Category: prose

  • Another ritual night

    Photo by Stephane Gagnon on Unsplash

    I have forgotten stars now. That light flickering, I wonder how it entranced me so now that it has faded from view. Perhaps I used to be somebody in the before. Or, maybe, it was always illusion that snaked this road into each night before the screens stole it away.

    Blood hands from holding blades, shards of glass on a beach of stone. Mournful, the cries of ravens from the cedar warning me from the windswept hill. They used to hang people there. They used to pierce them, too, to ensure they were not playing the dead, those soldiers of gloom.

    A right pinch of snuff and a stroke of scrimshaw in the left hand holding. Clearing the head of stagnant saltwater in rituals of the hands… I am bone, I am stone, I am wings on the thermals ride. Black as the night that drew me. My feet pound the wood dock branching out over water, echoing the hollow within.

    Joyless I wait for the push from behind, black water calling.

  • Lingering guests

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    He chased the coffee rings on the formica coffee bar with his fingertip, spreading the thin ensō of liquid into ever broader strokes in time with the acid jazz playing softly overhead. It was past midnight on a work night, he should go home. Instead, he lingered at the late-night coffee joint with the drinks looking for sobriety in the dregs of their cup and not finding much there to give them hope. The stared at their empty cups, debating on if they should risk the drive home or the sleeplessness another cup would bring. The Beacon’s barista could not be bothered to help them decide — the tips had been lackluster all night anyway with no promise of more to come for showing a willingness to serve the clientele another cup.

    Mark was avoiding home, with good reason. Along with the futon bed that called his name even from here, his studio apartment overlooking the Sound was otherwise occupied by ghosts.

    So he put off dealing with the unwanted, uninvited guests at least until the barista made his last call announcement. Mark wished it was not raining, because then he would have been able to roam the streets until daybreak, when the ghosts would finally take their leave. He thought he might call in sick today so he could sleep for the first time in three days.

    If he was lucky, perhaps he would sleep right through the return of his ghosts after dusk. It did not seem likely, but he considered himself an optimist.

  • Just Alice

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    He was minding his own business, fishing there up on the bridge and not catching much at all when she went and showed up. The only thing biting were the ‘squitoes and deerflies in the heat of the summer haze. And although he had his line dipped in the cool fishing hole swirling about in the creek below the bridge, and there were plainly river trout with their speckled bellies flashing in the noontime sun, he was not catching a thing. Not that was surprising at all to him, seeing as he had neither baited his line nor tied a hook at the end of the line for which he might bait.

    The way Hank saw it, if you put a hook on a fishing line, you were apt to catching something at the end of it even without bait. He had seen it happen that the fish would get all glammed up by the shine of the sun on the metal and decide that if something were so shiny, well then it might be tasty too.

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  • Campfire sessions — 02may25

    Campfire
    Photo by Ville Palmu on Unsplash

    A fog had descended on camp. It happens at times and, when it does, the fog reflects the flames in such a way that the immediate surroundings appear aglow but the campfire is quickly swallowed by the thick fog standing a few dozen yards away. I did not expect anyone to find me tonight as a result of being well within the betweens. So I warmed my hands and contemplated the thorns still visible on one side of the clearing: daggered things that would have screamed of a sepsis incurred within hours of being pricked by their sharp tips.

    The weald likes to keep its secrets. I may be the nominal warden of this place, but that does not mean that I know anything more than I need to about the darker spaces within. Of course, if there were need of the blackthorn’s protection, I would find I could slip within the hedge’s folds like a chickadee or wren. The weald protects its own as much as it wards.

    That is when a familiar and small voice spoke in my left ear.

    Hey, they said. Thought you could stand some company.

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  • In the evening

    Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

    Ed watched his neighbor undress in the moonlight in the window in the apartment across the way. He dimmed his reading lamp so he could better appreciate the natural contrasts of the moon against the inky blackness of her room, put down his book on Celtic mythology filled with more fiction than the latest bestselling high fantasy novel. It was truly awful scholarship, if there was any scholarship involved in its writing at all. The lack of references and indices told most of that tale.

    It was not the first time he had played peeping tom and he doubted it would be the last. Although he suspected his neighbor knew full well that he often watched her in the semidarkness, her eyes never once stole to the window framing her slow dance from clothing to skin. That his neighbor had never once drawn her curtains in the name of modesty, Francis Edward Carlisle (“Ed” to most folks) was damned if he was not going to allow himself to take in the show visible in varying degrees of light as the moon waxed and waned throughout the year. His neighber was “a looker” by his book and Ed was not exactly flush with offers from women willing to share their naked bodies with him at fifty-two. That had stopped happening someplace in the last decade or so and, to be honest, he had never had all that many offers in life but it still happened on the rare occasion before he had acquired his permanent beer belly and man tits.

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  • Chipped nails

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

    Her matte-black nail polish was chipped again, a detail she had grown used to. She knew she was rough on her nails, using them for everything from a makeshift screwdriver to a replacement for the worrystone her grandmother had given her and that she had lost. Instead of rubbing a smooth stone to assuage her nerves, she taken up nail-biting. Or, rather, she had taken it up again. The stone was her grandmother’s way of trying to break of the nail-eating habit. And it had worked, until she went and lost the stone one night out on the town. She kept hoping the stone would show up but considered the possibility unlikely. And she had yet to get around to replacing it.

    She ran a ragged fingernail over her lips, drawing a pinprick of blood where the rough edge accidentally caught a ridge of flesh. When she thought about it, she found that she did not care. Maybe he would think that was sexy. If not, she had other ways of getting his attention.

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  • Campfire Sessions — 17apr25

    Campfire
    Photo by Ville Palmu on Unsplash

    There is no preamble when they arrive, not even the fluttering of wings to announce their presence. Just:

    You are a fool, Raven says.

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  • Silksong

    green trees near body of water
    Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

    Mountain flowers flowed out in carpet under the granite teeth of bears, the silksong still waters shifting slip from lake to falls a canyon behind. Though half a mile north and downhill, he could hear the faint roar of cascade against rigid sharp stones below as the waters would slip yet further away.

    Cedar breezes and that mystery smell of water evaporating in the sun on grey stone. He wanders this place as if he lives here, though it has gone a lifetime away. Chill mountain lakes, snowcapped peaks thrust still here at the top of a world.

    He brushes away the pine needles browning on the rock overlooking the shallow lake, just a broad space of river as it slow shifts water from higher places to low. He sits and waits for her arrival, wondering if today will be her day.

  • Between Shadow

    I often wonder lately if it is my shadow drawing me into dance and embrace, if the million mile journey is here in my heart and conventional wisdom would say that I never need leave home. I give my shadow name, because a shadow should not remain without a name just because it refuses to share one.

    “Scáthach,” I whisper and it just laughs and twirls away. The mistress of shadows, in the castle of shadow, from an island far, far away. It is neither denial or affirmation, and I do not have the energy to play a neverending game of warmer and colder. If it is just my shadow, it would likely care less how it is named.

    But I need a name and so give it one.

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  • Campfire Sessions — 13apr25

    Campfire
    Photo by Ville Palmu on Unsplash

    No campfires for me last night, I’d decided. Instead, I elected to wander away into the day that followed flame as I left the camp behind: Sun blazing on one side, Moon cool and pale on the other. Maple’s yellow leaves fell mystic around me, an autumn kind of sakura celebration lacking only the plum wine for the stream ran beside me, falling over stones and breaking white the reflection of the sky.

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