Tag: Friday Fictioneers

The Sounding Tree

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes16 Comments

quick submission to Madison-Woods Friday Fictioneers…thankful for a task I can get my mind around!  Please join, newcomers.

tree

As close as he would ever come to stillness, the boy, lying here, slit and dying at the base of this strange tree.  How could he have?  Only one simple task, one clear instruction that might have spared them all.  Any boy could do it, why not he?  Why must he never be capable, never succeed, always fall short?  How he’d run, as the marauders swooped down, how he’d raged through the woods, torn through the brambles toward the sounding tree.  How could he have missed it, faltering here, now, cut from ear to ear, staring at the shofar of alarm, secure in its nook?

Corrosion: Friday Fictioneers August 3

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes16 Comments

Home from vacating for a couple days.  Free-write 100 words prompted by photo as follows (thanks to Friday Fictioneers / Madison Woods instigations/inspirations.  Please join)

The trouble is corrosive.  Is rank.  I do not say what you think I say.  I do not say what you say I say.  I hear you wrong.  Rot.  You love taking pictures of ruins.  I love the effects of rust.  On iron.  On rock.  The meal of erosion is slow.  Don’t yell.  Things erase when we turn our heads.  Eyes such enormous editors.  My ears confuse wind with anger.  What you think is running water is something else.  Is sobbing.  Are tears.  Words are constructed of contexts.  Are hints and withers.  What accrues is corrosive.  Is gentle.  Is fierce.

N Filbert 2012

Here and There

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes22 Comments

Threw this one together quickly…not sure it can be kept up with in its leaps.  Apologies.  But I made something.  Thanks always Friday Fictioneers

grapevine

Blue Walls & Vines

The blue of the walls was brighter than sky, made peaceful by children’s playthings.  The Other was far.  Another place, other time.  Among grapevines and meadows.

Both worlds had clouds.  I remember.  It takes time to conjure this up.

Her sky and those vines reminded me where I was – in a room full of chatter, chaotic with toys.  One is peace; one is peaceful.  Both are fraught.  Both are ripe.  There’s a difference.

We had hoped that it wouldn’t be great, but would carry.  And it does, in its longing, its loss.

Both are fraught, both are ripe.  Both are lovely.

N Filbert 2012

The Incident

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes24 Comments

buzzard

The Incident

The evidence was stark and slim.

A photograph of akimbo’d limbs against a whitened sky.  A dark bird.

The detectives were at a loss, many losses, and uncertain of how to proceed.

They called in “the expert,” a wizened old crackpot retiree who still seemed to capture things no one else could.

He was sent for and trundled his bulk up the sidewalk later that day, grimacing and cursing his way to the station.

Huffing and grunting, he picked up the picture between leathered forefinger and cracked swollen thumb.  He squinted.

“All I can tell you boys, is that it sho’ ain’t no murder.  A murder involves always  more than the one.”

N Filbert 2012

be sure to join us at Friday Fictioneers – photo prompted flash fiction

Friday Fictioneers – July 6, 2012

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes23 Comments

landscape

I labor steady, slowly, surely.  Block after block, hewn from my ruin.  This hapless task at hand.  Construct a habitation of words.  I use whatever I come by, wherever I happen to be.  With an eye for the concrete and a feeling for sky.  I’m a weedy terrain, dried up from AA and a searing of spurn.  No smoke, no rain.  I’ve been looking for signs or instructions:  there are none.  Or far too many.  So I set out simply to make.  A noun, a verb, an adjective; pasting with participles and pronouns.  Tedious, thankless, alone.  I build, it crumbles.  It cracks, I evolve.  Not much of a shelter, but it holds.  And remains, opening up to the night.

