The Silent Room, Part 14

Prompt from Copper: “[his] eyes were beginning to flash with lights-- spots of pink and purple, yellow, and even a few sparkling silver fireflies.”

Grenfelder

Grenfelder wanted a nap. 

It had taken him the better part of a day… or maybe it had been days, plural… to make his way back out of the hold of the recreated fantasy world and to remember the burning paper with its strange list of items. 

In fact, had he not come across a small patch of Johnny Jump Ups with their cheery yellow and purple faces, he might never have remembered. Johnny Jump Ups had been the one bone of contention between his grandfather and his mother and the topic of many a friendly argument. She adored them and planted them everywhere she could get them to grow in their gardens at home. She had even tried to pot them up for their kitchen table once. His grandfather, however, had absolutely despised them. No mocking little dandies for him when he could have a rose of any variety instead. Even as he stared at them and watched them dissolve into a low clump of pale pink fairy roses it had begun to niggle at his brain and bring him back into an awareness of the false nature of the gardens.  He had been tired before he had started.  Now he was beyond exhausted.

Geraniums, Stone, Blue checkered... something.  He turned the list over in his mind again, looking for something, anything else.
 

There were no geraniums and no blue checkered anything hiding in this garden that he could find. And the stones, there was such an abundance of stones. The impossibility pressed in on in him.

He started the list of his process over again in his mind as he circled the garden again.

He had started first with the eight stones in the main path. It was definitely none of those. 

After that he'd moved on through the rest of the stones lining the pathways. It was none of those either.

Then he had moved on to the hundreds of smaller rocks and stones incorporated into the gardens. His grandfather had apparently found it necessary to incorporate every stray rock and flat stone and brick that came his way into his design plan. It made for beautiful borders, enchanting walkways, and fascinating fountains. But it also made for hard going to find just one, particular, out-of-place stone. 

Twilight was settling in now, and his eyes were beginning to flash with lights-- spots of pink and purple, yellow, and even a few sparkling silver fireflies. His hands were cut and bleeding; he was beginning to feel a bit faint from adrenaline and lack of food. 

Apparently being in a world all in your head didn't save you from the real world difficulties of not eating and running your bare hands across the surface of rock after rock. For a moment the cupboard doors from the first room hovered before his eyes, cracked open brimming with all of his favorite foods. If only he had taken to time to eat first before he had picked up that flour jar. Even now, he could leave his search in the garden and go in to the kitchen with its cheery apricot walls and freshly baked chocolate cookies. He tried to push the thought away even as his eyes drifted shut in longing. A warm chocolate chip cookie melting on his tongue, soft and gooey, the chocolate oozing...

He rounded a corner near the mermaid fountain on yet another circuit of the garden and saw with relief a bench hiding in among the lush greenery of a weeping cherry. It looked broad and solid enough to take his weight. A chance to rest. 

 With a sigh of relief he settled himself down onto the rock studded concrete bench, his foot scuffing forward against one of the paving stones making up the pathway as he sat. And promptly fell through it with a hard resounding thump. He struck his head on something in the fall. There was a haze of pain, the world narrowing in, and then everything went black.

The Silent Room: Part 13

WNP: There was no one in the rest stop, but the parking lot was full.

(The prompt doesn't obviously connect to the actual writing, but I think I took the feeling/sounds of emptiness and silence and things not quite adding up in writing this)

Number 11

Number 11 had been walking for hours. The sun had passed high and hot and was deep into the sweltering, burning part  of the day.  He must have started out in the morning, though he hadn't realized it from the height of the sun.

Sweat ran in rivulets down his arms and back, down the backs of his knees and calves. The heavy fabric of his coveralls itched and stuck, pulling at him as he walked.  He wished he could strip and leave the coveralls behind. Wished he had brought the coffee thermos with its two swallows of coffee with him. It would have been extra weight to carry, but it would have given him the hope of finding water to fill it with.   Whenever he found water that is. Even a muddy creek was sounding appealing at the moment.

The last of the cheese biscuits had been eaten up some time after the morning heat had made it clear that the biscuit would either disintegrate into inedible particles or be saturated with his own sweat if he waited too long. He had opted to eat them.  After that he had forced himself to be thankful for the napkin to wipe his sweat away rather than regretful. He lifted his feet in perpetual motion, forcing away the memory of the biscuits and the coffee. Again.

