4.22.22
Today’s Prompt – Use the following five words in your story:
4.08.22
Today’s Prompt – “It was a dark and stormy night…”
When the thunder came on like this, it was so easy to remember the drafty and dark cabin we’d shared all those years ago, and my heart squeezed the memories of Sissy and I as tightly as she would have squeezed my middle, all those years ago.
“The storm’s right up on us, Polly,” she would whisper in a voice that quavered, and her little form would jump against me as another clap sounded, and I would be glad for the darkness that concealed my grin.
“Now it ain’t either right up on us. Count with me.”
Together, we would track the number of “Mississippi’s” that filled the space between the booming thunder and the flashes of lightning, and I could feel tension drain from the little body as her grip on me simultaneously relaxed. Before long, my sweet little Sissy’s breathing would ease into the regular rhythm of sound sleep, and once that happened, even the angriest of the heavenly outbursts were not able to reawaken the worn out little frame.
Angriest of outbursts…
I contemplated why it was I always associated thunder with anger. I knew I wasn’t alone—I’d heard others mention it as “roaring.” It was the loudness of it, I reckoned, and the way it had an ability to shake you, in spite of yourself. The most benign way I’d ever heard it discussed was Papa’s unsurprisingly mild “rolling.”
I considered how it seemed everything was so green after a good storm, like the one we were getting tonight, and wondered if it were possible that I’d be able to think of thunder in a different way. Perhaps I could think of the thunder as one of God’s ingredients for a more verdant earth, reminding myself such a calamity was necessary in order to produce the kind of harvest we hoped for.
I decided to try my theory out on Sissy the next morning, when I knew that she, of all my siblings, would be the most delighted to wake up to everything so brightened and refreshed.
I kissed the top of her little head, then extricated myself from her embrace and rolled myself onto my side, to drift off to the sounds of the dark and stormy night.
That’s all for today!
4.01.22
Todays’ Prompt – Use the following 5 words in your story: Shenanigans, ridiculous, absurdity, frolic, jester
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There was nothing left for Corvis.
Sitting at the edge of the clearing, where he’d often sat with Tremula, sharing bread and cheese, he gazed upon the smoldering ruins of Drethblane castle and sniffled.
There was not another soul in sight.
Why had he left? Why, he silently opined, as the tears continued to fall, had he taken the journey into the land of the foreigner?
He looked down at his now seemingly ill-gotten gain – the leather bag which hed the new set of jugglers clubs, hewn from the smoothest wood he’d ever been privileged to touch.
Who would he juggle for now?
What had become of his master and his holdings?
Heaven only knew.
Corvis tilted his chin up to that unknown realm now, and cried words in the familiar convoluted mix of tongues which overtook him when making sense was not his first priority.
He longed to curse God but was too superstitious to do so. Instead he cursed fate, and worried it might be the same thing, so that his speech devolved into a convoluted mass of apologies and grievings and misgivings. The tears continued to fall and his chest heaved with sobs until he was too exhausted to say another word, and he fell forward onto the grass, and lay panting.
“Corvis!”
His hands went to his ears. Certainly, he’d gone too far with his cursings, and was now hearing his name in the mouths of the birds who inhabited the woods surrounding the clearing, and whose songs and calls and trills had awakened him at around this time each morning, back when things were right.
“Corvis, it is you!”
This time, there was no mistaking the words of his beloved, Tremula, with the calls of the birds.
“What? But how?” He breathed, as his eyes beheld the slender figure, racing toward him, her clothing a mess and her hair coming out of its wrap but otherwise seemingly unharmed.
Moments later she was in his arms, laughing, and the spasms of her body seemed contagious and then Corvis was laughing, too, but the tears kept coming, falling on her hair and making the places where he kissed the top of her head damp against his lips.
“I knew you would return,” she said, “I told them so. I insisted they leave me, and let me wait for you.”
‘But, how have you survived,” he meant to ask her, but then the plump and hunched form of Baba Nona crept out from the shadows, and he knew.
“She would never leave me, of course,” Tremula said, her head turning to see that Corvis had spotted the old nursemaid. “You know she’s been soft for me all these years, and without any young to look after, now that our lady has been wed these several years.”
“Besides,” she continued, with a pink glow rising in her cheek, “she would never leave me in my current state.”
Her hand moved to her stomach and her eyes met Corvis’s, meaningfully.
He dropped to his knees, pressed his face against his beloveds abdomen, and once again fell into his distorted manner of speaking an amalgamation of languages, this time in praise of the fates, and of the God whom he suddenly once again trusted and loved with all his heart.