Tag: short story

Friday Fictioneers – March 29, 2013

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing19 Comments

Lamps

The body as a field where many battles rage.  Strife of ideal fathering, strafed with spousal passion and demands.  The infantries advance – toward occupational worth – stealth sweeping the rewards.  Childhood plans of freedom and grandeur – the risk and adventure – hits from guerilla flanks.  The will to heroic power and injured survival.  Biology of age.  Maproom of surrender and negotiating borders.  Where the surge will be.  Today.  Rigorous advance of death.  Waging to forge something like a home, a country, an interdependent territory.  All of it leaving its marks.

It is time to sit down and write.  Time, as measured by flame.

It has to be burning.

N Filbert 2013

 

Set Screens

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing25 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers, March 15, 2013.

Copyright - Lora Mitchell

With age I come to see more clearly, through glaucoma and the cataracts.  Each layer beamed away, burning holes in cloudy veils.  Colors hardly remembered, bright edges that the world lends.  All that glitters can’t be told.  Even my hearing improves, as if long years of practice had taught me how to listen.  The paper of my skin whispers pages’ sound.  Dying’s process of deletion, dropping memories like scales.  Surgery after surgical procedure – removing the lens, installing; expanding tubes, constricting; bypassing and shunting – internal edits increasing my awareness that I’ve no idea how deep my set screens go.  I am yet to see this world, through the versions that I’ve filmed.

N Filbert 2013

The Direction of Dreams

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing23 Comments

a la Friday Fictioneers – everybody should give it a go!  Thank you Rochelle Wisoff-Fields for keeping us prompted…

copyright - Jennifer Pendergast

The Direction of Dreams

My son says he always dreams the same house, strangely enough.  Except with a spiral staircase.  The cartoon girl runs jerkily past.  Perhaps she trips, perhaps there’s a dog in the way, perhaps a lady walking with a stroller.  He doesn’t know the house, he says, but it’s always the same house.  With a spiral staircase, but not a cartoon girl.  I know she’s running though, in fits and starts, with urgency.  Something depends on her speed.  There’s a trying to get somewhere, in any direction.  And direction needs a context.  Something about dreams, spirals and speed.

N Filbert 2013

Sure it runs!

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing24 Comments

I wasn’t sure I had it in me this week, concocting something from a picture, worth a 100 words (you should try – visit Friday Fictioneers), but I battered and welded something together in the nick of time.   For what it’s worth –

Copyright - Beth Carter

We sang when we made it.  We laughed and we drank and we sang.  So many said that it couldn’t be done.  Not by philosophers.  But why not?  Sappy, crappy and happy we sang.  And we drank.  Marty stole the carts, Jerry supplied the pictures to spur us along – as if they were sure to result.  Trey provided visors and sunglasses, given the absence of roof.  We swore we’d take it 10,000 miles.  10,000 miles a year.  We ditched our courses, thirsty for reasons.

Of course it runs!  Look close – you can tell where it’s been.  Take it further.

Friday Fictioneers 2/22 : The House that Jack Built

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes19 Comments

In keeping with the minimum-creative-work-capacity provided by the stimulus of Rochelle Wisoff-Fields at Friday Fictioneers, this week’s brief composition:

Copyright-Janet Webb

The House that Jack Built

Whatever he put his hand to.  Didn’t seem to matter.  Oh he had the will and the brawn – the heart – he was a determined man.  Yeah, the fence does look nice, dad built that.  But the house, that was Jack’s doing.  Parents said he was always that way.  Everything he touched.  Marriages, parenting, education, work.  Big dreams and fine intentions, with a flair for entropy – DIY and disorder.  Always came to pieces, his doing the undoing of whatever he done.  Easy and difficult to love on so many levels.  This house only one of ‘em.  It’s amazing anything still stands.

N Filbert 2013

Yearn Vulnerable – Friday Fictioneers 2/15/2013

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes12 Comments

Such a powerful prompt this week – yowza!  Thanks to Rochelle Wisoff-Fields and her continuous work at Friday Fictioneers for providing us with such fare to engage and reflect.  Please join us if you have an urge to translate experience into words.

The prompt:

copyright-David Stewart

(this prompt was so good I’ve included 3 responses in the manner of brainsnorts)

1.

She grasps while he flees.  The horror of everything offered.  He’s reaching all the same.  She clings, and thus submerged, loss becomes attachment.  He yearns.  They’re vulnerable.  Their hold and flight are balance.  A panicking fail like this can require only one thing – somebody’s everything – which she offers, and which frightens him to terror.  She lays it at his feet and pursues – without her he would fall – traumatizing him, for there will come a day.

copyright-David Stewart

2.

