Piece in Ekphrastic Review

I haven’t looked at the Ekphrastic prompts in a while, but this Pissarro brought back too many memories not to join in.

Thank you to Lorette at Ekphrastic Review for selecting my piece of prose. You can read all of the chosen pieces here.

That was then

A rain of light, a jewel box, Paris nights on the grands boulevards were brilliant then. Roof slate, slick-glittered purple and midnight blue, and the hot gold of music poured from brasseries, peals of laughter, and the click-clack of hoofs, water-splashing.
The echoes lingered long, so long I heard them before they faded. Les filles were the same, the paint, the pose, the clatter of plates, chink of glasses, and the brassy yellow light, smelling of choucroute and bright red lobster corpses. Waiters, white shirted, black tied and aproned, swooped like swallows, and in the dark all cars were Tractions.
But the vibrant, multi-layered social architecture of the Impressionists, Piaf, Simenon, Jean Gabin and Zola was changing. In the streets behind the glitter, the girls waiting in dark doorways, cats at windows, washing hanging out to dry, music blaring, voices shouting in scènes de ménage, all were slowly being tidied away, pushed out beyond the périphérique into the soulless suburbs, so the rich of the world could have the playground of lights, the rain slicking off purple slate all to themselves.
What was once a city of squalor and beauty, misery and merveilles, a noisy colourful cacophony of sounds and smells, of rain and refuse in streets where satin shoes and buttoned boots trod, where urchins followed red balloons, is now a cemetery inhabited by ghosts, as at home here as in Dubai, New York, London.
They have it all now, squeezed of life and colour, cleansed of its ordinary people, workers, families, old folk with their chairs out on the pavements, babies in prams, dogs, street vendors and prostitutes. The argot of the titis parisiens has been replaced by sanitised interactions in the universal language of wealth, and the Paris of Maigret, Montand and Monet is dead.

Plans

For dverse.

Plans

The fire burns bright now; summer is on its way, bringing children with their lives to tell and show, laughter and plans to share. We have plans, quiet ones, and a routine of caring and observing, creating what we can, tending the broken and fragile. But there will come a winter, colder than the rest, when children are far away, absorbed in their lives, creating their own laughter, and the fire will burn low, flicker, and die. Our names, clear and hot-blooded bright, will cool, fade into memories, and once all the tears are shed, will be just two of all of the names swallowed up by the cold.
There is a tree in the garden where the birds flock in spring. Among the songs, the feathers and budding leaves, I like to think you will find us there.

A small tragedy

For dverse, a piece (132 words) of prose, to include the words:

‘But that smile was the last smile
to come upon her face.’

from the poem Ballad of Birmingham by Dudley Randall. I wrote the piece before I read the poem.

A small tragedy

She couldn’t stay to talk, she said, it was time for the baby’s feed, and danced away from the gate, insouciant as a child. She turned with a careless wave, her face aglow with happiness and pride. But that smile was the last smile. To come upon her face so few minutes later, haggard and ravaged with grieving, was pitiful. I had barely got home when she called me, and I dropped everything and ran.
I arrived before the ambulance, before the little body was whisked away and antisepticised, when she still held him in her arms, the head with its crown of reddish fluff lolling, lifeless, and she, crooning like a madwoman, wordless songs as if she believed they contained some magic to bring the little scrap back from the dead.

Handful of thoughts

I have just written a piece about my thoughts on Christmas, but I’m not going to post it because there’s no point. If I get upset and angry at the utter mindless waste this ‘holiday’ generates, that’s my problem.

Another gloomy day creeps in this petty pace from dawn to dusk with no change in the quality of the light. There’s a wind blowing, a persistent rain, and still a few leaves left to fall. If the rain stops I’ll take the dogs for a walk. If not, we’ll stay here, in the kitchen with the stove, watching the trees wave, waiting for you to come home.

There is beauty here, but nothing
in this world of tree and bird compares
with the bright filament that runs to
the core, the pulse of my heart, from you.

December fog

The weather forecast is adamant that we’re having bright sunshine just like yesterday. In fact the low cloud and thick fog hasn’t lifted all day. The light didn’t get any brighter after 7.30 am. The only thing that changed was the frost that eventually melted.
So there was no walk in the car today to a new place, just a brisk trot up the lane. Then since it was quiet, i.e. hunters all gone home, the dogs had a long, hair-raising race round and round the house, along the stream, under the willows, across the meadows, a leap up the bank onto the lane (Get off the road, both of you!), and down again, Bix always in the lead. Just like the old days with Finbar, Redmond got a bobo, tore the one remaining dew claw they have between the pair of them. Thankfully we still have Finbar’s well-stocked first aid kit.

Through the gloom, late afternoon, two hounds fly,
ghost-pale as clouded sky, swift as streams in spate,

and tree bark-dark, wild both, long-limbed, fleet pawed,
one thought, the race, grip-clawed, by speed beguiled.

Waiting for the moment when

Once again, I had great difficulty with this prompt. The sense of the words eludes me. It was difficult, and it still doesn’t make sense, and I’m not at all sure what is going on in the story. 140 words for dverse.

Waiting for the moment when

Some of us don’t know who or what we are, only where and when. I have always known that the where of my birth was the wrong place. The when was immaterial. For years, until my epiphany, that where was my obsession. If only it had been somewhere different. I was where. I am when.

