Magic Dragon

He was sitting untouched by the noise and movement around him, day-to-day face glued to his head, perfectly convincing.  His hands moved over the keyboard, marionette appendages on strings of habit.

“Why are you doing this?” Binker asked him.

He would speak to Binker, really speak to Binker.  To others his words were read from a script behind his eyes, one written by a drudging hack, a cobbled together pastiche of remembered phrases and stock witticisms.   But to Binker he could really speak, though nobody else would ever hear the words.

“I’ve forgotten,” he told Binker honestly, “It’s just what I do.”

“You’re punishing yourself,” Binker said, “But I don’t know why.”

He shrugged, actually shrugged with his numb shoulders, and turned the movement into a stretch to cover his mistake.   Someone nearby said something to him.  He said something back which made them laugh.

“I’ve long forgotten,” he told Binker in the silence of honesty, “But here I am.”

“Don’t you remember how many worlds there are to walk in?” Binker said, his voice low, entreating, “ten thousand thousand shades of sunlight, and every scent that ever blew on winds of hope?   Walk with me there again and let us dazzle the gods and outrage the raging storm.”

“You go on ahead,” he told Binker, “I’ll follow soon.”

Binker, who had never before left his side, did.

In response to the prompt "Penitence/Remorse" from Studio30Plus

Image courtesy of Tim Chesney at freeimages.com

Through a glass darkly

Image courtesy of John Boyer

Cobham West had the look of a weasel about him, albeit a well fed and self satisfied weasel.   His naturally thin features had filled out as a result of the high life he’d been living for the last few years and it made him look slightly wrong, like a bad photoshop of himself.   He took the towel from the stage hand and mopped the back of his neck as he left the stage, the applause of the credulous still ringing out.   Always leave them wanting more he had been  told, and he always did.   Not a dry eye in the house by the time he’d finished his show.   The living consoled with messages from their departed loved ones, words of wisdom passed on from the great beyond, a few cryptic messages of uplifting import to inspire the world toward blah blah blah.   It had been a good show.

Landslide Victory

Do you remember when you were a child?  Alone and hungry and crying for a mother that was beyond hearing?

I heard you.   And I came to you and comforted you as best I could.   And I arranged for you to be found and pulled from the puzzle of rock and earth, the eager hands of the rescuers dragging you into the light and showing you off, teary-eyed and widesmiled.   I smiled too, and waited.

Election Night

The sound of the rain on election night was a constant demanding drumming on the roof of the car, like a radio station tuned to white noise whose signal cut out as I passed beneath every one of the seven bridges between work and the polling station.  It was, I knew, my democratic right and duty to cast my vote and much depended upon it.   The car park, I noted with dismay as I drove into it, was a long way from the entrance.   A long wet way under the wet white noise.    But still I had my mark to make, and make my mark I must.  I locked the car behind me with a brace of beeps.   A bundle of fly tipped garbage propped against the wall of the desanctified church that was now a community centre moved unexpectedly and spoke.

“buy your name, mister?”

Please allow me to introduce myself

I smiled, oh my brothers, but how I hated him.   He was head honcho, big cheese, grand panjandrum and didn’t he know it just.   He smiled the expansive smile of a perpetual winner and his happiness was sickening to normal, that is to say lesser, types like me.  Not that I let on, oh no.  Foremost of the archangels, and captain of the heavenly host my job was to look magnificent and adoring and to do his bloody will whenever he expressed an opinion.  He had a lot of opinions, cryptic and unknowable, but the ones concerning the physical realm, the human race, the dirtball little planet of water and mud and living clay, those opinions were sweet and smiley and joy joy joy.

Spectator Sport

image courtesy of freeimageslive.com

Alan finally managed the lock, hoping that the vodka would numb the impact of a too quiet house and painfully empty rooms.   It didn’t, and the silence prickled his skin.  He’d sleep on the couch he decided but needed the bathroom first.   Stupidly he wandered afterward into Megan’s room and ran a finger along the Disney princess border on the wall near the door.

Something gleamed on the floor, something dropped.  He picked up her funfair snowglobe and saw how dull it looked.

It only became beautiful when shaken up.

He wondered if that was how God viewed human lives.