Everything depends on it.  Seems to.

This risk, this reach, this grasp.

All has been let go, ripped away for this advance.

She’s nothing left but hope and fear.

Submerged in this suspension.

And he in silent trauma – terrorized.

What would be the gain – of grasping or clasping; a yearn or a vortex; great loss or its threat?

A possible life?  An wholistic vitality?  The “whole hurly-burly”*?

What?

We leave it here.  NOW.   In the reaching.

*Ludwig Wittgenstein’s phrase for the complex background, context of human life

copyright-David Stewart

Alternate 2.

“Do you not get it?” she stressed, “can you seriously not see what I’ve done?”

“EVERYTHING!” she cried, “EVERYTHING I’ve left and abandoned, deserted, let go, in order to offer myself up to you! – to come for, reach out to – YOU!”

“This is unbelievable!” she, exasperated. “I really and truly cannot!” she, bewildered.

And he – silently terrorized, traumatized, afraid.

Trapped in this suspension – the grasping or clasping; the yearn or submersion; the loss or its threat.

And what of the gain –  a possible life?  An wholistic vitality?  What – ?

We leave it here.  NOW.  Reaching.

N Filbert 2013

Points of a Journey

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes37 Comments

Thank goodness (again) for Friday Fictioneers – fostering the insistence and reprieve of manageable creative work when I’m finding it ever so hard to pull away from endless research.  I always mean to set aside a little time, or “get to it” at a break – and just write awhile…but days have a way of eluding me.  So thank you Rochelle et. al. for the weekly prompt and community that kindly obligates us to create, at least a few paragraphs, 100 words (I borrowed 9 from Doug).  A healthy distraction.

copyright-Rich Voza

            The beginning is filled with arrivals/departures, dogfights of fly-bys and paradise islands.  Ecstasy and remorse, all seeped in the past and aimed toward a future, took place in realms  in-between.  Between a rock and hard place, between the cities we called home, between obligations and accidents, here and there, me and you.

In the long middle we developed mistrust and fostered desire.  Building on distance with dependencies and betrayals.  Which flies faster – a sparrow?  Depends which side the wings are on.  We flew and we crashed.  We survived.

Bringing us to the end, the point at which we always arrive, together.

N Filbert 2013

The Anniversary

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes43 Comments

FRIDAY FICTIONEERS – WEEK OF February 1

(please consider joining us)

The Anniversary

I remember what the sculptor said, at our wedding:

“How very many years it takes to get to this – the unitary lean.  Two figures completed in one.  So much stripping and friction, hacking and cuts.  So very many tools applied.  The hurt and the loss, the heat and the cold.  Form and substance are hard to reshape.  A person is a stubborn thing.  Nuance and habits of matter overcome.  Natural processes and straining retrained.  Rock removed from its quarry – blasted and torn where it rested and grew.  A new context of becoming so forceful and delicate.  Ravaged and renewing till it holds itself up.”

– how our weight is supported, these 22 years.

Passages

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes33 Comments

quick quip for Friday Fictioneers…

Copyright-Renee Homan Heath

Not as if we’ve much choice.  Forward?  Back?  If we could see a little further, higher, or what might be underneath.  There’s a reason we’re heading this direction, away from what’s behind, but still.  We needed water, we’re given sand.  Needing shelter, we find a beach.  It won’t do to stop here, but where do we go?  Carrying on is unknowing, all the same to me, and yet.  Something’s bound to open up, if we could locate a horizon.  You go on ahead, I’m surely unfit to lead.  Why does it always seem like this?

N Filbert 2013

Found Objects

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing25 Comments

Greetings all – squishing this in before the homework hits.  As always I highly encourage any and all of you creatives out there to take these generous prompts and craft away, as exercise or effort – The Friday Fictioneers weekly wonderful co-creativity :

Copyright-Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

“Look, the details don’t matter, okay?  It happened, and here’s the proof, and now nothing will ever be the same.”

“As if it were.  As if things could change like that – all over and immediate.  How do we even know what from this collage?”

“Jesus Ralph!  They’re connected by the photograph!  Look!”

“As if the image were the thing itself.  C’mon Rachel, really?”

“God dad!  It’s grandpa, a menorah, a dial-up and some crayons – how obvious does it have to be?”

“I’m gonna need something more than a sign Rachel, something more than a trick of the light.”

N Filbert 2013