Relationships – This Jolly Beggar

The False Counselor

Word Count: 100
Genre: Fiction

The False Counselor

“What should I do?” she whined.

I met her vacuous eyes, pleased she always gave precedence to my words over others’.

“Forget her! Leave! She’s made her choices, now let her wallow in them!”

“Her children, my grandchildren. They’re still babies . . . .”

“Listen, dear, what’s she ever done to deserve your love?!” I asked, choking back my philosophical angst: can love be love if it’s only deserved?

Maybe she’d have abandoned them without my uttering a word.

But I did.

Now I walk as one divided, my head shorn, then healed, then shorn repeatedly by Hell’s demons.¹

¹The judgment described is taken from Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto 28, in which the poet describes the ninth ring of the Malebolge where makers of discord are condemned.

“So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” (James 3:5-9, bold italics mine)

Join the Friday Fictioneers at Rochelle Wisoff-Fields's place
and bring your own story (100 words or less) by clicking on the:

The Disappearing Man (story)

Genre: Fiction
Word Count: 100

The Disappearing Man

For the hundredth time, he recognizes this as the moment he loses her.

She looks out the window at the restless pecking of a wren, relaxes into its movements.

He sees the colors drain from his world, like an old timey flick on a spool ticking the moments until the screen fades into flecks of black and then, THE END.

It’s the moment to bow out, without fuss. It’s just a social experiment, marriage, though it’s lasted five years.

“Let’s skip the play and stay home,” she says, turning, and he, seeing the colors return, says, “I’m not going anywhere.”

No (Wo)man’s Land

Warning: Sensitive topic broached.
Björn at dVerse: MTB asks us to write a cadralor, which poetic form consists of "5, unrelated, numbered stanzaic images, each of which can stand alone as a poem, is fewer than 10 lines, and ideally constrains all stanzas to the same number of lines. Imagery is crucial to cadralore: each stanza should be a whole, imagist poem, almost like a scene from a film, or a photograph. The fifth stanza acts as the crucible, alchemically pulling the unrelated stanzas together into a love poem. By “love poem,” we mean that your fifth stanza illuminates a gleaming thread that runs obliquely through the unrelated stanzas and answers the compelling question: 'For what do you yearn?'" Click on Mr. Linky to join us.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

A bird cries over the tele-
phone wire, is it you? is it done?
over black shrouded head

Shiny pruning shears in her gloved
hands, methodically apply to de-
locate dead heads, snip, snip

There once was a small torso in a
womb severally dislodged by forceps
into medical waste

If death comes in slippered feet,
will they curl at the ends
or just your lips? Mother?

All the ghosts have left, barren
in winter, the autumn leaves twist
the sea breezes rustle in her mind.

The Load

Genre: Fiction; Word count: 100
Come along and join in with Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers.
Rochelle asks that we use the photo prompt (© Sandra Crook) 
and limit our words to 100 or less.

I counted them too, you know: every turn, every curve, every meter. Every pothole, aggravation, near disaster.

For what it’s worth, the load was never the point.

It was where I was going.

My only regret is you were stuck with me for every millimeter of it, and you hated it.

Life was too slow for you.

It was too fast for me.

I had a load to carry: responsibility to those who depended on me.

You were looking for an escape.

I was looking at the journey’s end.

I wish you could know now it was worth it.

Now I Know

Photo by **Merlin lightpainting** from **Pexels**

Now I know that poetry
is a razor blade
slipped into a caramel
dipped apple of
eve’s desire
sharp and tangy . . .

is as love’s wounding
rigor mortis of bites
ennui-soaked
languid post-mortem
of shamanic rites . . .

is a coroner’s tableau of victims
bodies stretched out on gurneys
for the inquest after the serial killer
slips free of the electric chair
because the judge knew his brother cain
at harvard law . . .

is hummingbirds and bats
dandelions, a lover’s hand
broken stalks, memories . . .

is my heart laid out across the sky
a constellation charted out of unknown
algorithms multiplied
to infinity
dove’s wings
rapidly beating
now.

Today Victoria is guest-hosting at dVerse: Meeting the Bar and asks us to write a "Solilo-Quoi?", paying extra attention to form or other poetic devices in our self-talk. Click Mr. Linky for more and join in.

Letter from the Past

Dear Rochelle and fellow Friday Fictioneers, This is my second stab at writing for this week’s prompt. I guess I must be out of practice: instead of fictioneering I ranted for a hundred words, posted then banished from inlinkz when I realized a piece of fiction it was not. Back to the photo prompt and finding my muse again. :>)

Genre: Fiction; Word count: 100
Come along and join in with Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers.
Rochelle asks that we use the photo prompt and limit our words to 100 or less. 
Click on the frog to read more stories.

Andrea gripped her husband’s hand tightly as Grace ripped open the letter. It was from her birth mother. The fifteen-year-old had made them promise to give it to Grace when she too reached fifteen.

You were loved every moment I carried you. Just wanted you to know that. There won’t be a moment when I don’t love you.

Sighing, Grace looked up from the blunt, childish scrawl, a smile on her face.

“I believe her. She could have thrown me away like a piece of garbage. Speaking of which, Dad, can we get back to fixing up my motorcycle?”

Unexpected

Today, make an opportunity to give someone an unexpected treat, someone who’s not expecting it, someone who’s in need of it, someone who’s outside the circle of your usual community.

As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.
Etty Hillesum (1914-1943)

For Cee's FOTD

The Accidental Rose

Seeing a rose, I once said that we stand out like that, red on green, and you reply, tongue-in-cheek, you mean like an ambulance at 3 AM in a Mississippi swamp and I shut up, crushed, like you’d said we were an accident that had been waiting to happen, as if crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end, just a screeching of brakes, a clang of metal, the jolting of bones, and then the long drawn out police report and insurance claims, a ledger of rights and wrongs, and the spindrift pages in the moonlit night where my heart spills and the nightingale vies with a shrike impaled on a thorny bush that ought to have a bloom, a rose, while someone, no one, looks for a medic to resuscitate the dead in an ambulance at 3 AM.

For Cee's FOTD 
and dVerse's Prosery where Merril asks us to use a line from a Jo Harjo poem, “Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end,” to write a 144-word piece of prose. Click on Mr. Linky and join in!

More Arms to Reach You

If I had more arms to reach You
Would that help? But You say,
Two will do now
To reach my neighbor.

Eyes upward, arms outward: Happy Lord’s Day

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
John 15:12

Check out more flower photography at Cee’s FOTD challenge for April 25, 2021

The Only Way

Word Count: 100; Genre: Realism

The Only Way

“You’re in my world now. What do you think of it?”
“Like a fish out of water. Like I stand out in an unpleasant way, like I don’t belong.”
“Does that offend you? Want out?”
“Not really. I mean, it’s not your world I want. It’s you.”
“To know me is to know the world I came from. You understand?”
“I do. But you’re still missing the point. It’s you that makes my idiotic world and yours worth knowing. I couldn’t care less otherwise.”
“So our ‘love covers a multitude of sins’, in both our worlds?”
“It’s the only way.”

Rochelle Wisoff-Fields very kindly invites us to join the Friday Fictioneers in their weekly creative quests of a hundred words or less prompted by a photo.

Click on the frog to join the party!