The field went on and on ahead of him.   Rows of turned earth running away from him as if he was the center of its universe. Ahead of him a distant row of trees lined an edge that never arrived.  He was starting to feel as if he was caught in as endless a repeating loop as the one he had left behind.  For a moment he would start to feel as if the trees were drawing closer. Then, energy restored, he would take a few more sure steps forward... only to find that somewhere in those few steps the world had shifted slightly and the trees were as far away again as they had ever been. 

He thought about dropping his napkin, just to see if he came on it again a half mile further down this dusty imprint he was calling a track.  Even as he thought it, he pressed it to his forehead and watched as the trees literally shifted away from him as he walked toward them.

He stopped. Lack of food and water was obviously getting to him.

He turned in a slow circle, taking in the vastness of the fields, looking for any deviation or change.  The fields with their neat exact rows stretched seamlessly away from him.  Trees rimmed the distant edges in all directions, except for the one from where he had come.  He turned back toward the direction he had come, staring at the even rows as if they could speak and give him answers if only he knew the right questions to ask. The house itself was no longer visible.  He had another choice to make.

Keep going forward with no food and no water and not even a hint of forward motion toward anything that resembled people and where he would be forced to sleep on the hard packed earth under the wide open sky.  Or return back to that strange empty house with its haunting demon dreams and its slim possibility of food and water.   The basket of food this morning represented that someone knew he was here. Or there.  Maybe they would come back again.   Could he face dreaming again if it meant someone gave him food?

 

His shoulders slumped, and with the exhausted plod of someone past the end of his reserves and running on brute willpower alone, he began the long walk back the way he had come.

The Silent Room Part 12

Number 11

Life felt like it was set on endless repeat. Though it had probably only been a day at most.  Maybe two.  Maybe... but no. It must only have been a day. Except the sun had set at least once in there. Hadn't it? It was just so the never-ending same that he couldn't keep track of where he was, let alone where the sun was.  Climb down the ladder. Wonder around looking for something new. Get too tired to keep the eyes open. Climb up the ladder. Fall asleep to dream of being chased by spidery men.  Dark. Light it didn't matter. It was irrelevant to the cycle.  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.  With a groan he struggled to his feet and headed for the ladder again. Even if he was too tired to safely get down the ladder, he couldn't take another dream.

Surprisingly, when he reached the bottom of the ladder, there was something new.  A basket, neatly covered over with a  blue checked napkin, was sitting comfortably in the center of porch.  So someone had been here in his sleep while he was busy fighting  the monsters in his dreams.  To bad he hadn't heard them. Maybe he could have gotten a ride out of here.  Then again, if they had left him food, they had also known he was here... and left him all the same in this dreary place with its phantom ghosts and lack of amenities.

He shoved it roughly toward the steps with his foot, afraid it would turn into something else. What he didn't know. The dreams were getting to him. It didn't.  He nudged it one more time just to be sure, then settled down on the top step next to it to examine its contents.  A moment later, his entire world had righted.

"Food!"

The basket was filled with soft flaky cheese biscuits still steaming from the oven, a container of pan fried brussel sprouts with bacon and pears, a small jar of what turned out to be the best peach jam he had ever tasted in his life, a thermos of hot sweetened coffee.  A strange mix perhaps, but he dug in with gusto, nearly moaning after every bite.  He only had two biscuits left and a few swallows of coffee left in the thermos when it occurred to him that perhaps he should have rationed the food a little better. Apparently hours, days, without food and little sleep, a sleep laced with a hoard of chasing hooded figures, had left him too famished to think that far ahead.

With regret he forced himself to wrap up the last two biscuits in the blue checked napkin and put the cap back on the coffee thermos.  Then he looked out at the grass lawn and the endless field with its dusty rows. 

Within moments he felt the overwhelming fatigue begin to weight him down again.

He shot to his feet. No, he wasn't staying here to fall asleep again.  He refused.  He needed to be up and moving and DOING something. He looked around desperately for something that might qualify as needing doing.  Besides taking the ladder down.  There was nothing but emptiness.  He took off around the building in four quick laps, racing the feeling of lethargy tugging at his bones, pulling him down.  Back at the front steps, the ladder beckoned the next stage of the repeat. Sleep. But someone had been here while he slept. Who? Where?  He didn't know, but he was going to find out.

