Thanks to Sonya from Only 100 Words for hosting #3LineTales. Also thank you to Sarah from MindLoveMisery’s Menagerie for hosting Saturday Mix. This week her Double Take homophones are: band – a musical group and banned – forbidden; cent – one hundredth of a dollar, scent – an aroma, and sent – dispatched.
Credit: Thomas Shellberg via Unsplash
A person can catch the voices of yesterday in the stars where the decayed farm house sags, where a band sings, playing the fiddle, and the scent of bread lingers with rotting wood; King George pennies are scattered on the floor, one cent coins forgotten with a monarch dead, no longer minted with the current Queen, Elizabeth II.
The prairie nights of old linger here, where joy and sorrow blend with relief, moving from a run-down house banned, deemed unsafe by housing inspection; a gleaming modern farmhouse replaces it nearby, but the old one is left to rot with a sense of nostalgia from the farmer’s elderly father.
A person can picture the dances and parties, dead relatives and friends sitting around the table, the young boys sent out to chase the horses who’d escaped the field, into the neighbors pastures; the past clings to this house as it does to the stars above, both from a time long forgotten.
For November Notes Day 11 the song is “What About Us” by P!NK. I’m combining prompts with Mish from #dVerse Poet’s Pub Quadrille poetry form prompt using the word/theme rock.
Three hours into the desert [Sandra felt the jeep’s] engine choke and buckle, rolling dark smoke into the pale blue sky.
“Are you kidding me?” Sandra asked her husband Jim. “We’re going to the Grand Canyon something people do all the time from Vegas and the damn Barbie jeep breaks down? Don’t they maintain these things, check that they’re working before they leave us in the open desert?”
Jim gazed at his wife his eyes half closed. The temperature was a sizzling 45 degrees Celsius and growing up in Toronto’s cold winters meant he didn’t handle the heat well. Sandra’s harping made Jim feel that much worse, sweating prufesly in the leather seat beside her.
“Jim, Jim? Are you even listening to me? How long is it going to take for them to send another jeep? Why is everyone else so mellow about this? It gets cold in the desert at night and what about the snakes and scorpions?”
Jim groaned out load and Sandra gave him a dirty look. “Sandy, its hot right now,” he mumbled. “We’ve no air conditioning and if it gets cold soon that would be great for everyone. I’m sure the tour company will find us soon. Our jeep’s Barbie pink as you say.”
“Oh and could you calmdown? You’re frightening the elderly couples,” he said whispering into Sandra’s ear as to not offend the two couples nearby.
Sandra gave Jim a weird look then continued yapping. The tour guides who had been on the radio the last hour with their company were now glaring at Sandra as they too sufferered in the heat and from her constant questions.
The older couples had it the worst, Jim thought. No one wanted any of them to undergo heat stroke since the temperature seemed to affect the four of them the most. Sandra’s constant complaining wasn’t helping the matter.
“Simmer down, lady,” one guide told Sandra,”This happens sometimes. Another jeep is a couple of hours away, if you can control yourself until then.”
Sandra didn’t care, she kept talking.
Jim was surprised when a lady in her seventies, named Meg, smacked Sandra’s face hard. So hard he could see the red outline of the woman’s hand on Sandra’s sweaty cheek. Sandra was so shocked she didn’t say another word except to ask for a bottle of water every couple of hours.
Megan winked at Jim and said: “Nothing like a good smack in the face. I think the heat was getting to your wife. She seems to be okay now that I smacked her and that she’s drinking water instead of talking.” Jim laughed bumping fists with feisty Meg.
“Okay?” Jim asked Sandra later.
“Yeah good now, just a little panic attack I think. The heat was getting to me.”
Jim laughed at this stroking Sandra’s back.
The evening sky in the desert turned from twilight into glittering black with giant stars. All eight people in the jeep sighed with pleasure as the blistering heat cooled and they were awed by the fantastic celestial bodies.
When another pink jeep arrived the next morning, no one complained about the heat or Sandra. Both problems had been eclipsed by the perfect temperature and the starry night viewed under them.
Thanks to Dylan of MindLoveMisery’s Menagerie‘a First Line Friday Prompt. The first line from last Friday was: “I’m going to tell you how I lost my inheritance.” For NaPoWriMo the prompt is to write a nocturne which is a poem/song about the night. For A to Z Challenge, today’s letter is O for a GoodRead’s quote.