Thanks for Madison Woods et.al. and the continuous production of prompts for this weekly challenge and exercise: Friday Fictioneers

Friday Fictioneers: “The Brambles”

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes10 Comments

Another failure…I nearly doubled the word count ’cause he wouldn’t shut up.  Probably shoulda aborted it, but here it is:

raspberry

The Brambles

He was painting a picture for us.  “Now this takes significant time to develop,” he said, “but I promise it’ll be worth the wait.”  “The fruits, they aren’t easy pickings, but if you’re willing to work it, I mean really get in there and give it a go – you’ll find ‘em, and they,” he assured us, “even these beautiful berries, nuggets, sweet bloody fleshes can seem prickly and tart at the first – it’s kind of an ‘acquired taste’ as they say – from years and years of this trying/acquiring and trying/acquiring – but those tiny pert jewels, held deep ‘round the heart of its center, those phenomenal pearls of good juice, as they finally give way and pop open,” he said, “that rush!  That momentary flood of powerful delight, that untangleable blend of most delicate morsel and sun-bittered time, that salting of aging and ripeness – it’s a wonder!”  “You’ve just got to get to them and find them, one after one and by one, have persistence!” he admonished, “far along, deep within, there’s always this unbelievable cluster of most amazing, unique and mouthwatering reward – yes, it seems tiny and ephemeral and difficult to grow or achieve, but it’s worth it!” he encouraged us, “the dedication of labor and time, constant tending and pruning pursuit; the right balance of trimming and rest, nourishment and fallow…”

Why he’d referred to our marriage as “the Brambles.”

N Filbert 2012

Please join us in these weekly forays!

Friday Fictioneers

Zygoptera: Friday Fictioneers

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes29 Comments

I struggled with this week’s prompt-picture…then struggled with keeping it to 100 words…then changed my form altogether

For all unfamiliar – join up! – “Friday Fictioneers” is a terrific place to read others and exercise one’s own languaging!

damsel fly

Zygoptera

(zygo= joined or pairing; ptera= wings)

.

I have read of the damselfly

they of paired or joined wings

that lie paralleled and close

in their similarities

unlike others

of a horizontal differencing

.

it seems we each begin

as only one

lop-sided and clumsy

but eager to fly

flapping, leaping

slipping, falling,

we collide

.

finding another

and learning to lean

an economy of movement

security

so we huddle

and shelter

surrounded in pair

.

we of the joining wings

merging and taking to flight

.

if only for moments

N Filbert 2012

Embraces

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing20 Comments

I didn’t get around to performing the Friday Fictioneers prompt-100-word-story this week…having gotten sidetracked by a prompt that has haunted me all week from the writings of Lynne Tillman…finally, something worked out of me related to this… as follows:

EMBRACE

“in an embrace, something may be confirmed, avoided, or resolved”

-Lynne Tillman-

            A kind of “there was.”

Sinking into his arms, strong and coily, warm almost gruff.  The dusty smell of oil and denim.  She felt small, she felt memory.  She closed her eyes as in sleep, and allowed.  So much to confront and to question, perhaps to ignore, but now, just this now, this embrace.

He’d wounded her for years.  Secretly whittling strips from her heart with a scalpel.  Holding her mind under liquids and spells, the sky and its stars, overwhelming her with presence while silently working dissection.  His voice anesthetic, a narrative of dreams.  She was victim.

And part of her knew.  Wanted.  Would rather.  She with her own confused expectations, demands.  Her ownership.  Defiance.  Some part of her vision selected this blur.  Macroscopic.  Details out of focus, the essence of place.  Embrace.

***

She had shouted, threatened.  He had thrown.  She began her crumbled march as he grabbed her.  He corded her in arms, shackled her to his chest.  She, unable to move, to breathe.  A little dizzy.  Anger and fear.  Him holding.  Him safe.  He panicking.  It held.  The embrace.

She struggled, she sobbed.  She squirmed and struck out.  Refused.  He held.  He tightened.  As if in a last expiration, the lungs clinging life.  She stabbed and she stabbed and she stabbed.  He bled.  He held.  A braced embrace.

Eventually collapsing.  Exhaustion disabled the leaving, dismantled the stay.  Floor and furniture took them in and supported.  And held by receiving their burden.  Stasis.  Time, embraced.

