Monday Morning by Tim Wilkinson

Wayne floats gently across the surface of the lake, fishing pole in hand, held loosely. Leaning back, he rests his head against the lone, life vest, propped against the end of the boat. Bare feet down on the cool metallic surface of the boat, knees up and bent, legs leaning just a bit open, he sighs loudly, resting the fishing pole lightly against his thighs with the long tip jutting high up and over his knees.

Chewing casually on the remains of his, after breakfast toothpick, he inattentively watches his line stretching far out and away from the boat, while lazily scanning the puffy, blue clouded skies for soaring raptures and the kite like wings of rising vultures, gliding on waves of warming air, circling higher and higher, with ever increasing ease and unhurried poise.

Light, soft whispered splashes echo across the surface of the water as fish frog and snake, leap and escape, feed, hide and play, hunt, kill and die. Muskrat and beaver swim past, unhurried and unafraid, heads up, eyes straight forward, as they glide effortlessly across the surface of the placid clear waters.

Loons cry and wail to the morn in sorrowful, doleful tones, regretting the passing of the silent, safe darkness, yet welcoming the newfound day with its promise of yet another night to come. Geese and crow, caw and hoot in pointed, grouped procession and random gathered flight, soaring high overhead, seeking open waters, or tall, piney perches.

Tiny finger length shad, silvery and shiny, gleam and glow in the bright morning sun gathering in groups of hundreds and of thousands, bubbling and jumping, churning the water’s surface as they feed. They in turn are taken as the swift and fleet of wing raptures, bald eagles and fishing hawks swoop down from the heights with talon and claw, to feed their growing, incessantly hungry, newly hatched clutches of downy, new feathered life.

Fat, heavy oversized carp splash and dash hither and fro in the shallows amid the thick verdant grasses at the water’s edge, submerged and flooded with springs heavy rains. Dancing and swaying they mate, spewing streams of milky sperm across masses of newly laid eggs. Bass and crappie jump and splash in sheer delight at springs growing warmth, hopeful and eager, sure in the promise of another summer’s full bounty. Huge, seven foot gar with jaws two feet long, patrol the surface, sneaking into the shallows, hunting the unsuspecting prey of perch, drum and shad as those it seeks play, infatuated with the mornings joy and the newfound warm of sunlit dawn, momentarily forgetful of the danger of the world and of deaths, clamping, tooth filled jaw.

Wayne’s short brown hair flutters lightly in the soft, welcoming chill of the mild morning wind. It tickles the whiskers of his unshaven face, ignored and unkempt in newfound and seldom enjoyed freedom. Reveling in the fullness of temporary escape and blessed sloth, he drifts aimlessly in the kind, gentle wind, bobbing and rocking in the placid, soft waves of forgetfulness. Occasionally twitching and wiggling his toes, he smiles, takes a sip of his rapidly cooling coffee, lights another smoke and thinks of absolutely nothing, his open mind flooding with misty, soft nothingness, untangling nothing, configuring and constructing nothing, planning, worrying and anxious about no one and caring even less.

No sorrows tug at his heart this morning, no woman beguiles him. No pains nor regrets of decisions past, no poor choices, no things gone or people lost, weigh upon his heart. This is a pure, free moment, a moment of freedom and an escape from a world and a life of pain and regret, of things not done, of things unsaid and the hopeless mess of past mistakes, decisions that can’t be revoked and consequences that cannot be changed.

Then suddenly, without warning, a loud, menacing, almost painful screeching assails his ears, startling and noxious, pulling him abruptly from his reverie. Rising quickly, he sits up, the horrid sound forcing him into an upright position. Franticly searching his surroundings, he seeks the source of the insistent wailing, frightened, alarmed and confused.

Moments later, Wayne staggers out of bed, gropes for the alarm clock with the beady red eyes, attempting to choke the life from its cold, hard plastic body. “Monday, already,” he grumbles, heading for the bath. The water runs, filling the tub with sudsy, perfumed scents as he heads down the darkened stairs to the kitchen Plugging in the preloaded coffee pot, quickly laying out three strips of cold, greasy bacon across the blackened aluminum skillet, he returns to the bath, slipping silently beneath the succulent, inviting waters.

Moment later, stepping out of the tubs warm, soapy goodness, he greedily inhales the glorious scent of slow frying bacon, in combination with the fresh, brewing coffee wafting up the staircase. He smiles the first smile of the morning.