In response to Light and Shade Challenge

Messenger

Photo by Lyssa Medana

My real name is Myer, but I go by the nickname Angel these days.

I’m not an Angel.   Not in the sense that most people understand, but I think it’s justified.  You see “Angel” means “Messenger” and that’s what I definitely am.    When my boss wants to send a message, he sends me.    When people see me turn up they get the message.   Of course by then it’s too late for them, because the message my boss sends is for the benefit of others.   The messages I deliver encourage other people not to make the same stupid mistakes as the recipient.

Am I being too coy?

Gotterdammerung

Edward DelRay was the last of the DelRays that there would ever be.

Prove it he told himself.

He had burned the last of his books that afternoon and inhaled the smoke of his imagination as he watched the fire.   Now he took his melancholy out the back door and stood silently in the garden where a thousand lifeless stems grew, each one marking a future he had buried.

He was silent and unmoving but he screamed nonetheless.

Beneath the ground each strangled dream held its neighbour’s hand and smiled, writhing toward the surface and a reunion rich with potential.

(in response to a prompt from Light and Shade Challenge ("Prove it") and Studio30Plus ("He took his melancholy out the back door)

Boundaries

Picture by Aesop Clerk

Peel away the layers of myth, Sarah thought, and it came down to this:   Beyond the iron posts was Outside and dangerous.   The waterfall was falling light, dazzling and glorious, churning the pool, outflanking the iron posts.    The cliffside hinted at faces in that flickering light, smiling, laughing, beguiling.   Outside was dangerous, but that had not stopped Sarah’s sister wading out a year ago, deaf to Sarah’s cries of warning, pleas not to leave her alone.

The elders of the Last Human Settlement had strict rules.  Only children could draw water.  It was safer.    But Sarah’s sister had drawn water too often, and now she was gone.

Sarah filled the containers and mourned her sister.   For a moment only she glimpsed a smiling youth fetching water on the far side of the pool, Outside.   Handsome…

No.  She imagined it.  

Perhaps she would imagine it again tomorrow, she hoped.

Prompt from Light and Shade Challenge using the image above, and Studio30Plus using the phrase "Peel away the layers"

Hey, you. Yes. You.

Hey.

I’m sending you an image.   It will reach you somehow.

You’ve been unresponsive since we got you back from the enemy, but the doctors say your mind is active in a  dream prison they made for you.  A life so real you can’t escape it.    Reasons to stay there.   

I don’t know what dream it is but my words have to reach you.  

Maybe you’ll hear them, or read them in a book.  

Maybe on a screen.

You have to walk through the door to wake up.  The door in the image.

Please.  Do it now.

(Don't walk through the door, this is just a response to a writing prompt from Light and Shade Challenge, that's all, just a writing exercise, nothing else.   The picture is just a picture from the internet by someone called Sulaco299 at rgb.com)

Unaware

Image courtesy Vierdrie of www.freeimages.com 

Hiram Harrison left the pulpit of his megachurch, smiling.   His sheep were his to fleece and he knew a text for every bit of hatred to stir up, every appeal for more money.

The stranger in his office looked like trash,  tattered , unkempt,  a tattoo on his arm:  Hebrews 13:2

Hiram, sneering,  went to snap out a text about marking the skin and instead said “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…”  and he went on, unable to stop.

“Carry on till you’ve heard,” said the stranger, and then he was gone, leaving Hiram helplessly, carefully, reciting.

(In response to Light and Shade Challenge's prompt taking inspiration from the phrase: If you don't find it in the index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue.)

All That Glitters

image courtesy of Evgeni Dinev/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The conqueror rose from his seat at the council table.  Of the six lords seated, four were likely to

become his supporters, one his enemy, and one would bide his time.   It was always like that, and easily dealt with.

He strode from the chamber followed by his young courtesan.   She’d knelt silently, patiently, head lowered at his side throughout the council session.   He had spoken passionately:   He and his warriors had conquered the small kingdom, all the armies of knights and archers not by superior numbers but by greater discipline and organisation.   He would teach his new subjects this.   He would raise their kingdom, his kingdom, to a place among the empires of the world.   Their ambitions had been paltry and he would show them that what they’d considered the ceiling of achievement was what he would consider merely the floor to stride upon.   