***

That morning – the fog – the waves – all the greying of sands.  They’d wandered alone for solitude’s space.  To be lost.  Unbeknown.

A moist, briny chill had embraced him.  Swallowed him up.  Become him.  Immersed, he released.  Saturate, evaporate.  Began.  Unwinding like a mummy’s cloth he disrobed.  His anguish, his anger, his hope.  Dissolving out to sea in trails.  Emptied.  Cleaned with a salty sludge, he weighed.  He grew heavy.  He blended in with the mist.

Enough moisture to formulate drops, her tears joined the air.  Embracing herself through the wind off the water she shook and she stumbled, she clutched.  Unseeing, she fumbled along. Desperate.  Undone.  Like the thick cover of sky, her past and her present, her future combined and ran away down the rock.  She was hollow.  Held only by her arms, her hair keeping her head in its place.  She wept out her body until drained like a sieve.  The charcoal of sands embraced her.  Falling.

***

The hesitancy.  Two scarred bodies full of wounds, slowly exposing.  The want for another.  A crave and a care.  Some tendering need to devour.  They approach gently, allow touch, speaking perimeters.  A leg crosses over.  Eyes keep locking and unlocking with an almost audible click.  Food is had.  Hunger remains.  They move and they walk, learning hands and arms and shoulders.  They gaze.

Arriving at last at embrace.  Caressing the soreness of worlds.  They mate at their bruisings.  It becomes more.  Ravenous and fearful, they struggle.  Wrestling and huddling, they carefully voice every play.  The directions.  No pain is no gain.  And they gain.

Become more in the matching – four legs and eight limbs, doubling heartsize and brains, and they fitted.  They enter, they receive.  Exposing and sheltered.  In opening wounds they are bandaged.  They had not believed, they were doubt.  This, a healing embrace.  A beginning.

***

In death they are laid side by each.  Before long the roots will take over, a tendrilled combine.  The skin will grow lax and more fluid, the moss and the mold remedy.  Bones become ashen and dust.  Filtering one for another.  Transposed.  There will be one flesh, this earth, the conglomerate of bodies and beings with rain, moon and sunshine.  Planted there, embraced in all that will hold.

They take to the breeze like powder and spark.  Knuckles and teeth cackling the stones.  A huffed form of cloud, they merge, they seep.  Skein on the water, grain on the leaves, one and the other, the other again.  No one can tell.  Salt sugar sand shaken together and forever sifting.  Their love, their lives, its embrace.

N Filbert 2012

Writing Prompt

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Writing5 Comments

I have been attempting to take part in Madison Woods organized Friday Fictioneers which has been very enjoyable and a fantastic exercise – particularly to see the many figments of minds operating on a singular prompt – how various persons / how various world!  I came across this sentence standing on its own in the midst of a story by Lynne Tillman recently and it just will not leave my head.  I thought “a picture is worth a thousand words!?” – how about “these words are worth a billion pictures!?”  I’m sharing them here hoping they might also inspire in many of you reams of stories…And I’d love to receive links to the works that you create with/in/from them – any length, any time.  Here’s the sentence:

“In an embrace, something may be confirmed, avoided, or resolved.”

-Lynne Tillman from her story “Phantoms” in This is Not It–

Friday Fictioneers – June 8, 2012

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography, Writing37 Comments

caveat: thrown together quickly! (Friday Fictioneers prompt – www.madisonwoods.wordpress.com)

Against the Day

                   And what was there to do?

                   High school now behind us, Frank’s dad dead, and no promise of college, work, or love; we were lost, angry, confused.

                   We’d all of us read Pynchon, we knew very well what to expect, and it wasn’t good.

                    And lots of it.

                  So much burned inside us.

                   At the city’s River Festival we spotted the blimp.

                   And somehow we knew.

                   We just knew.

                   Now, it begins.

N Filbert 2012

www.manoftheword.com