After his daily bout with the ironing board and the ingestion of his first two cups of highly sweetened coffee, overdosed with rich powdery creamer, he suddenly concludes that he is human after all. Looking over his shoulder and the jumbled, tangled mess of sheets and bedclothes on top his mattress, he remembers the lake, the boat, his bare wiggling toes and he can’t wait to come back home this evening, and go there again.

The End

© 2009, Tim Wilkinson

Author Bio:

Father of two girls, Mr. Wilkinson has been writing since the age of twelve.After spending thirty years working in the telecommunications industry, traveling and writing in between the often conflicting commitments of family, work, home and life in general, Mr. Wilkinson now focuses more time and effort on his most enduring dream, writing. Collections of his earlier works are available online, through Amazon-dot-com.

Recently accepted for publication in ‘The Path’, ‘The Speculative Edge’, ‘The Global Twitter Community Poetry Project, and ‘Static Movement’, he continues to write and seek new avenues for publication and distribution.

Links:

http://timwilkinson.org

http://tlmntim9.hubpages.com/

http://timwilkinsonshortstories.wordpress.com/wp-login.php?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Ftimwilkinsonshortstories.wordpress.com%2Fwp-admin%2F&reauth=1

http://timwilkinson.blogspot.com/

https://twitter.com/tlmntim9

 

Kaleidoscope and Harpsichord by Donal Mahoney

As I've told my wife too many times, the meaning of any poem hides in the marriage of cadence and sound. Vowels on a carousel, consonants on a calliope, whistles and bells, we need them all if a poem is to tickle our ears. Otherwise, the lines are gristle and fat, no meat.

Is it any wonder, then, my wife has had a problem, for decades now, with any poem I've given her to read for a second opinion. This is especially true when we both know the poem has no message and I simply want to hear the music, assuming there is some. Miles Davis made a living doing the same thing in jazz clubs. Why can't I have a little fun and give it a try even if my instrument is words?

The other night in bed I gave my wife my latest poem to read. I said it was fetal, not final. Afterward she said that reading this poem was no different than reading all the others I had given her over the years. She had thought I'd improve by now. Maybe I should switch to fiction or the essay, she suggested, or else stick with editing the manuscripts of others since I had made a decent living as an editor for many years. 

"You've been writing poetry for decades," she said, "but reading a poem like this is like looking through a kaleidoscope while listening to a harpsichord."

Point well taken, I thought, point well said. The nuns for whom I toiled all those years in grammar school would have liked my wife. They might have even recruited her to join their order.

Then I asked her what a man should do if he has careened for years through the caves of his mind spelunking for the right line for a poem only to hear his wife say that reading his poem was like "looking through kaleidoscope while listening to a harpsichord." 

Should I quit writing? Start drinking? After all I quit drinking when I started writing and I discovered that the hangovers from both were equally debilitating. 

The following morning she said, "You should never quit writing." 

At that moment, she was enthroned at the kitchen table, as regal as ever in her fluttery gown and buttering her English muffin with long, languorous strokes Van Gogh would envy.

"You should write even more,” she said, “all day and all night, if need be. After all, my line about the 'kaleidoscope and harpsichord' needs a poem of its own. It's all meat, no gristle, no fat."

 Author Bio:

Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, Donal Mahoney has had work published in a variety of print and electronic publications in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

It's Almost Sunday Morning by Donal Mahoney

 

       In the summer of 1956, any Saturday at midnight, especially when the moon was out and the stars were bright, you would be able to see Grandma Groth sitting on her front-porch swing waiting for her son, Clarence, a bachelor at 53, to make it home from the Blind Man's Pub. He would have spent another evening quaffing steins of Heineken's.

       Many times that summer before I went away to college, I'd be strolling home at midnight from another pub, just steps behind staggering Clarence. But unlike Clarence, I’d be sober so I'd always let him walk ahead of me and I'd listen to him hum "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Sometimes, very quietly, I’d join in. I don’t think he ever heard me.

         However, on the last Saturday night that Clarence and I came down the street in our odd tandem, I didn't see Grandma on her swing even though the stars were out and the moon was full. For some odd reason, on this particular night, she wasn't waiting to berate him. 

         So far so good, I thought, for Clarence. He won’t have to listen to Grandma give him hell. But then, not far from his house, and without warning, he toppled into Mrs. Murphy's hedge. It was like watching a sack of flour fall, in slow motion, off a truck.

         When I finally got him up, I managed to maneuver Clarence slowly down the sidewalk toward his house. He didn’t make a sound but it wasn't easy moving a man that big who was essentially asleep on his feet.