With sudden decision, he picked up the napkin holding the biscuits where he had left them and pushed them into his shirt.  With a swift about face he headed away.  A moment later, he was down at the edge of the field carefully examining the ground for any signs of where a vehicle or a walker might have come to bring him his basket of breakfast.  

At last he found a faint track running out across the even rows of turned earth.  Yes, he decided, it did look like a faint track.  And with a decided nod and one last look around at the house to make sure he hadn't missed anything important, he set off across the field to see where it would take him.

From a prompt on shifting points of view using a found photo on a bing search with Copper yesterday.  

Link to Photo
Link to Copper's prompt writings.

Prompt 1: From her point of View

Lacey stood at the window, looking out at a summer day whose promise had all been wrung out to dry. Thick gusts of dust and dried up grass gusted across the vacant yard and battered fence rails. The supposed to’s piled up along the shattered barn wall with the rest of the rubbled supplies.

They were supposed to have gotten paid for at least one crop or head of veal by now; they were supposed to have a been hosting a wedding party with paying guests tomorrow; they were supposed to still have a standing barn, one that had not been shattered by some freak thunderstorm/tornado mix; they were supposed to be able to make it with just the two of them and one farm hand working the farm, not have Wes post surgery and unable to lift anything heavy for the next month; they were supposed to have received a loan extension due to extenuating circumstances; they were supposed to...

Lacey cut off the thoughts. Supposed tos were nothing more than broken shingles and splintered barn walls. Not much good for keeping the rain out or the wolves at bay. She drew in a deep shuddering breath. Tried with everything she had to hold on to her guttering trust that “things would work out” if she could just keep its tiny spark alive within her.

 

Prompt 2: From the Viewers Point of View

Wes tried not to let emotion work its way to the surface as he sat in the old beat-up pick up. Dust gusted around him. Lacey hadn’t noticed he was back yet, and it gave him a rare moment to see where she was really at in this whole fiasco. His strong pillar of support.

She hadn’t wavered for one second. Hadn’t let doubt strip him of their belief in getting this dream off the ground. He’d known the farm would be tough going. He was an independent small town farmer after all. Life was always on the line, waiting on the whims of weather and crops and hard work. He’d grown up with it. He’d grown up loving it and bleeding it and steeped in every detail. Taking over the farm from his uncle two years before, he thought he was as ready as he could possibly be. But this...round of hardships, he didn’t know if they could survive.  And from the look on Lace's face right now, she wasn't so sure either.

The Silent Room: Part 11

Grenfelder

The question of what to do with the odd list of items in the burned up letter turned out to be rather easily answered a minute or two after the pounding feet of the guards stopped outside his door.

 He had relaxed back into a slack position against the wall within his eyes closed tight.(He saw no point in  giving away that he was awake and aware if they didn't already know that.)  Apparently they didn't expect him to be anything other than in a deep sleep though because they didn't even flip the door window open. They just started calling out in quick succession one voice after the other-- "Room 1 engaged."
" Room 2 engaged."
" Room 3..."

A flood of images exploded in his mind behind his closed eyes and their voices disappeared. The chains disappeared.  He was back in his own home, nestled in his comfy chair with his feet up. A soccer game was on and in mid-play. The world of the prison completely gone.  If he hadn't experienced that little interlude with the  red headed doctor, he would never have thought anything about it. He would just have dismissed the chains and the prison as a bad dream he was waking from, and dropped into the blissful contentment of a lazy weekend afternoon at home.  Now though...

He looked around a little more closely. It was home. On the surface of things. He was surrounded by his favorite comforts. But the details weren't quite right. Small errors.  There was a bottle of his favorite micro-beer sitting to his left (a "friends only beer" his best friend brewed in his basement), the cold sweat of condensation rolling down its side, but the label wasn't quite right. The crescent moon was just a fraction to wide, a little to close to stocky pine tree instead of a tall leggy one. He stared at the label; watched the error dissolve into accuracy.

Then he glanced over at the soccer game a little more closely. It was a tournament game from last year.  One he had missed, actually. The third in the series. Something he would definitely love to watch. He'd been on the run then too, and there were some plays in that game that were for the annals.  He managed, barely, to pull his attention back from the game and to look around with close attention once more.

