Unspeaking but in sync
Entwined across a room they sit
Understanding bonds them, stronger than words express
The artist and the muse, each one to the other
Together they are lost
Lost in each other, in themselves
Lost from this world
All they have is pure
Each loves, and it matters not who
Only, completely, that they do
[My friend wrote a poem. Then I rewrote it, changing every word but keeping the meaning and the precise 100 word total. I won’t say which is which just now, because I’m not certain I can remember. Maybe half of you reading (yes you, not not you) should scroll down and read the second one first. Anyway, thoughts? Which do you prefer? Does it even matter? Can we just appreciate both. Answers on a postcard (gosh, that would be romantic).]
House of Hope #1
Bowing, bending beams and walls
‘Tread softly’ I repeat,
‘Take care’, broken bricks and mottled mortar
Sharp silhouettes and angles fill the gloom
Leering out, reaching up
Beyond the boundaries of candlelight;
Passageways take shape
The soft hum that signals slow collapse,
Pierced with urgent screeching,
Timber snaps and starts the descent,
Gradual, but gathering, past every path,
Each side taken, each challenge faced
Even challenges I couldn’t face.
Collapsing.
Building blocks, cracked with age,
Shape undecided, indeterminate, growing and decaying.
A hollow whisper whistles round dead end corners
For each one that got away
The blueprint for my past
House of Hope #2
Great groaning husk of building
Proceed slowly,
Carefully, rotten wood and blackened timber
Strange angles and shadows in the darkness
Looming forwards, extending upwards
Further than light’s glow can show;
Corridors unfurling
Gentle murmur of slow decay,
Broken occasionally by a more destructive leap,
A beam breaks and begins its fall,
Its slow, sonorous fall, down all the passageways of your life,
The choices made, the bridges crossed,
The bridges you turned away from.
They fall.
The wood creaks under the pressure of time,
The structure changing, shifting, morphing, parts falling.
An empty wind blows through the broken house
The unredeemable moments
Architecture of your life
Hey there you wonderful people!
So my housemate and I had another short story competition, as outlined in my previous post about Vocal.
Now I don’t want to insist you read my work on some other site, so you can read it below if you want! This is how this one’s going down:
If you want to support me by reading the piece on Vocal, just click here. You’ll earn me like $0.003 and I’ll be super grateful. My housemate’s piece, for comparison, is on Vocal too.
[fun aside: Vocal has a ton of different categories, and you have to pick one for each piece, and they all come with a range of preset tags, so I can’t be my usual inventive tagging self. This one’s in the ‘Criminal’ category and tagged ‘fiction’, ‘guilty’, and ‘mafia’.]
If you’d rather read it here, just read on! No hard feelings. The piece is in full below, with the prompts used, and some chat, at the end. Enjoy!
Forbidden Beauty
I’ll tell you how I died, and you can tell me why. The cause was simple enough: a fall from as great a height as the 13-story Lindenberg Building will wreak havoc with anyone’s structural integrity.
Excuse the jargon—even in death I’m a typical engineer. So how I got mixed up in all this is beyond me.
It started when I met Grace, the born-again Christian evangelist, behind the scenes on her show. I was there advising the production company on the new stage they were building specifically for Grace’s energetic and dramatic performances. She used ‘the power of God’ to heal the sick and crippled live on prime-time TV, and to bring in millions of dollars in pledges, naturally.
Of course, Grace was as beautiful and charming as you’d expect, but she was a celebrity, you know? At first, I thought nothing of my crush. But as the weeks past, and we saw each other more and more, I started to get the impression Grace felt the same way.
One day, I let my touch linger on her arm a moment too long. She turned, looked me square in the eyes, and mouthed, “Patience.” I didn’t need to wait long. The next day, she invited me for a drink after work in a discreet bar downtown. From there, a chauffeur took us back to her place. The night was a first for me, but not for Grace, I learned.
All of this did not sit well with the man about town: Jack “White Baby” Lindenberg, head of the Faith Network Guild. It was his money, or his family’s, that ultimately funded Grace’s show, and that was no coincidence. He’d apparently had his eye on her from the start, and well before I arrived on the scene. I was told by reliable witnesses she had not reciprocated. It was one of those reliable witnesses, I’ve no doubt, who also took news of my blossoming romance with Grace back to Jack.
Someone had seen us backstage, snatching a kiss between shoots. We heard them scuttle off, but didn’t see who. We laughed it off.
A day later I found myself invited up to Jack’s penthouse apartment atop the Lindenberg Building where the studio was housed. After a few drinks from his extensive collection, Jack invited me out to the roof to ‘admire the view’.
“Sure is a beautiful sight,” he mused as we looked out over the city. “I love beauty, you know? I’ll do anything to keep hold of it.”
The statement sounded odd, and I turned and searched Jack’s face with my eyes. I knew he didn’t like people looking at him, given the skin disfigurement that earned him his nickname—a curiosity in a noble black family. But I figured I was in too deep anyway.
There was cold resolve in those eyes. A bodyguard stepped from the shadows.
“I’m sorry, Angie,” he said to me as the hulking great man approached. “But I can’t let you take her.”
[502 words]
[prompts: “It’s a boy!”; from a great height; Grace, the born-again Christian; Jack “White Baby” Lindenberg, head of the [] guild]
[Once again, this is the result of a bit of friendly competition between me, my housemate, and our latest competitor, his girlfriend. Find the full explanation with the first piece I wrote, Division. We added a few new prompts to the disc, drew four again, and gave ourselves around 15 minutes—the buzzer this time was when a friend we were expecting rang the doorbell. The eagle-eyed among you will notice I missed a prompt! So I may or may not be DQ’d. Still, hope you enjoyed it!]
[I won’t be putting my housemate’s entry on here, because it’s his, so I’ll just give you the Vocal link. Of course, reading his and not mine on Vocal puts him ahead in our competition, so if you read his, please at least click through to mine here :)]
Underneath the sky, bright and boundless,
gently reaching down to hold the Earth once more.
Underneath the sky, in amongst the Life, they lie.
Sprawled amongst the heather, their laughter rings like bells and birdsong.
Natural, here they fit and feel alive.
Nature watches without judgement; the only witness to all they do
and do not do, to all they create, destroy and create again.
Busy city streets are far behind, the unkind looks left there as well.
No hushed ironic whispers, no raised eyebrows.
Here, and maybe even here alone, they live and laugh and love as they’ve longed to all their lives.
Urges kept in check before run free and fire fills their souls.
All day they play, at night they keep the cold at bay.
Bracken burns in a merry blaze, warm hazy glows on warm contented faces.
Darkness brings the owls and bats, dancing through the firelight.
Exhausted, they fall back into the landscape, and
sprawl amongst the heather, nothing can touch them.
My name is Skylance 