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Arditezza

Arditezza

Gender : Female Pisces Posts : 274
Join date : 2014-11-20
Age : 52
Location : Midwest

Short Prose Empty
PostSubject: Short Prose Short Prose EmptyTue Aug 18, 2015 2:55 pm

Oceans Between Us

She stood there, arms outstretched and firmly holding on to the door frame as her toes wriggled forward to see how far she could get to the edge without slipping. Feeling the warm sun on her face and the gentle breeze buffering her from side to side swinging her whole body with a gentle rocking, she glanced down at the vast blue water below. It churned and eddied with a light force, and she could smell it’s humidity on the air. Her breath deepened as she contemplated just leaping forward into the unknown. It was safe inside the white room with it's wooden , and no one could touch her there. The walls were soft to the touch, and absorbed her thin voice as she sang as well as it absorbed her sobbing cries. There were cool crisp white pillows stuffed with down strewn all over the floor, as well as big down comforters to hide under.

In her mind, pictures flow continuously like a drawn out movie and she could live in each moment briefly. The sounds of the water lapping gently at the dock as she hooked her first worm with her dad at her side and felt the tug of her first perch on the line. . The rubbery, fishy smell of grandpa’s waders after a long day fly fishing. The gentle swoosh sound of grannies deep freeze and the feel of the cold air flowing over her fingertips as she delved in for ice cream in the warm summer heat. The scent of honey colored cedar paneling that edged the hallways and the glistening swordfish dueling each other for a place on her grandparents basement wall. The vibration of the electric trains as father and daughter stood side by side and polished the tracks with tiny erasers before driving out with the wind in her hair to catch the California Zephyr in all it’s restored glory. Deep crimson velvet seats, the little tables and their clean white linens. The taste of wild blueberries on her tongue in pancakes she and her father made together after braving the loons at dawn to pick them in the warm summer air. The creak of leather on her poppa’s chair as he watched the baseball game and peered down at her with skeptical eyes. The smell of the deep oriental carpets and wood polish that wafted through their home, and the feel of her grandma’s long hot pink nails tickling her back. The taste of a plum, eaten on a warm fall day after riding cool water rapids and chasing waterfalls.

So many memories to shield her from all the pain. To protect her as if they knew that deep down inside she was still a vulnerable child. Not ready to jump from the ledge, too afraid to fall and much too far away from the visions she fills her nights with. The world outside her door seems inviting and exciting, full of color and light. A promise of adventure and stories to pass down, should she ever need one. But she closes the door, and goes back to thumbing through her mental sensory album, happy to be here until the world crumbles around her. And if the world should fall, so be it. She is safe here, and only the loneliness can drive her over the edge, the silence edges her towards the door again, the lack of touch darkens the room and she tries to sleep it away, only to awake in a nightmare of her own making. Carefully, she tears those pages from her book of memories and drops them through the hatch into the sea below.

The dark tomb of water where her adult lives, in sorrow deep under the depths of the tears she has wept in silence. Debris of all the pages torn out of the book of memories that were too hard to bear float around her, and those words sink into her like lead and numb the mind. The sounds muffled by the salted sea, amplifying only within her mind until her throat is ripped raw and she gives up in defeat. The soles of her bare feet, too bruised to walk and the muscles of her arms too sore to lift herself off the dirty floor on which she sleeps. She holds on to the rope that suspends her inner child above the sea; away from the drowning depths that could swallow her whole. This one holds her prisoner, she is both afraid of the light and afraid of letting the cage drop into the sea in case she has forgotten how to swim. With no sight of land, she is unsure of the swim and knows that she has no wings to fly as they were severed when she was a child. She is anchored here, tending to all that is on the earth. All that ties her to this world and all she has borne upon it. Her arms are tired with the weight of it but she endures because the water is warm and pushes gently at her from all sides, making her feel safe. No bullet can penetrate, and she cannot hear the world around her trying to sway her resolve.

The twins, neither existing in reality, one dutifully shut inside her own fears and the other a blissful dreamer of past and present. They stare at each other through the waters, each comfortable and conflicted and waiting for the other one to make the first move.