         Somehow I got him through his back door only to encounter Grandma, a wraith in a hazy nightgown, standing in the hallway, screaming. She began thrashing Clarence with her broom, pausing only for a moment to tell me, 

         "Go home to your mother now so you won't be late for Mass. It's almost Sunday morning!"

         After that, she resumed thrashing Clarence. He never made a sound, just took the blows across his back, head bowed, without moving. But Clarence was a man who said very little even when he was sober.

         After that sad night in 1956, I never saw Clarence again, either marching to work in the morning, his lunch pail gallantly swinging, or staggering home at midnight from the Blind Man's Pub. 

         But many a midnight after that, years later, I'd be coming home from the other pub and I'd see Grandma reigning on her front porch swing, broom in hand, waiting. Maybe Clarence was coming, I thought. But if he was, I never saw him.

         I remember coming home from college every summer and asking the neighbors if they had seen Clarence. Not a sign of him, they said. But on a Saturday night when the moon was out, they’d still see Grandma, on her swing, waiting.

         Now, so many decades later, as I stroll home at midnight, after an evening at the Blind Man’s Pub, I can see the moon is as big as it was the last night I saw Clarence.

         Suddenly I realize I’m older now than Clarence was the night he disappeared. And even though Grandma's been dead for many years, I can see her in the starlight. She's sitting regally on that swing, broom in hand, waiting. So for old time’s sake, I give her a big wave, hoping to hear her say, just one more time, 

         "Go home to your mother now so you won't be late for Mass. It's almost Sunday morning!"

Author Bio: 

Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, Donal Mahoney has had work published in a variety of print and electronic publications in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. 

Some of his earliest work can be found at http://booksonblog12(dot)blogspot(dot)com 

 

The Awakening by Amy Pollard

     

You tighten your grip on your wind-battered umbrella and huddle beneath its protective wing. The headstone before you is dark and impending, mimicking the distant mountains, almost glaring at you as you bend over and arrange your store-bought daisies in the little built-in vase. How your grandmother loved flowers. Already you can smell her rosy perfume serenading your nostrils. You remember the garden she kept in the back of her house and how she would let you inside it. She would name all the flowers, stretching around you like an endless rainbow. After you had seen all of the buds, she would fetch her watering can and feed the flowers, all the while telling you how important water was in sustaining life. “Water is the key to any garden,” she would say. “Without it, there can be no growth.” Then she would go on about the beauty of the flowers and the satisfaction of tending them. She’d given you some seeds, once—pansies, your favorite—and encouraged you to plant them in your apartment window tray.

But you didn’t listen back then. You never listened. Always too busy. Always something else on your mind. What was growing a bunch of skimpy flowers compared to getting your rent paid a month in advance? What was a watering can compared to a raise at work? What was a homegrown garden compared to a house—a real house? You gulp, a teardrop swelling in your eye when you remember the cold, callous funeral procession, full of intoxicating well-wishes and sobering hymns. It wasn’t until the dust accumulated on your unopened pansy seeds that you began to wonder if a garden might do you good. You started thinking about the seeds and how you’d never planted them or given them water, how you’d never given them anything but a dusty existence on the corner of your shelf. Your head felt unusually jammed as you mulled it all over. A garden wouldn’t hurt. In fact, you rather liked the idea. Maybe you could plant the pansies. Maybe you could start over. Rising to your feet, you glimpse the daisies, still strangled by their price tag, and you sigh. It will do no good. You’ve forgotten to pick up the gardening tools on your way here. You have no shovel. You have no spade. You don’t even have a watering can. What a fool you’ve been, thinking it was that easy, that simple to nurture life. Now those cheap daisies are the best that you will ever do. Biting your lip until it bleeds, you swallow and turn away from the gravestone. And then a drop of water splashes onto your cheek.

The umbrella slips out of your palm and sprawls on the grass, sticky and shriveled. You take the packet of seeds out of your pocket. You get down on your hands and knees and start tearing open the earth. The soil cakes your fists as you dig further down. You hadn’t stopped to examine the packet or read the directions. But what four-by-four inch packet could explain how to coax flowers from the ground, how to wring water from the skies or how to hold the sun’s potent gaze long enough to make it all possible? What could ever explain any of that to you?