The snow began at midday. The sky is thick with flakes now, dull grey, impenetrable. There is no light, just grey twilight, between day and night. And it is cold. The snow will fall and fall even after dark, when the cold will deepen and the ice crack. By midnight I will feel nothing but the freezing gangrene squeezing the marrow of my bones, it will come, the certitude, that the where of my life’s beginning has no importance, only this coming when of its extinction.

Games

A short piece of prose I wrote for the Ekphrastic prompt, a nineteenth century painting of Niagara Falls. You can read the successful entries here.

Games

In the clearing in front of the house, a child is playing. She sorts the leaves she has gathered in her pinafore, separates them by colours, red, orange, brown, yellow. She picks out the beetles and tosses them away. One falls into the trickle of the stream and with a pang, the leans over to fish it out, but the beetle has gone. The small tragedy clouds her play, and she abandons her leaves to blow and drift and scatter again in the gusts of wind.
Her mother is busy dying the cloth she has just cut from the loom. Her father and elder brother are fishing among the islands of the inlet. Gudrun is scouring the forest eaves for kindling, and Solveig is picking sheep’s wool from the bushes. Gerth is out of sight, minding the pigs up in the oak spinney.
The child pokes with a stick at the mud of the little rivulet, wondering about the beetle washed away. The stick makes a trench that fills with water, and she has an idea. She trots to the house and comes back with a wooden spoon, her very own spoon. Her father made it for her, with the rune of her name carved in the bowl. The beetle forgotten, she collects a few broad alder leaves for boats. She will scoop out a bay of calm water in the bank to sail them in.
Her mother, the messy job of dying finished, dries her hands, and smiles at her youngest, crouched over the stream, intent on her play. The smile vanishes when she recognises what she is using to dig into the soft mud of the bank.
‘Hilda! Stop that! A spoon’s not a plaything. What would your father say if he could see you?’
She takes the child’s arm, yanking her to her feet, and clips the side of her head. The stream water swirls about and fills the scooped out hollow. The alder leaf boats bob, circle, then slowly join the current.

In another world, below, in-between, through the clouds, a small huddle of men and women watch as the god’s fist retreats, and the crack in the sky closes, seamed with lightning. With a deafening roar, river water, blocks of stone and uprooted trees tumble over the lip of the cliff, the scoop-shaped wound left by the angry blow from the sky. The avalanche pours, wreathed in a fog of boiling steam, and the men and women run in terror from the haunted place, stopping their ears.
Above the furious pounding of the falls, filling the clouded sky, echo the maddening screams of a giant’s child.

Prose piece in Visual Verse

Well, I was wrong. I was convinced that this rather ranty piece wouldn’t get in, so thanks a lot to the editors for putting up with it/me.

You can read When pigs fly and hens have teeth here.

Tournesols

This is 144 words of prose inspired by the line of poetry in yesterday’s dverse prompt. But only inspired by it.

Tournesols

Tournesols harvested, their beauty long withered, ragged and raddled, they sagged beneath the sun, no longer turning heads. Their black beady seeds have been sucked into the harvester’s belly, but enough are left, glinting on the parched earth between broken stalks, to draw the black eyebrows of crows, the noisy swagger of magpies and the soft grey gentleness of wood pigeons.
If I could paint, I would give them back their youth, yellow-ruffed, the blue skies of summer. I would let their forest of stalks stand tall and green, the wild things trot beneath their parasols, in and out of the striped shade. But we must always muddy the waters, drip ink into the crystal cup and watch it spread. Our eyes are full of fictions, unattainable fantasies, the fulfilment of our greed. Not yellow petals, or the long ears of the watching hare.

The End

The dream I had last night/this morning. Otherwise, I slept quite well.

The End

And it came to pass that division and sub-division splintered all the world’s societies into groupuscules, and the word unity was removed from all the dictionaries. Men had fought one another over land, then over oil and religion, historical and imagined grievances, and then over water, until the earth was criss-crossed with scars, cracked and wrinkled.
The men hunkered down behind their walls and wire, and each group brought back one of a multitude of gods to worship, and they let themselves be ruled by their god’s living representatives. Each god had his own code of laws, and the only common law was that the earth belonged to men.
So there were no more women, only birthers, no more fauna, only cattle, no more flora, only crops. There were only men to rule them, and in the words of one of their gods, in the darkness bind them.
Men had fought over the most precious resources of the earth and tainted them all. They had stolen, soiled, and spoiled everything that was beautiful in the red lust that blinded their eyes. They had diverted and dried up the great rivers, destroyed the great forests, poured concrete over the green grass, scattered the carcases of rockets, missiles and satellites through the atmosphere while populations starved. They tried to snatch the stars from the sky and failed.
There was one thing of beauty that remained, a reminder of what had been, and what could never be. Birds. They taunted the men with their freedom, their graceful, weightless dance. They sang songs that no machine could match, and they went where they would, clinging to the sky when there were no more trees.
In their rage and envy, their anger at what eluded them, so simple, so stupid, so fragile, yet so inimitable, the men united one last time. Across the world, in each tiny beleaguered nation, each miniscule city state, the priests and preachers hurled the order from pulpits, to massacre the devils in feathered form that mocked men and their heavy boots that could never leave the ground.
And when the last little body lay limp and broken on the ground, the earth gave a final shudder and made an ending.
The plaster and paint gods knew nothing, and their bewigged and bedizened mouthpieces would never have understood, that the fretwork of frail and hollow birdbones held up the coping of the sky, and birdsong was the lifeblood of the earth.