50 Word Stories – Ocean Bound

Unsplash image courtesy of Tolga Ahmetler

Lost in moonlit moments, we walked along the creaking pier, as wicked surf stripped the ancient wood of yesteryear’s memories.
“We’re ocean bound,” I called to a nosey seagull. He cawed a warning, one we chose to ignore.
We held each other as we drowned, no longer lost, just smiling.

—

Thank you for reading

Richard

Alligator Eyes

mohammed-ajwad-xYpRJMuvG4s-unsplash — Photo by Mohammed Ajwad on Unsplash

There was something about her. Something impassive. All she lacked was the nictitating membranes of a reptile’s eyes, that brief translucence before the kill. She killed often. I know. After all, she killed me.
We met on a windswept Wednesday, when everyone with sense remained indoors. I caught her umbrella as it blew from her hand, or rather, she let slip from between her fingers.
We walked, drank coffee, and later… danced. Wednesday night became Thursday morning and the sun reappeared. The city streets steamed.
It was inevitable really, she and I. She had a house near the swamps and I had the money to fill it. I’d always hated the city, anyway.
We settled together like a hen on an egg, by which I mean, she smothered me. It was a slow disassembling of self, how she manipulated me with raised eyebrows and slight shakes of the head. She never moved more than necessary.
Late spring became mid-summer and the weather turned hotter still. The flowers drooped, trees sagged, and the weeds burned to a crisp. Every day began with the misted leftovers of the prior fried evening. They never quite cleared, the sun a citrine blur behind the withering reeds.
I took to walking along the thickening waters like a heron patrolling a stream. It was as if God reduced them daily to pour on his lunch instead of gravy, so unctuous they turned. They had that same solidity as skin and I wanted to walk across them, test physics and nature alike. I wanted to but didn’t.
My keeper lounged. She always lounged. She wore as little as possible as often as she could, sprawled like a lizard basking in that endless heat. Nothing bothered her, not hunger, lust, or even death. As the world burned, she bronzed.
It came to a head when I tripped over her one afternoon; I hadn’t even seen her there. A dislodged sandal slipped into the water and a whisky-lined throat scratched, “Get it back.”
I tried. I really tried! But no matter how far I stretched, reached with grappling fingers deep into the shoreline, the sandal was gone. Her response, “Wade.”
And I did. Despite the very real fear of knowing what lurked beneath those stygian waters, her presence commanded it. My own personal Cleopatra, her beauty expected nothing less.
My stomach hurt, teeth ground, heart sank. I gagged on the stench, eyes watering and throat retching.
She sipped her drink and sauntered over.
And just when I thought she might help, she slid onto her stomach and slipped into the water face first.
It was not a fast death, that drowning. She made sure of it. I saw the pitch-black night of those depths as an astronaut sees space, taking them in, navigating them needlessly. The pain became insignificant as I faded.
She placed me in her parlour with a pat to the cheek, her teeth stained crimson, eyes glazed. There were others in various states of decay. I was just the latest.
She remained there for those final moments, motionless, inches from my face.
I drooled a lobotomy. “You have alligator eyes,” my last words on this earth.
She leaned in close enough to kiss.
They say you see your life flicks past at the end. That a jigsaw of all you’ve been and all you’ve known is laid before you. It wasn’t, though, not for me. And as I went to who knew where, passed on, all that marked it were her epitaph words. “Wait till dark comes, my love, they glow.”
But I was already there and saw nothing.

The End

Thank you for reading

Richard

The Bridge Between Us (100 Word Stories)

Photo by Andre Amaral Xavier on Unsplash

Lands are divided by borders, some obvious, others not. Whether lines on a map or cracks in the earth, borders separate. Add war into this equation, and ours was wider than most.

She stood waiting with the others, wearing the same desperate expression they all wore. Families removed from each other. Children unstitched from their parents. Soulmates lost to limbo.

They lifted the rope at the agreed upon time, Lissette and the other refugees pouring forth like an unblocked drain. How could the bridge hold them? But it did. It was their replacing the rope that made us both cry.

