on, ignoring the slight green hue that crept onto her sons’ faces. “It is the blood of life, the blood of disappointment, or relief, or missed opportunity … but it is our blood, made by our bodies and relinquished so new lining can accept a future product of intercourse.”
“Mom …” her eldest groaned, but she silenced him with one of her ‘looks’ and glared a warning at her youngest, who appeared ready to chorus. At seventeen and sixteen they had squirmed through several variations of “the talk” in their lives, and would survive this one, too. Especially as they were old enough to be instrumental in causing a female’s monthly cycle to not cycle … If they were capable of ravishing girls’ bodies with more than their eyes, they should be able to stomach the realities of what girls’ bodies are capable of, as well as what women both endure and celebrate.
“I’m not going to force you to be here for the party,” she clarified. The vivid relief on all three of her menfolk’s faces was hilarious even if she couldn’t help being somewhat insulted. “What I will not do is lie about what this party is for.”
Her body had reached a milestone, and she wasn’t going to pretend it was nothing worth a mention. Not when the two young men (and the one which had preceded them but never made it through to birthing) were proof of the very miracles that female bodies – like her own – had been capable of till now. This called for proper celebration.
She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a scribbled-on napkin. “Let’s see. I’ve made a list. There will be invitations, perhaps shaped like uteri, or like tampons. I hadn’t decided.”
Now that her attention was no longer fully on them, her sons eyed each other and began to beat a slow but determined retreat. She raised an eyebrow in their direction and did not challenge them, but when her husband deigned to follow his offspring, she tapped the seat next to her in more order than invitation.
He sat.
He’d learned long ago that anything to do with “women’s time” was best not argued with or over. He hadn’t the foggiest idea what it would be like to have a period (or be pregnant or lose one or give birth or nurse babies, for that matter), and he wasn’t sure he wanted to have more of an idea of any of it. Certainly not the bloody business, which always gave him the queasy willies. So he kept his mouth shut and nodded at what he thought were appropriate intervals as his wife kept on with her planning monologue.
It did not stop his mind from sending fervent prayers that Carrie or Michelle or Linda, or anyone with double-X chromosomes, and therefore far more suited for such planning, would stop by or call and rescue him from being his wife’s audience.
“So,” she enthused, “for the cake? What do you think? Red velvet?”
His favorite. Well, not anymore.
He didn’t think he’d be able to touch the stuff again.
For the SoCS prompt: abash/a bash/bash
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Black Friday
Photo prompt: © CEAyr
“We’ll call him Friday,” Emmaline stated.
Roger glanced up. They’d just left the restaurant and he had urgent emails to check. “Call who?”
“Him.” She pointed toward the bike, which was parked across the alleyway between a bush and a wall.
He squinted and frowned simultaneously. Emmaline’s cryptic tendencies were sweet sometimes but annoying most other times.
He saw no one. His frown deepened. A stupid black cat perched on his bike’s seat, fur puffed as if it had just stuck a paw in a socket.
“See?” Emmaline laughed. “He adopted our bike on Black Friday. Let’s call him Friday.”
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
Na'ama Yehuda 
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