“It’s going to be a dark flight.”
I looked at the man next to me. He didn’t look like the prophetic kind that would mutter sinister predictions. He didn’t look like a terrorist, either.
Not that one really knows what terrorists look like since they seem to come in all shapes, genders and sizes. Not all of us have the keen terrorist and weapon detecting eye of, let’s say, soon to be ex-President George W. Mass Destruction Bush.
To be on the safe side, I simply said, “Uhuh.”
He got out a paper bag, from which he extracted a pretzel.
My middle-aged freckled neighbor with the short blond hair continued, “There’s hardly a moon in the sky now.” Munch. “That time of the month.” Chew and swallow. “That’s why.” Another bite. “Of course, most people pull their shutters down anyway.” More munch. “Not me.” Swallow. “I can’t sleep on flights.” Bite and chew. “Never have been able to.” Munch. “How about you?”
– James Steerforth
An imaginary, hopefully not too far-fetched and somewhat amusing sketch on flight as prescribed by Writers Island.
At sunset, on the river bank, Krishna
Loved her for the last time and left…
That night in her husband’s arms, Radha felt
So dead that he asked, What is wrong,
Do you mind my kisses, love? and she said,
No, not at all, but thought, What is
It to the corpse if the maggots nip?
When I returned, I found a desolate home I hardly recognized – red carpeting with a diamond pattern I would have never picked, broken glass on the floor, an unknown red chair as the only furniture left. The windows looked different, half boarded up, one thin like an embrasure, and strange blue light seeping in. My plant had grown tremendously and was in motion, playing with a streak of blue light. Had I really lived in this place before? Now that I thought about it, I could not even remember how I’d gotten here and where I’d been. And you were gone. But who had you been? All that was left was longing – as undefined and wavering as the blue light.
Dug out of memory and hard disk and revised for Totally Optional Prompts’ REGIONAL POETRY theme. Goes back much further – to a trip taken in 1977/78.
Reality check note Moon Travel Planner says, “Finally you reach Tovara Springs, which well from the base of a verdant cliff. On one side a bamboo-sheltered palapa restaurant serves refreshments, on the other families picnic in a hillside pavilion. In the middle, everyone jumps in and paddles in the clear, cool water.”
It’s likely that things have changed since I visited in the late seventies – I remember these springs as a very small and modest place, without any sign of a hillside pavilion. It’s also quite possible that the dark glittering waters I remember in my poem are a figment of the dark glittering waters of memory.
While Mrs. Woo was parallel parking her husband’s car and, in doing so, drove it backwards, the right rear wheel bounced off the high curb with a thud and a screech – much to Mrs. Woo’s surprise.
Mr. Woo, that night, was not amused when Mrs. Woo told him about this event, which she called mysterious, and which had put a sizeable dent into the shiny new Lincoln’s body.
– James Steerforth
Written using the three words mysterious, parallel and bounce from 3WW LXXX.
You’re making life difficult beyond endurance. This time it’s me and gone – no arbitration. I’m off, and that’s gonna be where my music’s playing.
Never even heard of some of those things you wanted.
Frankincense! Pure nonsense. Why’d you want to enrich the stale air of your room with that? Holy smoke and mackerel. Went to several churches for it, including Catholic and Greek Orthodox. They wouldn’t give me any.
Balder Dash I looked up in the yellow pages, but they were rude to me when I asked if they had the miniature trojan horse you wanted in emerald green dogwood.
Your demands are a bottomless pit, you know that?
As for Jimmy and Jody: go play with those slimy salamanders yourself. They’ve gone pugnacious on me enough times. I still wear the scars.
I ain’t gonna play your trivial pursuits no more.
Crazy Mama, you have a fantastic week but I ain’t coming back no more, I’ve got another place to stay now. Carry likes me, even though you hate her guts. But I don’t give a hoot.
The 10 words to be woven into a text were: arbitration, music, salamanders, frankinsence, trojan horse, balderdash, bottomless pit, fantastic, pugnacious, Trivial Pursuit.
The novel ending this time is not to be guessed at. It is a giveaway for the reason that the word at One Single Impression this week is ‘laughter’ – which made me think of light laughter (the kind everyone enjoys) as well as dark laughter … or Laughter in the Dark, the title of a grim earlier novel by Vladimir Nabokov. It was originally written and published in Russian, then translated into English by the author himself and published six years after Kamera Obskura (the title of the Russian original of 1932).
“So that’s all,” he thought quite softly, as if he were lying in bed. “I must keep quiet for a little space and then walk very slowly along that bright sand of pain, toward that blue, blue wave. What bliss there is in blueness. I never knew how blue blueness could be. What a mess life has been. Now I know everything. Coming, coming, coming to drown me. There it is. How it hurts. I can’t breathe…”
He sat on the floor with bowed head, then bent slowly forward and fell, like a big, soft doll, to one side.
Stage-directions for last silenct scene: door – wide open. Table – thrust away from it. Carpet – bulding up at table foot in a frozen wave. Chair – lying close by dead body of man in a purplish brown suit and felt slippers. Automatic pistol not visible. It is under him. Cabinet where the miniatures had been – empty. On the other (small) table, on which ages ago a porcelain ballet-dance stood (later transferred to another room) lies a woman’s glove, black outside, white inside. By the striped soft stands a smart little trunk, with a colored label still adhering to it: “Rouginard, Hôtel Britannia.”
