Category: prose

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • Campfire Sessions — 12apr25

    Campfire
    Photo by Ville Palmu on Unsplash

    Back to the campfire…

    It the shadows and glow of the flickering ruddy flames, he looks gaunt, grey, and emaciated as he approaches and sits down. His hair, what remains on his taut pate, is a dirty white and as withered as he — scraggly, sparse and I can see more skin than hair.

    (more…)

  • roads and halls

    sage bundles in a pot for smudging
    Photo by Ginny Rose Stewart on Unsplash

    I walked the beaded hallways red with you and you did not see, not really. Yes yes that’s very beautiful you said as we walked not the beauty of buckskin and ruddy skin. You saw only the patterned beads.

    You did not hear the heartbeat drums causing the red hallways to thrum and pulse as you raced towards the light, making sure you could say you had experienced it all for yourself, but you did not hear, nor see.

    You did not feel their blood on your skin, nor the sweat, nor the tears. You said you knew it all, had read it in a book you couldn’t recall the title of, nor author. And you pulled me along, not letting me linger to “feel the feels”. You told me you would find the book in the library for me so I could feel.

    I reached for the medicine up in the night, but you bound me to prevent “my escape”.

    I spoke to ravens and stones.

    You just stared at me.

  • Market missing

    I miss the Market today.

    Pikes Market, Seattle
    Photo by Sabine Ojeil on Unsplash

    It would be closed by now, of course. But I would have skipped out of work early and spent the afternoon window shopping comics, trinkets, maybe some herbs or incense. Walk down to the pier, although it was a stranger the last time I walked there because of the missing viaduct.

    I’d buy a couple of börek to take back to the apartment, reheat for dinner, salad or quinoa with tahini dressing on the side. I was never a very good vegetarian back then — I couldn’t give up my cheese or butter, but I rarely ate meat when I could visit the Market. Honestly, I rarely ate at all.

    (more…)