And he had won them over, four new loyal provinces each with their own levies of knights and men at arms.   The others would fall in line, or they would fall.

He opened the door to his tower room and held it for his courtesan who skipped nimbly ahead of him, gorgeous and scantily dressed, his little piece of fluff, of happiness, of distraction.   And who would begrudge him that?

He closed the door then crossed to the bed, and stood motionless.   The young woman kissed him on the cheek and then caressed the back of his neck.   Finding the access panel she slid it open and removed the batteries that powered this most sophisticated of androids and then slipped them into the charger unit in the generator beneath her bed.

Nobody would dare enter the chamber before dawn, which meant she had plenty of time to catch up with her reading.

(In response to prompts from:

Light and Shade Challenge - Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.- Terry Pratchett

Studio30 Plus :  Fluff of happiness

Write on Edge: “Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling?” ― M.C. Escher)

Vodoun

(image courtesy of Wikimedia commons)

Bronte Belvoir was three generations adrift from from  her ancestress  the most feared woman in Port-au-Prince.  Her Manhattan apartment was further adrift from Fredeline’s spice-haunted shack.

She opened her laptop and closed her eyes momentarily, feeling the light of the screen on her eyelids.  Instead of drums, the soft whirr of a hard drive and she was ready.   No sacred names, but a username and password.  No drawn veve, but a cryptic Captcha.  And no sacrifice but her career and a USB stick full of secrets.

At the crossroad where meatspace and cyberspace touched, Papa Legba, lord of messengers, grinned as she passed by.

(Written in response to Light and Shade Challenge's prompt using the quote: “the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.” - Roald Dahl)

Pocketful of Hope

Image courtesy of Jiimm of FreeImages.Com

The rain turned the trenches of the western front into a hell of muddy immobility.   Edward Royce, returned from leave, stepped back into real life.  Back home he’d worn a mask made of pre-war life, but every conversation, joke and smile was something he’d simply worn.

Back home they said the enemy was monstrous, barbaric, guilty of vile atrocities.  He’d nodded, but knew that in the trenches Death was impersonal.   Moral high ground was a precarious perch easy to slip from.

They said the war would be over by Christmas but nobody here believed that.   One sergeant in B platoon had planted daffodil bulbs on the lip of the trench so that if the war lasted till spring they’d have some colour and even a bit of cover.   

Private Royce was a clearer thinker. He’d brought back a dozen acorns to plant on the muddy edge between life and death.

(inspired by a prompt from Studio30Plus to incorporate the phrase Precarious Perch)

Half Full

(A response to a  prompt from Light and Shade Challenge - inspired by the phrase "Optimism is like a spiritual magnet")

(Image courtesy of Hills22 via sxc.hu)

The young man would die unless he received aid, that was clear.  Nobody was more surprised than him.

“Can’t be killed,” he said, almost petulant as he lay there doubled over in the moss, “Prophesy.  When I was a child.”

“Aye, well,” Lucas crouched down, stroked sweat-slick hair from the youth’s forehead, “maybe the Hive didn’t know about that, eh?   Typical of them.  Never do their research.”

The Scotsman’s weak jest drew a grin from the pained face of the other.

“We’ve changed context,” the youth said, only now taking in the scene.   Tall old trees and thick undergrowth, a sky of deep blue.   Moments ago it had been night, with steel and concrete towers twisting in anguish through the blazing sky, sirens howling from all directions.

“We have.   No drones here, we can rest.  Well you can rest anyway, lie there till help turns up.”

“Is help coming?”  There was sudden hope in the young man’s voice.

“Someone’ll turn up,”

The youth laughed, then winced, clutching at the wound in his side, a spreading continent of dark inevitability on his tunic.    “Never… never figured you for an optimist Lucas.”

“Optimist?”  Lucas spat the word.  “Me?”

“Expecting help to arrive.   Optimist.    Glass half full, that’s you, secretly, that’s you.  You think the glass is half full.”

“Oh aye,” sarcasm sizzled in that syllable, “Optimist thinks the glass is half full, pessimist thinks it’s half empty, right?    Well I’m a realist.”   He paused for effect.   “The glass is entirely full.   The top half’s full of air, the bottom half’s full of whisky.   Not empty at all.   And don’t tell me air’s not important or I’ll prove you wrong.”