The only glaring thing out of order was a lidded jar sitting on the counter. That had never been there before.  He stared at, waiting for it to dissolve out of existence. It didn't shift.  It did, however seem to lift off the counter and become slightly less concrete.  As thought it was now in the vicinity of the counter instead of being on the counter. 

A little like that letter had looked near his hand.

He got up to investigate.

As he got closer, he could see that there were still two faded letters on the side that must have once spelled a word.

           

                                                  OU R

           

He pulled it toward him.  Taking off the lid, he saw the fine white powder of flour inside before it dissolved in his hands and the room abruptly disappeared, leaving him standing outside in the sunshine of his grandfather's garden.

He blinked in surprise.  He hadn't seen his grandfather's garden in twenty years! Not since it had been razed for a new industrial parkway.  The bushes hung heavy with roses. A profusion of pinks and reds and whites holding court. There were even a few naked lady lilies peaking out here and there.  He remembered how shocked he had been at seven when his mother, in a calm and casual voice, remarked to his grandfather, "Oh, dad, your naked ladies are beautiful this year."

A smile split his face.  They really were beautiful this year. The heady perfume of his grandfather's favorite "old fashioned" rose drifted on the lazy summer air.  Boy that smelled good.   All thoughts of flour jars and prison guards vanished from his mind as he started walking in search of it.

Storming the Castle Wall

It has been awhile since I've come around here... Thought today was a good day to work in a little writing prompt work.  A little entry that came from a The Write Practice prompt on storming castle walls.


Daisy and Doodle sat deep in contemplation like a pair of matching twins- knees to their chins, heads cocked to the right, fingers drumming on said knees, wings draped gracefully at precisely 100 degrees.  That is, as much as a diminutive dragon and her fairy rider could look like matching twins.

In front of them, stretched a long wild flower strewn grass field in various stages of mid-October decay-- that is shades of gold, russet, burnt umber, all shimmied over with a gray cast and a coating of dripping rain. On the other side of that lay a muddy, murky moat, a thick boxwood hedge, and the real object of their contemplation, the outer sandstone wall of the castle.  As walls go, it wasn't particularly fearsome in and of itself.  Four stories of interlocking stone rising out of the plain and topped by a few guards.

The "how" of getting through, around, across, over... that wall and into the castle proper had been the key thought occupying their minds for the better part of two weeks. Ever since they had foolishly accepted the assignment  from Headmaster Jayne to "Drop the Winter Ice Crystal into the Wishing Well at the center of The Castle's front courtyard."  It had seemed like such a simple task to complete.

That was before they had discovered the hazards of the wall from Hades. So far, among other things, they had encountered poison mist (Doodle sitll had burns on her front legs from that stuff), fiery arrows that came in heavier and heavier waves until they had been forced to retreat or light on fire, and a magic bounce back force field that appeared to stretch around the entire castle from about two feet above the archers heads until someplace higher than either Daisy or Doodle could fly.  They were currently recovering.from having buckets of anti-fly bespelled water thrown over their heads when they tried to sneak into the castle through the gate to the kitchen gardens.  Hopefully it would wear off soon.

"We have another two months of this, don't we?" Daisy's gloom depressed even the bell notes of her voice tinkle.

"Harumph," replied Doodle, equally depressed.

In tandem, two sets of shoulders slumped, dropping their wings to an undignified and improper 130 degrees.

The Silent Room continued... Part 3

From a writing prompt with Copper taken from the website writing prompts,  The Silent Room prompt series continues. (see the writing prompts page on the side or click the tag for the silent room if you would like to read earlier prompts in this story; and no, no idea where I'm going with this...)

Bailey

When he stepped through the doors Bailey found that The Silent Room was not in fact silent..  It had a thrum to it, a faint unstable hum that began to rattle his teeth the longer he paid attention to it.  While he was noticing this, his escorts- two guards dressed all in black protective gear- stepped back, leaving him standing frozen on a small hexagon plate set flush with the surrounding tile floor.  Frozen, because he had been immobilized by an unseen force field. Behind him he heard the doors swish shut, closing at the last with a sharp clang that then seemed to run on and on round the walls of the dimly lit white dome.

Round and round it went, as though slowly rising upward in a giant reverse marble roller of sound, until it at last ended in small series of tiny wobbly loops of dying sound at the very top of the dome.  Then it rose up and out, and left in its wake only a hollow empty space and the dull teeth rattling thrum.   A moment later a giant arm came rushing out of the wall directly in front of him and clapped a helmet on his head.

