Category: prose

  • of evensong

    sunlight shining through old growth woods
    Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash

    All that could be seen was ankle; your ankle, in fact. My face was against your bare calf, warmed in the golden glow of early summer evensong atop the old elm-crowned hillock, your fingers tangled in my hair. Narrowed of focus by my heavy eyelids, dreamy for ebb and flow of cicada drones — narrowed so I could drink in that ankle of yours, the sight of which being mead that made my head dizzy drunk and the linger of a kiss honey sweet.

    Someone hummed a tuneless song and I never did discover if it was you or me. But neither of us moved in the fading day’s heat. Not wanting to break the thralling spell, I just lay there, feeling the pulse of your blood against my cheek as I bathed in the vision of your ankle and the massage of your fingers in my hair.

  • Hollowman

    I’ve gone hollow, with dusty cobwebs occupying the empty space inside. If you were to loosen the black leather lacing that holds everything inside, you would be surprised at the void that greets you.

    I don’t want you to be shocked. So, consider this fair warning if you elect to look inside just out for the looking for any curiosities you thought might be tied up inside. Some other thief or thieves have already lifted the everything of what used to reside there.

    Ahh, is that disappointment I perceive? That long, gravity-trapped face dragging to the ground, where once a smile was to reside, turned to the upside down?

    It’s not my preference to be primarily hollow, I assure you. My clockwork heart was quite the thing, I promise, before it was taken from me. Even the spleen filled of ideal was taken from me. I am quite empty, you see.

    With all parts cannibalized for the sake of entertainment of others, only my eyes remain to reflect the void within. Waiting for something that long has a been and unlike to be again.

  • Are we there yet?

    Today, I am the child sitting in the back seat of a car on a journey to a place undisclosed by the driver. I jitterbug my legs, anxious to be set free from the confines of the speeding steel box hugging the blackened asphalt curves wending round oldgrowth pines, oaks, birch and aspen, the double yellow lines in the center of the road intermittently broken on one side of the other to indicate where a driver might pass.

    There are no other drivers to pass or following the road in the opposite direction. That give some allowance to cut some curves, bisect them as we speed forward to places unknown.

    But I just want to arrive.

    ”Are we there yet?” It is not the first time or last time the question has been asked. I wince, dreading the question as it is uttered, for I hate hearing it as much as I hate asking it.

    No one replies. There is no one to reply. The car drives on.

    I wish we could just arrive, for I am tired of this drive and am torn between wanting to run and laugh at the other end and just wanting to find a soft place to rest my head and cry. Boys don’t cry, so I will hide the tears as gemstones buried into the folds of the soft space and pretend those are treasures that will find refrain on your lips when you discover them after I am gone.

  • subject 19 — a short tale

    Below is my short fiction response to prompts proposed by Jolene on her post at Poetry & More. Check out the link to see the criteria she gave her readers either before or after reading to support another online author. Follow her, if you want to be really cool.

    I didn’t do a ton of research before writing this (and it is very much improvisational), so read it as a pulp tale, one not intended to leverage realism to any extent.

    It’s story time!

    subject 19

    Subject 19…?

    His head throbbed in time the hum of the machinery all around as Elias stirred.

    Subject 19…?

    With eyes still closed against the brightness of the room beyond his eyelids, he groaned.

    Subject 19? Can you hear me, now?

    (more…)

  • Stonerot

    We are Slaved of the Riverbound, and so even more stone than they. We are to be culled and carved away to make way for the flow which our overlords assure us is necessary for live to carry forth.

    I could see in the guards eyes and with the way he held his crop that he toyed with riding me. There was a gossamer thread between enforcing compliance and wanton thrill, and the guard had yet to decide if there would be his own punishment or glory in mounting me — if my transgressions warranted it, or were it to premature and hasty to act yet. Overly-eager guards were subject to the same punishments as the slaved. Our overlords wanted their workforce compliant, but largely intact and able to work, after all.

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  • Product

    reflection of woman s eye on broken mirror
    Photo by Ismael Sánchez on Pexels.com

    Everything is prop or backdrop on the stage for our play today.

    Check our vaseline smiles in the mirror before calling for “lights” and the sodiums flicker to life and set the world aglow.

    Pull on the masque, assume a pose. Adjust after checking the screen that mirrors the scene. Set, snap and print.

    Pat each other of the back when nothing slips and we have captured a plastic essence pristine.

    Then file it away as just another charade of former days, anxious to apprehend the next.

  • Kind

    I wonder whatever became of Kind. She drifted away like a mote on the wind one summers day, flitting here and there before in the distance she did fade, leaving neither full lips or ashen hair to guide the way to where she went on drift. Perhaps she burned away, like any dream does when the sun shines on something at such length — and so wan she was in the begin, that slim girl Kind. It was a wonder she had not been consumed years ago.

    I check balconies in the gloaming; I inspect the shadowtall oaks, gnarled in the their age. But Kind is no where and no when, our pale empress aloft on the wind. I miss our lady Kind, and the delirium euphoric that she did bring.

    And I wonder at where she took her drift.

  • At Winterkiss

    conceptual portrait of hands with red thread
    Photo by Amirhossein Kianbakht on Pexels.com

    Lingering at midnights, the skin’s hollow drum thrumming with tension tugging taut the skin in anticipation as black coil fingernails trace leys down the soft flesh of an inner forearm. First right, then left, setting lines burning like fireflies down to the fingertips.

    Comes at winterkiss. “Are you ready,” said she. A nod with it begins, her kiss leaving every nerve burning alive.

    A furtive nod, afraid the spell will break and longing for the neverending. Miraculously, there is only long vibrations humming through, a guitar string of tension bound under flesh.

    All bells break, shatter the water’s razor edge and then begins a falling, a falling lingering a twilights all that remains is the skin’s hallow drumming while wondering at Elektra and if might this be that hunger she beheld.

  • Death at the Wharf

    Photo by Izzy E on Unsplash

    I was murdered at Fisherman’s Wharf late one night in the month of July, way back when in 1995.

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  • Morning coffee

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    I don’t mean to be no trouble, but I am thinking of dyin.

    He sat across from me, sipping his percolated coffee with one or three too many fistfuls of coffee thrown in “for good measure”. If you were to believe the tall tales he tells, he uses an old sock to filter out the biggest of the grounds, but I think that’s probably bullshit. Or it might not be bullshit and I’m just hoping that it is at least a clean old sock he uses for the purpose.

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