We dreamt. We believed. Peaceful revolutions.
Darkness gathers beyond the flickering candles.
Hopes in held breaths, never released.
Thank you for reading
Richard
russet leaves falling
sundial casts no illusions
sighing from his chair
Thank you for reading
Richard
I concentrate, close tired eyes, breathe
Feel the air enter sinuses all of a rush
Surge down my throat like the North Wind a gorge
Pool in otherwise forgotten lungs like stagnant water
The accompanying rise and fall lifts a grumbling gut
Expands a chest with pigeonesque pomposity
It’s all fake, but proves I’m alive until sliding away
A moment. A dream. A thought. An almost.
This dark tide has infiltrated troubled shores
Revealed only by a spotlight moon, an inner eye, and sent scurrying
The clouds soon regather and it begins anew
This is the way, the looping thrum of existence
And I wonder: Is this really life
There was something unsavoury about her smile, an unavoidable diagnosis of disgust. Whilst she revelled in self-centred superiority, the world might’ve burned. The others played on.
She felt wrong. The whole thing felt wrong. As if having swallowed a live worm when expecting a jellied one, she wriggled within. I’d have wretched, but she was watching.
She’d done nothing other than sit there politely minding her own business. I hadn’t sought her, nor looked upon her by any other reason than an accident. She happened upon me. This was the simple truth.
Evasion proved the smarter side of valour. I slipped away to another table like a furtive rat, eager for some space and a place to breathe. She followed. Why the hell had I chosen this casino?
She sat and asked the time. I made a point of looking at her watch, but she ignored it. I gave her the correct hour but added twenty minutes. She laughed a crescendo.
I woke to an empty bed and an emptier wallet. She was long gone. I wasn’t annoyed, though. I blamed myself. She enjoyed her games, always had. I savoured them, too, once, but less so after we married.
THE END
Thank you for reading
Richard
This bamboo heart, strong but hollow
Lost to remote places, devoured
Gorged upon by strangers
As lost to this metal jungle
Though willingly, as I am not
Its thudding repetition deafens
Until the silence stops
Author’s note: After seeing all the mindless bombs and destruction of late, I have decided to post this story as I can’t bear to send it out for print. As Marvin Gaye once said: ‘Whats’s going on.’
This colossal loss compounds at every turn. There is no hope. We have no hope. There never was hope.
As I sit and stare from my window like a moth bemused by a star, searching without finding, dreaming without knowing what of, the world around me crumples. This rock for a heart weighs heavy. The unending guilt, more.
Today I rouse myself from bed and endeavour to do. The question remains, do what?
A green shoot sprouts from a pot on my kitchen window. I neither placed it there nor remember my wife or daughter having done so either. Still, logic dictates they must have. Perhaps I am tireder than I thought. This newborn holds my attention as though liquid gold. New life, who’d have thought it! The tiny one strives to reach the jaundiced light abstracting the sky. I admire its gumption, if not its sense. Nevertheless, it is to this I turn my unwavering attention.
Three days later, I am sitting in the same chair, wearing the same fierce frown of determination, just from a fuzzier face. The shoot is now a stem. This stem is jade green.
There is a flaw to my latter statement. I have always believed plants a lush emerald until they flower. Grass carpets the world in emerald. Trees umbrella these carpets with protective shade, also emerald green, though their shade is not. Even the languid kelp fields swaying beneath the waves suffuse the deep in emerald green. So why is my shoot jade?
I have a purpose. Mother Nature, life, has granted me a meaning. I am almost complete.
I have shaved and bathed, for I feel today is the day. When I take the long walk from my bedroom to the back of the house and the chair set centrally in my kitchen, the one I have sat upon for three weeks in patient repose, I expect my flower to have bloomed. I race when a measured approach would better suit my condition.
The kitchen is gone, the only room they have exterminated.
It is not the loss of bricks and mortar, not the invasion, nor even the fact my home will soon collapse atop its amputated limb, but losing my little flower which chills. Losing an unanswered question, a hope.
I weep, as I have since the war began. I will never know what jade might have bloomed, or if it might have replaced the real jade, my Jade. This world has taken another step towards monochrome.
Thank you for reading
Richard
Disasters happen, my grandfather claimed. This was in the years long before his own. He’d wag his finger and frown like a grumpy goat, and I’d laugh and giggle regardless. Take it seriously, he’d mutter. You’ll thank me one day, he’d say. Of course, I didn’t, couldn’t, not when everything seemed so far away.
Now, as disaster looms and I struggle to raise my head, my own grandchildren filtering around me like ground coffee a percolator, I wish I had. It’s not so I’d know, but so I’d know what to say.
I’m so preoccupied, I forget to say goodbye.
—
Photo by Bruce Tang on Unsplash
If this hurt of teeth and talons renders numb
Or slashing words and blunt-nosed answers
Tied up with twine, perhaps a handcuff, too
Fails to bring a stinging stimulus
Then what’s the point in pain, my love
If ever there was one, yes, if ever
Has it vanished, upped and left, retracted
Fluttered away on cold breaths and steam
Impaled itself upon a willow strip
Just gone. All gone. Run away forever
Left a soul in need of something suddenly pain-less
She was that age, that ageless something
Between rose petal cheeks and silver waves of fascination
Where the foundations moved but the plans never changed
Where her eyes only ever shone brighter, more acutely than before
Piercing like twin stars set in her own personal heaven
A girl with a woman’s knowing, woman with a girl’s innocence
The sort of carefree soul who bought coral rings just to remember other people’s dreams
It was easier for her living through the dreams of others, I think
As she had no time to waste on her own
I’ve forgotten what they called her because her name never really mattered
Not to those who shared her timeline, her space, her place
A name, as with the asking her age, was pointless
For whoever took the time to speak to the wind
When the only thing that mattered was feeling it rustling their hair
No, her name was only sought by those determined to tame her
To mould and conform her; they might as well have bottled an ocean
Elemental, unbridled, let loose on us all
An ageless angel without a prayer of surviving, she couldn’t have cared any less
And when I was with her, neither could I
Yet, now, I wished I’d known it
Guessed or made up something to define her soul
To capture the uncapturable even if but for a day
I suppose I will until my own spark fades
And all those dreams with it of her body pressed to mine
Richard M. Ankers - Storybook 
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