Thank you for reading

Richard

Snowflaking

Image courtesy Aaron Burden on Unsplash.com

Our hearts were like snowflakes

melting for each other

unwilling to settle

just feathers on the breeze

❄️❄️

Thank you for reading

Richard

Insistent, We Breathe

Wisps of darkness transcending life
Whilst dares and memories abound
Embers, are we, huddled in charcoal
Indivisible of form, just existing

We breathe, we breathe

Fissures of intermittent moonlight
Score this impermanent scene
With a harsh unarguable truth:
We are part of this universe, still

We breathe, we breathe

Ghosts of the primal no longer
Dreaming, eyes wide open
Two unlocked shadows, shackles lost
Unable to deny nature’s physics

Insistent, we breathe

The Shallows of the Heart

In the shallows of the heart swim armadas of doubts
Sails set proud against crimson storms, bows thrust forward

—

With no stars by which to navigate, no silver moons
No lighthouse lights to steer though uncertain ways

—

Here, where the ocean boils and maelstroms churn
Where sounds come in echoes, words dulled and undetailed

—

Only the strongest sailors find ways to return, to pursue
To retrace unfamiliar caverns and caves

—

To once again breach the clashing lips of indelicate speech
From which they first set sail

—

For ventricular voyages come easily to some, too easily
Whereas explorers are always pre-doomed

—

As uncertainties unravel and hesitation consumes
Whilst pursuing deeper words for Love

—

Thank you for reading

Richard

Anonymous

She had no status, no place in this world. She barely had a life. Then again, neither did I.

We met one Easter morning and had married by tea in an unorthodox ceremony involving a stray cat who fussed our feet like catnip. It then peed on the floor. We laughed like hyenas. The pastor didn’t. The next day became our anniversary, and the next, and the next. Not a great legacy but something. We all must have something.

We left the city for the coast on an empty bus, a move in direct opposition to the latest trends, and got off at the last stop because the driver made us. He smiled as he did so like a man in the know.

We found a tiny house with a bed, a toilet, a door, and a view. This was all we required. This and each other.

It began soon after.

She forgot my name by Halloween and my face by Christmas. My voice went last. Perhaps it reassured her? A somnambulist by day, worse still by night, she wandered. I wandered with her when I could. It was only a matter of time.

New Year’s Day. I found her mangled body upon the rocky shore. She’d stepped from the cliffs as though them our lawn, whilst the sea fret tickled her eyelids and vindictive gulls egged her on. I was sad, but not inconsolable.

I buried her deeper than I ought, marking her grave with a simple cross of two bound sticks. There, I scratched the message: To My beloved Wife.

Later, when malicious gossip made the pastor aware of my situation, he visited one gloomy afternoon.

“It’s untitled, anonymous!” he exclaimed.

“What is?” I replied.

“Her grave, man. Her grave!”

“As was she.”

“Because she had no name?” he ventured, calming at my obvious heartbreak.

“Because I never needed it.”

The End

Thank you for reading

Richard

Haiku 3

We pour from ourselves
as raindrops blown into streams
searching out oceans

Thank you for reading

Richard

An Inelegant Game

Death was an inelegant solution to an elegant game, an imperfect answer to the most perfect of all solutions. Yet here, Death held no sway.

Memories were never my forte. I remembered in fits and starts, never then till now, nor here to there. I recalled moments, or fragments of moments, nothing more, like a jigsaw turned upside down and with no means of reference to piece it back together. This was how the first conjunction occurred, grey on black, black on grey, always white in-between.

The small, white bird was not a creature of feathers and pumping blood, but of glazed porcelain with a copper beak. It sang, though, trilled its little metal heart out. It sang and sang and sang.

I put the bird in my pocket only to realise many years later, when next I checked, that it had a hole. I panicked then, something to set the heart palpitating. The dull boom, boom, thud of it rang throughout the place, as I searched everywhere except where I ought.

The second alignment came upon discovering the first of two pits. I peered in one, dropped to my knees for a closer look and almost toppled into the other. In a world of insubstantiality, they were flat, almost symmetrical, two discarded black orbs in a land of dusk. Well, until they blinked.

They say life comes in threes. Third time lucky and all that. Not for me.

The sun appeared like a coin from a grandparent’s pocket. You wanted it, needed it, but if you took it too quickly, you might not get another. I had desired the sun since I lost it. She always gleamed.

She was my little bird, pale with sable hair, which added to her ghostlike appearance. Her eyes were black. No other description fit them. Closing them was the hardest thing I ever did.

The sun, now bright and beaming like a lighthouse slicing through a stormy midnight, rose higher. It reached its zenith like a diamond in a jet black ring.

‘You’re forgiven.’

The voice hurt my ears. It rang through my befuddled thoughts like Big Ben’s bells thrust inside my skull. I hated pain. My pain, that was.

I didn’t answer. I never answered. The words were never quite there. Instead, I wrapped my fogged shawl closer, pulled it tight. Anything else might have killed me.

(ALMOST AN END)

Photo by Catalin Pop on Unsplash