The young man smiled at the familiar chiding.   “Why whisky?” he asked.

Lucas shrugged.   “Why not?  Anyway lie still.  Help will be along shortly.”   He stood up and walked a little way, toward the rough track that snaked through the woodland.   He ignored the mocking cry of “optimist” that followed him.

Lucas could already see the horsemen approaching, just as he’d expected.   Half a dozen mounted men on barrel chested dark steeds.   As they drew closer he saw the lofted banner with the scarlet hunting dog on the sable field, and thrust his hands into his pockets and waited.

The leader of the horsemen drew to a halt by him and looked down, raising his hand to the visor of his half helm and raising it.   The face beneath was cruel and carved from stone and war.

“You,” the warrior said.

“Incisive as always,” said Lucas.

“You know the king’s edict.  It’s death for you to return here.”

Lucas shrugged.   “There’s a warrior back there with a stomach wound.  Do you still have that senile old healer at the castle.   Aye, good.  Well he’s a bloody genius.   See to my friend and I won’t even resist arrest, how’s that.”

“Resist?” the mounted man said, “You, alone?  Against six armed knights?”

Lucas just smiled until the other man nodded once.

Optimism.

Nuptial Feast

(picture courtesy of flickr.cc)

The city was burning,  the choking smell of war-despair heavy in the streets.  Refugees of a moment’s notice, an hour ago simply people, rushed and stumbled with their hearts in hasty bundles and packs, desperate.   

Quick and lethal, the Duchess’ armies had struck after their mistress had been refused one last time,  rejected by this city’s eleven year old Duke who was, she said, the love of her life.  

Three proposals, three rejections, and now her armies came in like the tide.  Spurned and insulted, she told the world.  She did not mention the city’s gold reserves.

This is in response to three prompts - Write on Edge's quotation (“Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.”), Studio30Plus's phrase ("Quick and Lethal") and Light and Shade Challenge's quotation ("She tells enough white lies to ice a wedding cake")

The Gardener

(a prompt from Studio30Plus using the phrase "It Should Pounce" in 150 words or less)

"The thing about inspiration," Simon said, "is that it is not a tame thing.  You can’t force it, it should pounce on you unexpectedly,"

"From outside?"  I was bored with his nonsense and this dire little bar.  I wanted to get home and write, but I was suffering a bad case of writer's block

"Yeah," his eyes drifted to a woman sitting nearby, shabby and reading a paperback.  "Yeah..."  She looked up and met his gaze.  Her eyes narrowed.

She strode across the room and slapped him hard across the face.

"For the last time," she said, "I am not your muse!"

She stalked away.   I looked at the shocked expression on his face and at the blossoming painflower of red on his cheek.

Painflower I thought, A garden of painflowers raising their heads towards a dying sun.

"See you later," I  told Simon, "I'm away home."

Silence

(a prompt from Studio30Plus to simply address the 3rd 

dictionary definition of "Love" : sexual passion or desire)

It is too tame a word for summer lightning

And the high winds over the moors.

Just a word,

Too small to contain new lives and dreams

And whispered forbiddens shared in smiling seething night.

A single sound

Cannot within it bind the shattering of ease

And its glorious rebuilding.

It should burn

Not sit so simply on the tongue

Lazy and heavy like an easy thing.  It should pounce

And grasp

And bite

And hold so close and for so long

That worlds could rise and fall unseen

And do.

Clear Path Forward

A prompt from Write on Edge based on this image:

to which I'll add the following, just for jollies:

Often she dreamed of towers and dragonback flying and strong hands holding hers, of golden rings blazing with power and of long tracks in the wilderness that led, finally, to nowhere at all.

At precisely 06:15 the screen in her apartment blared out its alarm and dragged her upright and attentive while she was still not yet awake.   Stretching and calisthenics until 06:30 and then a breakfast of souring milk and tasteless Libertyflakes before the long walk to work.  Her bicycle, requisitioned a month ago and, melted down, was helping to secure victory against the relentless inhuman enemies of her freedom to obey and work herself to death.

She didn’t think that thought.

