She’s dreaming of lighthouses again.
Still and silent in her bed she lies yet her mind rages in beauty as images of seas crashing on rocky shores flash vividly in black and white. There is a cliff that reaches higher than the rest of the surrounding land and sea and on that cliff points a lighthouse up to the heavens. At the base of the lighthouse is a little path that winds to the edge of the cliff. On this edge stands two figures silhouetted against the grey sky. These figures, one taller and one smaller, are slightly angled towards one other, as if to protect each other from the winds swooping down on them from above. Down at the base of the cliff the sea pounds relentlessly in rhythm that the spray echoes back in delight. Back on the top of the cliff the two figures huddle closer together. Wrapped in long and bulky outerwear, these figures still seek to conserve warmth in a hug that lingers in its intimacy. Dark clouds move closer to the island yet there is no rain. The sea spray calls louder in sweeter harmony with the low percussion of far off thunder. One of the figures raises a hand pointing to the heavens. The other figure moves closer still to the first. Symmetry of sea below and sky above as both reach to meet the other in stormy union. The two figures break apart and pull up their hoods. They stay a moment longer as the rain washes down upon them in sheets, the pure water washing down upon the rocks and lighthouse and figures alike. One figure laughs out loud, her laugh joining the song of skies and rocks and seas. The other figure pulls her close and together they walk up the path back towards the lighthouse. The light next to the door burns cheerily. The figures pull open the door and enter in. The lighthouse now stands alone on a cliff. The lightning flashes once, twice. Again it flashes. The seas below roar in delight and dance towards the cliffside in chaotic beauty. There is light behind her eyes as she opens them wide. Still and silent in her bed she lies thinking on these things she’s dreamed and wondering what they mean.
She doesn’t mind these lighthouse dreams that call back memories so aching sweet. And she sighs in harmony with the song of that sea spray.
Tag: prose
Teatime
I have been trying to write winter poetry and failing miserably. Alas it is not to be this night. Hence I switch to prose, the last resort of the poet who refuses to believe his muse is dead. Or temporarily incapacitated. One hopes only temporarily. But sometimes the fire burns within and one simply must write or else he feels as if his soul will crumple in on itself like a big ball of wadded up notebook paper that is scrunched so tight that it may yet yield to the tendency to become a black hole. Yes, that is the correct feeling, finally put in words to burn in their very temporal state. But where was I? Ah yes, talking of poetry and poets and their unsurprising failures. As for me, switching to prose often feels like a defeat, yet I long to snatch victory from its jaws yet. I too am a shepherd boy – or at least I attempt to model myself after one such – and so I too can fiercely extricate this prized lamb from the lion’s jaws. Scratch that last. Dreadful metaphor, quite mixed in theme and usage. To continue. Sometimes prose pieces are fun, sometimes they turn out dreadful too. This one feels whimsical and experimental enough, I am actually somewhat pleased. It amuses me, I will allow it to live. Oh how merciful am I. Now for the piece at hand.
I really did mean to write some winter poetry as I just returned from a lovely walk on this January evening. Finally my humble southern state has been blessed with weather that feels like winter. Temperature in the mid-40s and a nice dry air and a stunning sunset to boot? What have I done to be blessed with such beauty? Well, nothing of course. It’s not all about me. Instead, the glory belongs to another. Musings such as this rolled around in my head as I walked down the sidewalk in my little neighborhood. I thought of the interplay of the small neighborhood with the sky above. The small old houses seem so feeble when compared with the majesty of a winter sunset sky. The clouds stretch up and up, set on fire by the last triumphal notes of the setting sun. The trees contribute a chorus, their branches finally shed of their overly ragged autumnal garments. The branches stretch up and out and contrast nicely against the blues and purples and oranges. But the houses? They seem a bit timid and bashful, their structures not at all suited to be seen in company with the artistry of heaven. An outlier though? The power lines. The power lines start on poles which masquerade nicely as slender wintry trees…and then the lines swoop gracefully, firm and delicate and subtle all at the same time as they highlight the brilliant colours of the twilight. Seeing the power lines hug the sky just as I hug my own arms to myself – well, it brings me a cosy satisfaction. I find delight in the way the mundane creations of this world complement the creations of the one who existed before this world began. It is a thrill to think on such and imagine that just as the power lines point to something greater, so too am I privileged to rest my eyes on the fires of heaven and sing praises to the one on high. Am I also allowed to compliment this moment as my figure somehow complements this scene in which I walk? What does it look like, this frail and faded creation walking on the sidewalk this winter night? Am I too allowed to be thought of as the mundane that points to the beautiful a bit beyond my mortal sight? My temporal hand stretches forth to the eternal. The power lines continue to vibrate in holy tension and I sigh. The sliver of dusk shivers in anticipation of resurrection glories and the waxing starlight sings of a story not yet done. The book is written and the ending sure. But for now, turn one page at a time. Faithfully I read on, now a candle lit beside me as I let my mind slip back to the present. Yet still I remember the stark beauty of that cold and perfect winter sunset sky.