_________________

When your arguments are guided by your conclusions, you aren't doing philosophy, you are merely demonstrating your bias.
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PostSubject: Re: Short Prose Short Prose EmptyWed Aug 19, 2015 1:59 pm

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Arditezza

Arditezza

Gender : Female Pisces Posts : 274
Join date : 2014-11-20
Age : 52
Location : Midwest

Short Prose Empty
PostSubject: Re: Short Prose Short Prose EmptyWed Aug 19, 2015 4:58 pm

A Storm of Steel and Sorrow

The dusty breeze seeps through the old wood slats to brush the hair from my forehead with its warm dry hand.  
You can hear its intent creaking through the boards that hold themselves together better than I have these past
few months.  The sound of their empathy echoes deep in the heart of me and I want to take their strength for my
own.  To shore up all the empty spaces in my soul that were once light touched and filled with laughter but are
now nothing but the tumbling of hay across the dirt floor and the tears that streak through the rusty rivulets in the
roof.  The silence that comes with the dawn is the hardest fog I walk into each morning, and I always wonder if I’ll
make it to sunset without shattering. Now time stopped encapsulated in my memory and stuck itself somewhere
in the cobwebbed rafters amongst its myriad of inhabitants, both living and dead.

It had been months since I came home, often ambling through streets of towns that had no name but looked very
much like the center of town here.  Each barn seemed similar to this one except for the history that sung out from
every inch of the place when I came near to it. From the tricycle that lay on its side with a torn shoelace stuck
wound in the bearings, to the tractor with ceased motor.  I never much had a hand for mechanical things, since my
own father was so good at keeping this place running.  Looking up, I can still see the patch he had made in the
steel rooftop from when the tree had fallen on the barn some sixty odd years ago.  The tree stump still lay in the
side yard, dried and grey with age the way my father had looked lying in the casket when was a wild teenager
and pregnant with my first child.

Mother had died years earlier from being trapped here for too many years, and now this prison had passed to its new
warden and my unborn gift.  We spent weeks sweeping up the stalls and trying to figure out how we were going to
make do with what we had been given and marriage seemed like the next logical step in that evolutionary process.
We only had a few weeks before the draft card came by mail and he was gone for a country I’d never even read about
in textbooks.

I would watch the barn out my dingy bedroom window, waiting for the doors to swing wide open and my father to set
out for the fields on his prized tractor.  I could smell the diesel up here, even as the rain slipped down the window pane
and gathered its courage at the sill before dropping to the earth below.  I could hear my husband tossing and turning in
the bed, as if being tortured by the demons he brought home in the pocket where his heart once laid beating.  I wonder
how many minutes I would have left with him before he’d wander out into the dark of night to search in vain for his
salvation.  Startled by the banging of the barn door swinging open, I ran down the stairs and slipped on my rain boots
and slicker before rushing out the door to check the animals and shut the barn up safe.  Once inside, the reality settled
in and the empty barn screamed its silent memories through my head and straight into my stomach where it burned a
hole. My arms felt so empty in their loneliness that the weight of them was too much for my heart to bear and it spilled
my anguish down my cheeks and dripped dark spots of wet dirt around my feet.  I walked outside to use the old pump
to rinse my reddened face with the cool water that I had played in when I was a child.  That well had born so many
families that it had now run dry as much from disuse as from neglect like the barn and my own body.  It’s my father’s
hands that I see when I look down at the water that never fills them.

I don’t know why I had come back here. I had meant to run away and escape as everyone else had done by death or
desperation, but something held me here. Perhaps it was the way the birds outside sounded like the cries of a baby, or
the smell of fresh hay sometimes crept over the hills from the working neighbors farms.   Those new farmers, whose
rooms once looked like the one at the top of this house, filled with old rock posters and American flags but who had their
own father’s guidance to keep them from taking up arms in another country while their old barns fell.  I leaned against
the doorway, tired from the work of tidying up my soul and looked out at the fetid fields that hadn’t born crops in years
now. Picking up my broom again, I began sweeping up the ghosts that I had left to dry in the light that slipped through
the rusted holes in the roof.  I could smell the rain on the air and said a silent prayer to the storm clouds that filled my
heart in hopes that they would finally topple this old barn and set me free to pass I don’t know how long I had sat in this
old broken rocking chair with the box full of colorfully ribboned medals clutched to my chest, my long white hair waving
in the gentle breeze.  

Tucking the bit behind my ear with a gnarled hand, I smiled to myself as the warmth of the sun caressed my aging cheek.  
I counted them again, making sure that each medal was placed in my memory among the rock posters on the walls of my
heart, the soft curls of the blond hair on the tricycle that circled round the barn floor, and the child’s laughter throwing hay
down on the cows from the rafters in my mind. The sudden wreckage of the barn came twenty years past my prayers, but
it was a beautiful sight to my wearied soul and the sounds of decaying timber filled my heart with gladness replacing the
deafening silence. My wrinkled eyelids fell in to place over eyes that had felt decades of sad loneliness. In the distance, the
ghosts watched the blanket and box slip from my lap to the floor as the full sun and everything found its place on the earth.

_________________

When your arguments are guided by your conclusions, you aren't doing philosophy, you are merely demonstrating your bias.
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