"This is it," he thought. "Goodbye, world."  And he remembered no more.


Across the country, several communities woke to find themselves stretched out on the hard lumpy ground of the open fields outside town. Along with all their neighbors.  Upon rubbing their eyes and fighting the adrenaline rush from waking up with a shocked start, they found that, no, they were not dreaming, and yes, they were actually still in a field. Dressed only in the light weight of their night shirts and patterned cotton pants, their sleep caps and eye masks. One woman noticed she was missing her eyeglasses; another noticed there were grass clippings mixed in with his hair; and they all noticed before too long that their feet were bare and cold in the early morning chill.  As though they had wondered here and then laid down to sleep some hours before. Hopping from foot to foot, confused, and facing a rather long trudge back home, they were not happy.

The Lights

(from a writing prompt of my friend Copper)
 " the lights glowed softly in the window..."

The lights glowed softly in the window like a Kincaid painting, or maybe a Norman Rockwell drawing, she mused.  Abigail was moseying home after a midnight candle service at church. She didn't come out  walking often enough to appreciate her small town at night.  It was special, this town, with its  soft gaslights and gleaming porch lights.  

At the moment her attention was caught by the gleaming lights of the small twenty four hour diner. It was situated across the street from the local college and just down the street from her own tiny two room apartment.  She had, really, rented the apartment for its ready access to the diner.  2 AM writing sessions felt much  more sacred and hallowed somehow when you sat curled up on the bench of a diner booth with a cup of steaming  hot coffee to hand and surrounded by fellow, similarly working, night owls.  In fact... tonight was a good night to write. She had that story installment due. She fished around in her over-sized purse until she came up with her notebook.  Yep. A good night to write.

Three minutes later she was lost to the glowing lights and the steaming coffee, curled up in a booth and wandering in her story world.

WNP: Snap Shot

WNP: Jose sat down across from him....


Jose sat down across from him. The table between them littered with small piles of scrunched up paper covered in spidery lines of smudged black ink, a half dozen empty bottles of Ale-8 and IBC Root Beer, and the cracked remnants of a bag of blue corn chips. Reg refused to raise his head from where he was pounding it against the table. He had been here for two hours already and still nothing...

A hand grabbed a handful of his black curls and hauled his head upward until one dark brown eye could meet his blue gray ones. Jose managed a serious glare for all of about three seconds until he actually got a good look at Reg, then his face slowly broke with amusement until a few seconds later he had let go and was leaning back against the cracked vinyl of his own bench, howling with laughter.

"What, man?"  Reg straightened upright with a snap and disgruntled snarl.

"Sorry, sorry,"  Jose tried to speak through his  choking bursts of laughter, vaguely waving his pointer finger at Reg's head until he finally managed, "... your,  your face.... it's..." At which point he gave up and just laughed as tears began leaking out of the corners of his eyes. 

Reg launched out of the booth and toward the back of the diner where a thin strip of mirror ran along the top of a long counter, receiving several startled looks from other patrons as he whipped past.  Dropping his forearms down on the counter, he leaned forward and peered into the mirror.  A mass of jagged red and green lines ran across his forehead and down his left check, a few lines of words in smudged black ink overlying them.  With a groan he sank down onto a stool and buried his face in his arms. This day was going to be so bad. Sam was going to kill him.

Eventually he felt a tug on his arm, trying to haul him up and off the stool.

"Come on, Reg.  You can still be the winner in the ink war."  For which he got a fierce glare over his left shoulder.  "Come on. Up and at 'em. We have to be back home in like five minutes or mom is going to kill us. A little soap and water, and you'll be back to normal."

"Yeah, but I still don't have a letter or a picture for Sam." The last almost a long drawn out wail.

"Maybe you should just leave the ink then," Jose managed between renewed puffs of laughter. "She'll give you a grace period I'm sure."  Then he hauled him off the stool, slapped a wet paper towel into his hand, and began dragging him back toward the front door of the diner.  He snagged a heavy  bag off the bench of the booth as they walked by that Reg hadn't noticed before, and wait for a minute while Reg gathered his own pens and paper.

"What's with bag?" Reg grumbled as he slid into the front seat of Jose's beater. He swore he was going to fix it up, but..