Between 08:58 and 13:01 she sat at a desk with a shiny plastic table whose top didn’t quite look like wood.   Documents arrived on her left and she corrected them using a combination of voice recognition software which didn’t work and a grubby grey keyboard that mostly did.  

She dreamed often of a world of glorious cold dawns and sisters with corngold hair, of incantations and dancing barefoot in forbidden places, and of a lover as wild as drunken lightning and  as gentle as summer waking.   She dreamed of a kiss on her lips, and of wearing the necklace he’d given her, a fallen star sheathed in whispergold.

Between 13:05 and 13:25 she ate with the others in ordered rows.  Noodles and soya cubes and the news broadcast at full volume gleeful with imminent victory and sombre reminders that the enemy could strike at any time and hated hated hated the luxuries and freedom that were so commonplace here.   The noodles were undercooked and crunchy.

Between 13:29 and 17:32 she sat at her desk correcting errors and omissions.  She excised a photograph of a dead eyed man from a ministry bulletin from a year ago, it had been placed there in error.  The man had never worked there, though she was sure she’d seen him just once on the day she’d first been shown her desk.   Another error corrected.

She dreamed some nights of a long trail in the wilderness, through grass, that led nowhere.   She’d held the hand of the man who was her wildfire and told him that if she fell in battle she’d want to be buried beyond that horizon, with his necklace on her cold breast.   He’d smiled and said she would never die for he was a king, and he would never allow it.

At 17:36 she began the walk home, with all the others.   The bulletin had promised sunshine and clear weather for the evening commute.   Someone fell into step next to her, took her hand.   This didn’t happen.     He was lean and grim and she did not know him.

“Let go of me,”

“Don't think I haven't tried,” his accent was Scottish, his voice insistent, “I need your help”

“What?"

“You need to show me where to dig,”

It was about quarter to six and raining gently.

Tuesday's Train

“You don’t get frosts anymore, not real frosts, not here,”

I looked up from my book, surprised at being addressed.   The speaker was sitting opposite me and I hadn’t noticed him arrive, he must have got on at the previous station I suppose.

“Frosts?”

“Your book, Frost.   Just saying you don’t get frosts these days.”

He was an old man, small, tidy looking, with pure white hair and a neat beard, he wore an old but dark suit beneath a thick winter jacket.   His smile had the mischief of a kitten looking at a precious vase.

“It’s not about weather,” I said holding the book up, “It’s poetry.  Robert Frost.”

His smile widened.

“You don’t get real poets any more either,” he said, “I remember poets that could charm summer out of snow, and lightning from a clear sky.    Babies into cribs too, most of them.   What’s this fellow like then?”

“He’s good,” I said, “I like his work.”   It had been a long day and I didn’t feel up to a conversation anyway.    Work had dragged eight hours into twice that and this train had been diverted so far from its usual route I’d be lucky to see my home before midnight.

“Like his work?   A poet’s words should stab you to the heart with florid flame and turn your world to ash in an instant, hah yes, and then build a new and better world an instant later that makes you wonder how you ever bore the last one.”

That was quite an expectation, and I said so.

“Guilty as charged,” replied this exuberant fellow, “and unapologetic.    Words are too wonderful a thing to expect anything but magnificence from them.   So what did this Frost fellow write that was so good?  Do tell me, I adore being proven wrong, it has an enjoyable rarity value about it.”

I couldn’t help but smile in response to his unabashed impudence.   I flicked through the book to find my favourite quotation.

“Here,” I said, and quoted, “I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.  And it is, you know, it was used as his epitaph.”

The old man considered this.

“A lover’s quarrel with the world,” he said, musing and stroking his beard, “A fine phrase, but maudlin perhaps.   I’ve never really understood lovers quarrelling.   I’m more the one night stand sort myself.”   He chuckled at some hidden joke of his own.

“New lovers are easier to find than new worlds,” I replied, nettled at his dismissal of my favourite quotation.

“Now what makes you think that?” he said leaning forward and pressing something into my hand.   A movement at my elbow distracted me, a flutter of wings and an impression of something large and tattered.    When I looked back the old man was gone, utterly gone, and a ring of ancient gold lay in my palm shining with truth and the burning cold of ancient winters.

A response to a prompt from Write on Edge using the Robert Frost quotation mentioned in the text