The door leading from the hall to the landing is wide open, too.
The evening I proposed to my girlfriend – the most gorgeous, most intelligent, most perfect, most patient, most exciting, most humorous, most lovable person I’ve ever known – turned into a night of revelation.
When I’d spoken, she took my hands and looked into my eyes.
“Before I’ll answer your question, there is something I have to tell you.”
“OK.”
“I’m not from this planet.”
“Yes, I’ve always known: you’re out of this world.”
“I am not kidding.”
“Where are you from, then?”
“Alpha Centauri.”
“Wait – that’s 25 trillion miles away, if I remember correctly.”
“Yes, about that.”
“It must have taken you light years to come here and be with me. And you must be a lot older than me. Like thousands or millions of years.”
“You think I’m joking, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what to say. This comes as a complete surprise.”
“You needed to know that I’m not like you.”
“But you are. Not exactly like me – you’re a woman, and beautiful and great and –”
She shook her lovely head.
“How could I convince you? Wait – I’ll travel to Alpha Cee and come right back.”
Before I could blink an eye, she had disappeared and returned. I wasn’t hallucinating. Her hands had left mine for a fraction of a second, and then their touch was back.
I was getting uneasy, and she could tell.
“How could you possibly be from so far away? At the speed of light, you’d be traveling eons. And there is nothing speedier than light. That’s a fact.”
She smiled enigmatically.
“Not true. There is something we call lyth. It has no speed component because it is immaterial. It’s what we use to travel.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re immaterial yourself? I know that’s not true, and you know it as well. We’ve touched each other, slept with each other, bumped into each other –”
All of a sudden I sat there by myself. My hands were still hollowed where they’d held hers.
“Sir, are you all right?”
“What?”
Our waitress had come to the table. I stared at her for a second.
“I’ll have another glass of that Bordeaux. – Say, did you see my companion leave just now?”
“Companion?”
“The woman I was with.”
Cora chose that moment to return.
“But isn’t that her?” the waitress said weakly.
Cora said, “I’d like another glass as well.”
“Did that convince you?” she asked when the waitress had left.
“Who and what are you?”
“I am who I am, but I can be anything I want to be.”
“You can? – Then show me. How about … can you be the rose in this vase?”
“Yes.”
Again she was gone, but the red of the rose brightened, and its petals moved. They sort of waved at me. And then Cora sat across from me again.
“This is too weird!”
“I knew it would seem strange to you; that’s why I had to tell you.”
The waitress brought our wine.
“Would you marry me anyway?”
“Would you still want me?”
they’re like sleeting rain, something that hits you lightly & obliquely, in an uneasy way between cold, cool and the thrill of the unknown, the thrill of not sure what to do with, and now I’ve got nearly seven minutes of fleeting gifts left, trying to think of a single one – perhaps fleeting glances that feel good because you know you’ve been noticed by someone for something that seemed worthwhile to them, like this morning – went and purchased a raisin and almond splinter wheat braid at the stand in front of the supermarket, went inside for further last-minute holiday stuff like butter and milk, I might have to serve breakfast to my son and his girlfriend, came out again and earned a glance of recognition from the Turkish girl who’d sold me the braid, I think she’s Turkish, I’ve heard her speak Turkish to her colleagues at the bakery … there’s a bakery inside the mall, the stand is only for special occasions, like this upcoming Easter, for which I bought the braid – did not buy a lamb, which they also had, or a rabbit. Briefly looked at the industrially dyed eggs in the supermarket, but the colors had suspicious E numbers, probably near poisonous, why ingest crap like that, but these are not very Easterly sentiments, merely those that occur during the Easter runup
– James Steerforth
This was written in seven minutes according to instructions at Cafe Writing:
Take seven minutes (use all seven, but don’t go over), and write on the subject of fleeting gifts. This is a timed exercise and it’s expected that it won’t be perfect. Any format - fiction, essay, verse - is acceptable.
Since Easter is in there and very close, I’m also using this to wish everyone a VERY HAPPY EASTER.
Nemesis is not only the name of the Greek goddess of revenge (divine retribution), but was also the code name for an act of human retribution: In a series of covert operations, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation had the Turkish masterminds of the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917, which resulted in the death of more than one million Armenians, assassinated from 1920 to 1922. See the Wikipedia article for details.
To this very day, the Armenian genocide is officially downplayed in Turkey, and Turkey continues to protest the formal recognition of the genocide by other countries. Wikipedia has an in-depth article on the Armenian genocide, one of the tragic events of the 20th century.
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933) by Austrian novelist Franz Werfel (1890-1945) gives a fictional account of the historical events.
Posted in response to Sunday Scribblings’ smorgasbord prompt, which included the nemesis theme.
Again, I’m letting someone else speak for me – this time it’s Joni Mitchell for the Circle prompt at One Single Impression. But yet again, this song is what came to my mind immediately (and no idea or image I felt like expanding on myself).