"It's not a beater," Jose huffed as he walked around and slid in the driver's side door. He tossed his bag onto Reg's lap with a thump.

"I didn't say anything." Reg defended, unzipping the bag as he spoke.

"I can hear you thinking it."

Inside the bag was a homemade blank book whose cover had been collaged with what looked suspiciously like photos of him and Jose. He pulled it out to get a closer look.

To Sam From The Dynamic Duo was hand printed at the bottom. He gave Jose a sideways look before opening the book.  Inside, scraps of his crumpled up attempts at birthday poems and drawings for Sam from the past two weeks had been carefully smoothed out and glue-sticked to the right hand page. On the left side Jose had written his interpretation.  Next to a black heart he had written  "we miss you already"; for a scrap of bad poem about her hair and charm "we think your awesome and beautiful and top stuff"; for a blue mountains scene that had actually been for a school project "just think of all the peace and quiet without your two rowdy brothers".  He had wondered what had happened to it.

Reg flipped to the last page. It was the page he had been pounding his head against when Jose had found him ten minutes ago. The page was a mass of black words with every other one scribbled through, and several dark lines of red and green running down it where Reg had finally given up and attacked the page with some of his other color pens.  Next to it Jose had written "In fact, we love you so much, we can't even find enough words to tell you."  Underneath it he had put in a photo their mom had snapped earlier that summer of the three of them sprawled on a park bench after hiking through the Gorge for several hours in the heat. They were dirty and exhausted and smiling. Sam was sitting between the two of them. It was a good picture.

"You did this?"

"Bro?  Sam is thirteen as of today and bitter, bitter, bitter that you and I are going away to school in three days without her. You think I'm coming home from school at Thanksgiving to find out she's cut holes in all our t-shirts and painted hate messages in black nail polish on the bottoms of our skateboards?"

Reg just bumped his fist to Jose's, too emotional to reply with more than a soft, "Thank you." 

"I got your back, Bro. I got your back."

WNP: Burnt Toast

WNP:  an awful smell arose from the toaster

T scraped the knife carefully over the top of her blackened toast, trying not to flinch at the sound or to dig too deeply. Or to waste the three minutes remaining of her five minute break. It had been deeply demoralizing to smell the burnt bread wafting through her kitchen door and into the bedroom where she had been parked re-writing a flawed paragraph in her final essay.  Finishing her attempt to reclaim her bit of bread, she pulled open fridge. Two cans of diet coke stared back it her.  She let out a groan. This was her last piece of bread without even any butter or jam left to fancy it up. She really needed to grocery shop.  Later. No time now.  She glanced at the clock again. One hour and forty minutes till she had to leave the house with the printed version of her final essay. Worth 30 percent of her grade.  The adrenaline shot cleared her head, and a moment later she was back at the computer screen revising frantically, toast forgotten.

WNP: Beginning

WNP- "While standing in line, I was tapped on the shoulder..."

The start of my detective career and the beginning of my first case (the Search for the Missing Bracelet Charm) began in a very a simple manner.  I was perhaps eight or nine at the time and had been waiting in line at the history museum with my class (We were on a field trip to watch  the Life and Times of Clementine During the Gold Rush of Forty-Nine.), when I was tapped on the shoulder very precisely three times. Behind me in line was a pale girl with large gray eyes and a trembling lip. "Have you seen a small silver charm in the shape of an umbrella?" she asked. And that was the start. I remember all of this very clearly, because I had just finished reading my first Nancy Drew book the night before and had carefully started a notebook titled "Sleuth Notes" into which I carefully entered all the relevant details of my first cases. Such as what movie we were going to see, and what my first client looked like and said.

Elizabeth Harden
Age 12
Excerpted from an essay application to "Kids are Sleuths Too" Training Camp

WNP- Broken Glass

Slivers of glass radiated out in a sun shaped patterned. The rays reaching out toward the corners and hidden spaces with unerring certainty.  Real sunlight broke through the clouds and sent a shiver of light across the room. Rainbows danced under its passing.

"I think you broke it," her little sister's voice from the door broke her contemplation.

Ruefully she shrugged with a nervous half smile,"Yeah. I think I broke it, too."