Shoreline
The room was full of paper, reams of it, heaps of it! And he waded through the paper as one trudges through the midwinter snow, grimly stepping through it as he knew he must. He feared he was damaging beyond the point of no return hours of scribbling. And he knew better than most the pains that these writings had inflicted upon her heart. But there was nothing for it now if he was going to reach where she now lived beyond world’s end. Fascinating, was it not, how quickly treasured mementos become waste paper. But this room that had harbored so many midnight hours of fevered creation now felt a bit hollow and empty. Almost it felt as if this room knew at its core that she was gone, gone forever. He reached the table next to the bed and saw the candle still flickering an inch above the little chipped porcelain saucer. She had not been gone long, as this world counts time. But why had she emptied her trunks of writing, why had she torn out the pages of years of journaling, why were her poems scattered far and wide throughout this room that had heard so many years of song and tears? Had she taken any poems with her? That was the question. He reached down a hand into the gently swirling depths of paper at his feet and pulled out a piece at random. It was a sheet he recognized, unsurprisingly. An ode to summertime. He smiled – it was one of her quirky silly ones, lilting in meter and light in tone. At the bottom she’d sketched a quick daisy. That had been a good day, one of hiking through lush green meadows and laughing at the play of waterfalls. There had even been a picnic, as is proper on a full summer day such as that had been. And she’d written that right on the bank of the stream after their stomachs had been filled with sandwiches and chips and carrots. He’d been half-asleep across the stream, gazing up at the way the light fluttered amongst the canopy of green above.
He smiled now, and wiped away the tear that threatened to fall. Oh Isabel, where are you? And why have you left me now amidst the detritus of your most treasured writings? Harry shook his head in fear, wondering what his next step was to be. He stood in the middle of an ocean of paper and felt as if he was a rock shivering underneath the midwinter rain off the coast of southern England. Oddly specific to be sure, but that was the last place he had seen Isabel and so the thought came natural. Here were the remnants of all Isabel’s dreamy musings. Harry fumbled through his pocket and pulled out his phone. No texts. There had not been any these many months but hope is oddly unrealistic at times. He looked around him at the paper swamping what had once been Isabel’s room and he sank to his knees. There was no time to waste. And so he gazed at the sheets of paper all around and looked up at the weathered ceiling and finally finally began to pray.
A Situation
The loss of oxygen was actually not that alarming, considering the circumstances. Multiple alarms warbled in imperfect harmony and far too many lights flashed persistently on the status boards. Irritated at her ship’s newfound desire to self-destruct, Juliet jerked her control cord to a new setting and hissed quietly in frustration. It was going to be close. Groaning in arrhythmic stutters, the chamber around Juliet’s pilot pod began to heat up. This was not entirely unexpected, but a bit too soon for comfort. Juliet glanced at the altitude indicator again and bit her lip. She needlessly tightened the strap on her rebreather and flipped the final switch. In one last protest, the structure surrounding her began to crumble into nothingness. Outside lay blackness and flame. Juliet leaned her head back and sighed. An explosion of soundless beauty. And then, the lights came on.
Closing her eyes, Juliet asked in barely concealed anger, “So how’d I do?”
“You died,” came the disembodied voice in her earbuds. “Again.”
“Really?” scoffed Juliet. “Well then, let’s run it one last time.” Her eyes flashed purple fire. “Again.”