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Credit: Arial Estrulin – Travel and Landscape Photography
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“You don’t have to be dead to leave a legacy. — Onyi Anyado”
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I’m going to tell how I lost my inheritance, how my legacy rides in tides as the full moon rises,
How the night stole my humanity and hammered my soul a blow.
The dusk covered the light, liquid tar blanket bestowed,
The sun hid himself away, way down in western wilds of woe.
A sinking feeling settled in and a certain chorus began to ring,
A range of notes, a rising crescendo of riveting lyrical prose.
A poet’s words possessing her, when she knows full well,
The powerful pull of the midnight hour.
And the pressing provocative lure as the moon glows,
A white orb that won’t warble, a strong luminious light,
Residing over all as every full moon does.
To be host over the howling wolves, the healthy youths as they prowl,
The dark delights of the night distend into the dimest parts of every soul.
A choir of banshees brazenly taking souls salaciously, the maids from their beds,
The hour of the demons drawing back to their victims with wet bloody lips;
The incubus raging and awaking the wild within their prey.
And all is a lure, an image not clear, all this is imagined,
All this is frightening, foretold in nightmares.
The affected awake in the morning from the pleasure and pain,
From satisfied appetites, appalling in the dank aptitudes of night.
Night swells and swallows herprey wholly, partaking and doping with her starry glow,
Inviting the worst from the wise, even ill from the innocent.
Yet a moral being cannot mean to say, night has had her way and ‘I’ had no say;
It’s easy to give in with ease, to isolate one’s self to enthralling entertainments, inscribed darkly now on souls.
And what’s done in the night when the moon is full and fat, cannot be told for it stays hidden on those nights, when the wildest ones escape.
The vampires and the wolves, the creatures we know not of, and humans do not stay humble ether — they choose to fly with the fallen.
A nocturne of night will tell you what power presumes to hide beneath an inky black veil,
It’s not pure evil, it’s the usual kind, who chooses to dance with the devil, and forget their choices their choosing for charm and wine.
For tequila and vodka, for him and her, and whisky burning down your throat as the howls of the night combine with a loss of memory;
And we all awake mid-afternoon, no one knowing the peculiarities of such a night, a full out frightening moon.
Only a feeling, a shiver, a prayer, as the moon fades from brilliance, she is trapped, unwillingingly held as she wanes us back into morality.
The light of the sun salutes from the east and all is forgiven in harmony and health, angelic nebulas, skys of blue birds, and Bambi deers galloping.
Woe is the wicked night on the full moon, but how much greater is the morn after malevolence is perpetually destroyed,
Yet oh, how we miss the fun of bliss in the dark — no thoughts, no reason, just acceptance to absorb the pleasures of night’s nocturnal nightmares.
“The LaCharta, created by Laura Lamarca, consists of a minimum of 3 stanzas with no maximum length stipulation. Each stanza contains 6 lines. The syllable count is 8 per line in iambic tetrameter and the rhyme scheme is aaaabb ccccdd eeeeff and so on. “La” is Laura Lamarca’s signature and “Charta” in Latin, simply means “poem”.”
1. “It was dusk and the light had an ultra-violet quality to it, a final burst of pigmentation as night and day rushed at each other in a clash of colour prisms before darkness finally, inevitably won out.”
― Karen Swan, Christmas in the Snow
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2. “The dance between darkness and light will always remain— the stars and the moon will always need the darkness to be seen, the darkness will just not be worth having without the moon and the stars.”
― C. JoyBell C.
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3. “But if I’ve learned anything, it is that goodness prevails, not in the absence of reasons to despair, but in spite of them; if we wait for clean heroes and clear choices and evidence on our side to act, we will wait forever . . . [life] . . . teach[es] me that people who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness, and contend openly with darkness all of their days; [… they] were flawed human beings, who wrestled with demons in themselves as in the world outside; [for] me, their goodness is more interesting, more genuinely inspiring because of that reality; [the] spiritual geniuses of the ages and of the everyday simply don’t let despair have the last word, nor do they close their eyes to its pictures or deny the enormity of it’s facts; [they] say, “Yes, and …,” and they wake up the next day, and the day after that, to live accordingly.”