The Circle Game
Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star
Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, when you’re older, must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
Sixteen springs and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turn to car wheels through the town
And they tell him,
Take your time, it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down
(refrain)
So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through
(refrain)
– Joni Mitchell
(from Ladies of the Canyon, 1970)
Watch and listen to Joni Mitchell perform Circle Game in 1966:
One Single Impression’s invitation this time around is for ‘kindness’ – when I read that and the quotes from Kikaku and Basho, I had no idea what I could contribute. It took looking at whypaisley’s post to arrive at an inspiration, albeit an oblique one.
But I can’t find it in myself
To let my kindness go
I just can’t let it go …
This is, some readers might recognize it, a variation of three lines out of Jesse Winchester’s song My songbird – (”But I can’t find it in myself / To let my songbird go / I just can’t let her go”).
I often find that kindness is my first impulse, but then my questioning brain sets in, and the impulse is all that happens…
Here’s a video of Emmylou Harris performing the song:
It must be observed that when the old wretch my brother (husband) was dead, I then freely gave my husband an account of all that affair, and of this cousin, as I had called him before, being my own son by that mistaken unhappy match. He was perfectly easy in the account, and told me he should have been as easy if the old man, as we called him, had been alive. ‘For,’ said he, ‘it was no fault of yours, nor of his; it was a mistake impossible to be prevented.’ He only reproached him with desiring me to conceal it, and to live with him as a wife, after I knew that he was my brother; that, he said, was a vile part. Thus all these difficulties were made easy, and we lived together with the greatest kindness and comfort imaginable.
We are grown old; I am come back to England, being almost seventy years of age, husband sixty-eight, having performed much more than the limited terms of my transportation; and now, notwithstanding all the fatigues and all the miseries we have both gone through, we are both of us in good heart and health. My husband remained there some time after me to settle our affairs, and at first I had intended to go back to him, but at his desire I altered that resolution, and he is come over to England also, where we resolve to spend the remainder of our years in sincere penitence for the wicked lives we have lived.
“Your dalliance with that woman was never more than that.”
“For Christ’s sake, mother, she is my wife!”
“But you’re going to get a divorce. And you got married just last spring. That didn’t last. I knew it wouldn’t. And that’s the second time already. As if you were Picasso.”
“Yes, you knew. You badmouthed her from the start. Called her a sexpot and an animal. I know you did.”
“I knew right from the start. And she was no virgin, either, you’ve got to admit that.”
“Neither was I. And neither were you when you got married to my father.”
“That man! Don’t talk to me like that. I am your mother.”
“I know. And mother’s always right. I know – you’ve been telling me that ever since I can remember.”
But my comment had fallen on fertile ground – she shut up and left me alone. For the time being.
Is it possible to get divorced from one’s mother? Perhaps, if I’d done that at an early age, I would have been spared my marital and many other messes.
– James Steerforth
Note
The challenge from Cafe Writing for March (option #4) was to weave at least three out of seven words – spring, change, virgin, dalliance, fertile, nature, oil, crank – into some writing. I ended up using four in this ultrashort piece of flippant drama that is only partially inspired by real life.
In her suggestion for this week’s Totally Optional Prompts, the theme of which is A different voice, Tiel Aisha Ansari quotes several poems for inspiration. They include a translation of Adam by Federico García Lorca. I’m letting Jackson Browne speak as my different voice for Adam:
Song for Adam
Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him well
He was alone into his distance
He was deep into his well
I could guess what he was laughing at, but I couldn’t really tell
Now the story’s told that Adam jumped, but I’ve been thinking that he fell
Together we went traveling as we received the call
His destination India, and I had none at all
Well, I still remember laughing with our backs against the wall
So free of fear, we never thought that one of us might fall
I sit before my only candle, but it’s so little light to find my way
Now this story unfolds before my candle
Which is shorter every hour as it reaches for the day
But I feel just like a candle in the way
I guess I’ll get there, but I wouldn’t say for sure
When we parted we were laughing still, as our good-byes were said
And I never heard from him again as each our lives we led
Except for once in someone else’s letter that I read
Until I heard the sudden word that a friend of mine was dead
I sit before my only candle, like a pilgrim sits beside the way
Now this journey appears before my candle
As a song that’s growing fainter the harder that I play
But I fear before I end I’ll fade away
But I guess I’ll get there, though I wouldn’t say for sure
Though Adam was a friend of mine, I did not know him long
And when I stood myself beside him, I never thought I was as strong
Still it seems he stopped his singing in the middle of his song
Well I’m not the one to say I know, but I’m hoping he was wrong
I’m holding out my only candle, though it’s so little light to find my way
Now this story’s been laid beneath my candle
And it’s shorter every hour as it reaches for the day
Yes, I feel just like a candle in a way
I hope I’ll get there, but I never pray
This blog features several series of articles, among them "bland observations," "stellar poetry," "flowers" and "novel endings".
The novel endings are posted as a sort of competition or guessing game for visitors to tell the title and author of the novel. Refer to "Pages" below for hints and solutions.
At this point in time, I cannot offer prizes, but am considering to do so in the future.