Closer Creeps the Night
Beth sighed as she sat in weary anticipation on the front stoop. Hearing a car approaching, she looked up warily, only to see a little black ’88 Volvo approaching. Not her ride. Actually, she had no idea who the driver was, and she knew most people in the neighborhood(naturally, as she’d lived in that same neighborhood for most of her 19 years). After the Volvo drove past, she put her head down again and watched the late autumn leaves tumble down the sidewalk in front of her. The leaves seemed to be dancing with gleeful abandon as they darted by, rejoicing in the winter-tinged air. Beth shivered. She didn’t share the sentiment. Pulling her orange coat closer around herself, she sighed once again. Where was Rich at? He had promised to pick her up at the crack of dawn, but as the early morning light spilled over the sleepy neighborhood sprawled out in front of her, Beth started to worry. She tended to do that a lot, particularly when things didn’t go according to plan. And in her life, things had a tendency to not go according to plan. Unfortunately. Beth rubbed her arms again. She was cold and irritated and still not quite awake. A squeal of tires skidding around the nearest corner shook Beth out of her brown study. In a flash, she hopped to her feet, grabbed her small knapsack and started walking towards the street. Rich’s lime green monstrosity jumped up next to her and she tugged on the door handle violently. Time to go save the world.
To Boldly Go
I haven’t written anything proper in a while…so I hope you don’t mind this extremely random and most weird short story.
Her eyes rested longingly on that last lonely crepe. It was sitting oh so daintily on the faux silver platter, it was adorned with the perfect amount of powdered sugar and it called her name. True, it had been sitting there for a few hours, so it surely would taste of stale flour and dried out berries, but she didn’t care. Her breakfast had been a sad half of a grapefruit. Not even the better half. She almost felt tempted to just grab the crepe and stuff it in her mouth, but then…then she’d get yelled at by the makeup artist and the director and Tom and…it just wouldn’t be worth it. Anna sighed. Sometimes being a movie star just wasn’t worth it. This was one of those times.
Of course, being a star had its perks. She didn’t have to do her own makeup, for one thing. Her outer face sat pristine, carefully plastered onto what she thought of as her “Saturday night” face. Saturday night, of course – being the only night she ever had to herself anymore. This latest shoot was a brutal, six days a week, fourteen hours a day. Saturdays were nominally off-days, but they’d been working those lately too. She still made sure to excuse herself early and make her way to her condo.
And then, for at least a few hours, she curled up in bed with a cup of cocoa, read her current fantasy novel and pretended she was a normal person. Her condo was her last remaining stronghold against the outside world. Her agent wasn’t even allowed in. Her condo was small by her peers’ standards, but it was hers. It protected her from the schemes of the paparazzi and the bloids. It sat in Los Angeles, polluted and tarnished by the city air. Yet it was hers. Sometimes she would look at her face in the mirror and wonder what others saw in her. She saw a woman that looked increasingly dirty and stretched. She’d wash her face again and again, trying to uncover the small girl that used to peer at her out of the mirror’s depths. Where did she go?
When Anna was five, she had wanted to be an astronaut, traveling to the farthest reaches of space. Her life goal was to be the first person on Mars. This was back in the days when mankind still explored space and sent out probes every few months. Nowadays, no country bothered spending money on space exploration, deeming it an “extravagant and wasteful proposition”, as the prime minister of Scotland had said in his latest rant on the floor of the UN.
Once though, Anna had dreamed of traveling in space. She had imagined braving the silent void, traveling through the vast reaches of space. And now she sat on a set in Los Angeles, filming yet another ponderous period piece. Surrounded by loud-mouthed executives and frantic cameramen and causing a mild panic every time she smiled. She was sick of it. It paid the bills.
Anna’s eyes darted toward the crepe again. She seriously wanted it. Anna sighed loudly and ran her fingers through her carefully arranged hair. Shoot would be starting soon though – once Tom got out of makeup. How it took him an hour longer to get through makeup, she had no idea…unless it had something to do with his preponderance of wrinkles.
And as her mind thought of the wrinkles on her co-star’s face, she thought back to simpler times, back before she knew what paparazzi and co-concentrators and restraining orders were. Back before she had to stare into a co-star’s face and pretend she had chemistry with him. Back when wrinkles signified wormholes in time and space….
She floated through a rusty starship corridor, her suit nearly catching on a protruding gauge. This mission was a simple one, but it would end quickly enough if she tore her suit. As Anna made her way through to the far control pod, she looked back for a second, satisfied she’d not been followed by any…unwanted presence. The silence stretched loud in her ears and she smiled as she thought of what her father would say if he could see her now. He had always told her that she’d amount to nothing more than a shiny broompusher and yet here she was, a rogue starpilot exploring a derelict freighter a hundred light years from Earth. Not too bad for a farm girl from Iowa.
