She Speaks of Drowning

    Inside her Corolla, the young lovers waited out the downpour. Each drop made a circular impact announcing their high-born alien names; each drop blended into the next. Soon the windows showed a world in watercolor, a mere portrait melting around them.
     "I've been after you since I saw you reading," the young man said.
     "I wasn't reading. Well, sometimes. I was mostly writing what I was thinking and reading them back to myself." The girl replied almost automatically, as her true attention flickered far away in that watercolor portrait of reality. He stayed in her periphery whenever he sat with her, and something when he did not.
     He chuckled, a pleasant throaty sound, one of the rough layers she liked to rising to the surface. "Okay, writing then. But you were reading and alone, and you looked so sweet and quiet. Hardly anyone paid attention to you."
     "Alone?" she said. Her alto voice rose to a shrill. "My friends were there. Our friends. I was drowning in people. I had to get away - I needed to think."
     "About us?" His lips fired the light nerves in her right ear.
     She inhaled the deep scent of his lye-washed hair, the radiating heat he gave off without knowledge or volition. "Sometimes," she admitted, breathing a cloud into the cabin space of her Corolla.
     Conscious of the scent of her breath mingling with his warmth and available to him, whatever defense posted within her tightened. He usually made that impression on her when he asked her questions like no one else had in her life. Balled up inside her, she carried a hunk of shields and walls and treasures as vices and vices masquerading as crowns.
     He had been smiling at her and she barely noticed. Her only clue was his eyes gleaming in the cold blue shade cast by pounding rain. "Ah, sweet." His smile spread slowly. "Come here, love."
     She did as he bid her, and soon his kisses entered her consciousness, next to the rain melting every fabric it touched, and the hollow pounding of her heart between the ill-fitting walls.

Craft Wednesday #29 Compass

This blog needed a place for talking about writing. "Craft Wednesday" will be me talking about all things writing: how to write, why to write, and my own craft journey. I hope to learn and to share experiences with you. 

Compass

                One word is good enough. 

                Early this New Year I was challenged to think of one word that would be a sort of anchor, a magnetic north for this new year.

A "Chicken or the Egg" Question

     Which came first: light or darkness? The question is a philosophical question.

      Did darkness exist before One said, "Let there be light?" In order for there to be light, wouldn't there have to be something before? What existed before?

     Or with light, did existence begin? Did the invention of light become a dividing word to distinguish two parts of a mottled whole? Where the whole come from?

     Light is a metaphor. We also know light to be both a particle and a wave, affecting the lots of other particles it bounces off. Light makes work, or is work, and creates more work; light is a catalyst for change.

    Then what is darkness? The definition of darkness is an absence of light.

    That's right - an absence.

    Darkness is a negation. We define it by the absence of something. It is nothing. Darkness does not exist.

     We have our answer: Light is something, Darkness is nothing. Light had to come first because it is the only thing that exists. Darkness is nothing at all, so it never arrived. Therefore, neither came first because only one exists: Light is and Darkness is not.

A Mantis Death

    In winter we forget about bugs, which is why I was doubly surprised to see such an exotic insect clinging to the window screen of the living room.
     Pale green and purple, the praying mantis was a larger than I had ever seen before. I thought he was dead until I blew on him and his antennae twitched.

An Absence

Grandma Lillian sat in the peeling white wicker chair. She had not wanted one that rocked.
"Every day," she repeated. "Everyday."
"What's everyday?" I asked her. I stopped laying the long pieces of grass in floor plans on the porch steps. I hoped to eventually build a house.
"Light is in every day, Kareem."
"Yeah, I guess Grandma. They call it daylight."
She chuckled at my youth. "Do you know what darkness is, dear?"
"You're going to tell me." In one motion I swept the grass off the step.
"Darkness is nothing. Darkness is an absence."
"Of day."
"Of light," she said.
"Oh," I said. I went back to my picking.
She sat for a while. I was too busy making improvements to see when she left.

Then It Rained

     There was a man. He planted a tree in his yard.
     The man watered the tree every day there was no rain. There had been no rain for four hundred years.

The Far Ocean

I dwell far from the ocean,
locked in by sprawling tracts
without the slightest motion
and only stagnant facts.

I dream of sea salt sprays
in acrid prairie lanes,
lifted by September haze
never bringing fragrant rains.

I hope to hear gulls shriek
as they tumble overhead
and search out when they leak-
it sinks as fast as lead.

I watch for other ships
where blue ends at the white
and day dips into night