WNP: Gardener's Bounty

prompt:  "The backyard gardener stopped as his shovel hit something solid." Thunk. The sound shocked him as much as the sudden jolt of reverberation firing up through his arms like a thrum of electricity. Shaking out his right hand, he pulled the shovel out of the hole he had been digging and tossed it to the ground off to the side. Peering down he tried to see what might have caused the problem. Unfortunately the chestnut tree was casting rather a long shadow over it in the early morning light. Carl looked at his watch in frustration, then dropped to his knees to get a better look.  The evening primrose bush he was attempting to transplant from his sister's old house to her new one sat calmly behind him, its root ball wrapped in thick burlap.  He saw something rather large on the left side of the small hole where he had just been trying to widen it.  Just his luck. A big rock to try to dig out before he had to leave for a work meeting. He pulled the well worn leather glove off his right hand and fished in his pocket for his cell phone.  A moment later he had his sister on the line. "Natalie, there's a rock." "You can't get it out easily?" "No."  A heavy sigh from too many late nights and too much unpacking carried over the line to him.  "Alright, I'm coming out." Soon the patio door slid open behind him and Natalie came out to join him. His niece Ainsley, all pig tails and sleepy eyes, trailing after her in her fluffy bunny slippers. "Can I just move the bush to the right a foot?" He had a bad feeling that was too simple a solution.  Natalie could be very... decided. "Absolutely not.  It'll through off the whole balance. Let's have a look at this rock." Somehow Carl managed to keep from rolling his eyes. After four minutes of contemplation the three had decided that it might not in fact be a rock but the dented corner of a tool box. Natalie went and got her trowel to start digging away at the sides of the hole, and Carl started digging down from a little further out. Ainsley curled up on the ground next to them as she had been ordered out of the way, sitting Indian style with her fluffy slippers set carefully off to the side. Her sleepy eyes had been replaced with bright ones and cheeky over energetic grin as she practically bounced in place.  After about twenty minutes they finally worked it out of the ground.  To the top of it, sealed in plastic, a letter had been taped that read through the smudges of dirt simply "To the Finder". "Maybe we should wash our hands before we open it?" It was agreed, and the trouped back indoors, Carl carrying the case (after having brushed it off as much as possible) and Ainsley her slippers.  They walked through to the laundry sink and then carefully washed their hands.  Natalie found a letter opener to slice the plastic and fish it out. The envelope was remarkably pristine for having been hiding out in the ground for a long enough amount of time for the grass to have settled in over its head. Inside was a small white slip of paper covered with a few short lines of spidery handwriting to match that written on the front of the letter. Dear Finder, I am going to hope that you are a gardener and not someone building a pool.  Inside are all the heirloom seeds my husband collected from his gardening over the years.  He is gone now, and I am moving where they can't be of use to me.  All those years of collecting, I just couldn't quite throw them out. Hopefully you will find these helpful in your new gardening adventures. Ann Carter  Carl opened the box, and inside were hundreds of little labelled envelopes.  "Guess you'll be needing me a little more regularly as a gardener, eh, sis?" She grinned at him, then started flipping through envelopes, dreaming of late summer bounty.

Memory Beyond Memory

(from a photo writing prompt of my friend Copper)

As she watched, the old photograph began to pulse and hum as though slowly coming to life. A breath more and she found herself standing behind the dusty counter of an old style general store.  The man from the photo seeming to grow larger, to draw nearer.

A gust of wind passed in and through, scattering the layers of time, flooding the world's sepia tones with color.  A moment later she stood there face to face with her great grandfather. Up close she could see the twinkle in his eye, the quiet quirk to the corner of his lips, as though he had heard a good joke just outside the front door from a passing neighbor and still carried the quiet laughter rumbling in his chest.

Bridge

(from writing prompt with my friend Copper.)

Bridge

I feel, standing here on the flagstones of 2013’s entry gate of January, that this year is like a bridge stretching out before me.

I can see the lines of its guide wires and the  arc of its beginning to stretch up up so high. But most of it is still obscured by the sheets of mist and the curtains of fog blowing in form the bay somewhere off to my right.

On my back I have my rucksack.  It’s pretty bare bones but really all the tolls I’ll need. My black gel pens, my composition notebooks, my eating list ever rotating on its four day schedule. On my feet I have got my hiking boots of time and intention. Somewhere in the fog I hear my friends and family are calling out their thoughts and encouragements, but still it is my bridge to cross. My space to add to with my bricks of words.