Anna pushed open the last door that sat between her and the cockpit. It swung heavily, hindered by the rust that had accumulated over the centuries. And then…she forgot about the door and the rust and she forgot to think much of anything at all. The ship’s control lights were ominously lit, not dull and dead as they should have been. And there were words swift scrolling across the main console in a far-ancient language. She was not alone on this ship after all. There was an intelligence with her. A machine intelligence. She was not alone. The lights blinked at her in a mildly threatening fashion, and then her eyes glanced more closely at the computer screen. The script had changed to a more familiar one.
WHO ARE YOU TO DISTURB?
Anna reluctantly touched her fingers to the dust stained keyboard and tapped in almost-forgotten patterns.
I COME IN PEACE. I COME TO EXPLORE. I COME TO LEARN. I COME TO SEE.
YOU ARE HUMAN. YOU ARE NOT WELCOME.
I COME ALONE. I MEAN NO HARM. I COME TO SEE.
The lights of the console whirred in an almost hesitant fashion, as if the machine mind was thinking, its mind tracing long unused pathways in its circuits. New words finally flashed upon the console, slowly.
THEN SEE.
The ship began a gentle yaw to her left, showing her another portion of star studded space through the cockpit view screen. And there was a flash. Anna blinked. The sky was still full of stars. Yet, she had never seen such patterns. Before her mind could comprehend the fact that she’d traveled a thousand thousand light years in a millisecond, before it became clear that she was now stranded in deep space with a likely hostile machine intelligence as her only companion…before all that, she brought her hand up to her mouth and gasped. Stars wheeled across the sky in front of her, galaxies pinwheeling in front of her eyes. Stardust filled the void. Space was not empty here, it was heaving, full of life and beauty. Anna struggled to understand. Stars painted the canopy of space as if strewn there by a master painter. Nebulas arrayed themselves in elegant rows and began dancing to the song of the stars of heaven. Anna did not understand. There was so much beauty. Why? Anna put her hand down on the rusty computer console and sighed in longing and awe.
And then the sky crackled, softly.
“Let’s go, people!”
Anna jerked upright. Had she been…dreaming? Tom was striding toward the columned area they were scheduled to shoot their first scene, a flirty rendezvous of some sort, Anna remembered. Anna sighed. What had been in her dream? It had been…beautiful.
“We’re on a schedule,” that annoying voice barked. Carefully, Anna rose from her chair and walked towards the camera strewn pavement.
Anna set her face in the same mask that had graced a thousand magazine covers and smiled a gorgeous pink-lipped smile, casting one more look at the lonesome crepe.
New Autumn
The last thing she wanted to do was flip that switch.
The warning siren warbled at an even higher intensity and the cockpit lights dimmed ominously.
Jasmine raked her hands through her hair and glared daggers at the navigation panel and refused to believe it would all end like this. No more time for hesitation though. She reached over to the awkwardly positioned and boldly lettered ejection lever and caressed it for a brief second before giving it a firm flick. The restraining belts snapped into place as her head was slammed backwards. There was a song of screeching metal and gasping wind and flashes of lights across the sky in purest symphony of calamitous fate. And then her eyes rolled back in her head and she only had the time for briefest thought. Home sweet home. Blackness.
******
Why was it so light outside? Had she missed her alarm? And why was there a giant tree root jabbing her insistently? Wait, tree roots were in her bed?
Hazy waking up thoughts fled as Jasmine bolted upright. Coughing violently, she looked around wildly. Grass stains on her jumpsuit and the taste of blood in her mouth. Yet, it was beautiful. The sun – the sun! – shone down on her like a mother’s smile. The trees swayed magnanimously around the meadow she had apparently ended up in. Leaves of red and orange and yellow fluttered down as the wind sighed around her. Jasmine supposed she could have landed somewhere worse. And it appeared all her limbs were functional. Mostly. She pushed up against the soft grass and lurched to her feet. Wavering, she looked up. Blue sky. Never, never had sky looked so beautiful. She took a few steps across the meadow, limping as she went. Everything hurt. She didn’t even want to see the bruises she’d ended up with. But she was alive. Alive.
Her ejection pod was still slightly smoking a few meters away. It had done its job and delivered her safely down. She should probably retrieve her survival gear and weapons, but for now…
Jasmine wobbled around the grass like a toddler learning to walk and marveled in the feel of the sun upon her skin. It was so warm. So real. Her pale skin soaked in the heat and Jasmine sighed in joy. What a wonderful planet. What a wonderful world. She should probably scout out the area and set up camp, but…
A piercing cry echoed across the sky. Jasmine’s head jerked up. They were here. No more time to rest. She walked towards the pod, determination in her limp. There was work to do. Her destiny was at hand. There were enemies to slay.
Something Weird 