You feel the rain spilling over you and suddenly you can see. The trees become an emerald carpet spread over the mountains, distant and knowing, veiled in cloudy starlight. The rain dares to whisper its secrets to you as it drums across the grass. The moist, grimy earth mixes with the cold, crisp water as you empty the packet into the man-made hole before hastily packing the dirt back in again. A paid rent, a raise at work and a real house are the last thing on your mind now as the water soaks your face as surely as it is soaking the pansy seeds, lying in wait beneath the earth. All your life, you’ve waited for this garden. You gaze up at the sky, a chalky silver, and see the clouds unfurling. The radiance splashes onto the graves around you, shedding light onto the unborn pansy seeds as if to wake them from their slumber, enticing them to bloom a season early.

You scrape the tears from your cheeks and gaze at the smooth stone in front of you. She has never been this close before. You feel the rain spilling over you and suddenly you know that the world will keep turning, the water will keep falling, and the flowers will keep blooming. Your lips break into a smile. You can’t believe it’s taken you this long.

  

Previously published by the Smashed Cat Magazine on 12 Nov. 2012.

Author Bio:

 Amy Pollard is a poet, writer and student. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as Eunoia Review, Emerge Literary Journal and The 5-2: Crime Poetry Weekly. In her spare time, she drinks coffee, makes music and browses used bookstores. For more information, visit http://amyspen.blogspot.com/.

Dust and Stone by Amaranta DeBrefny

           If Daddy had mentioned my lack of finesse and highlighted that stumble I took into the pothole, I think I’d have screamed. Not that I was a screamer. But a girl could learn. As it turned out, he’d long since left me wandering the ruins on my own. My real walking shoes, along with the mini first aid kit I would have used to clean my grazed knees and that bump on my temple, were in his backpack. The pothole, you see, was more of a gash in the ground, like the ha-has we’d seen last year on those landed estates all over Britain. One minute I was walking along and studying the map of the amphitheatre ruins in Pula, and the next I’d slipped into the gash, fallen forward, and hit my hit against a rock-hard earth crust. This never would’ve happened in Britain.

            Daddy must have fled when the first screams erupted. As I said, I’m not a screamer. It was one, or a dozen more likely, of those Euro-tourists; Daddy didn’t scream. When I’d turned around he was just...gone. He’d wanted to stay in Zagreb, but I’d wanted to see the ruins. I wasn’t surprised he was one of the first to disappear.

            The bump on my head didn’t break the skin and the scrapes on my knees weren’t too bad. Folding the map, I took tentative steps over the cracked and split earth. If another gash opened up, I didn’t want to lose my footing again. Even though most of the tourists had now gone, it would still be an embarrassment I didn’t want to subject myself to. Also, I still had to find a way to get to the katerdrala and the triumphal arch. They were on the list, see. I didn’t like my chances with the screaming lady. She had stopped screaming, but being on the chunky side like Nanna, hadn’t run with the rest. She was pacing around the arena. She wouldn’t be much help at all. My best chance was to walk away from the chaos and through the city’s old quarter.

            The katerdrala and basilica were erected over former Roman temple sites. There were still ancient temple ruins to see—some with their columns and lintels still standing. I thought about that, about the temple sites, as the carved stone of the arena groaned and shifted. Little pebble pieces fell from the structure as I continued on my path. As the stone crumbled and split, the dust of a hundred million abrading rock particles flew upward and clouded the view of the bright blue sky. It was a shame too because everyone knew the Mediterranean Riviera had the bluest sky this side of the Adriatic.

            I left the pacing lady in the arena. I didn’t know what happened to her, and I didn’t want to. Her hyperventilating was worse than her screaming. Out from under the dust cloud, the hot sun beat down on the top of my head. Had it been earlier, or later, I would have been in the shadow of the amphitheatre and each step wouldn’t have felt like such a labor. Without Daddy here I had to carry my own backpack too. Glancing downward at the hard-baked ground, I noticed pebbles skittering. A moment later, a rumble sounded and I felt the earth move through my soles. I halted. Without warning another gash opened up a few feet from where I stood. Each side of the former wholeness gnashed against each other until the gash was the size of a small swimming pool. It was as if Pula’s plates were shifting. I’d never seen anything like it so I stopped a moment to watch.

            Then, quicker than I had time to process, something slammed into my shoulder. I spun around to see a familiar face pleading with me. It was a guy from the old quarter. He’d pestered me during our whole trip, like most of the local boys, to buy me pistachio gelato, da? and ride me around on his Vespa. The Vespa turned out to be an old bicycle, so I never found out what the gelato would have been. No. My Western appeal wasn’t lost on these people; But what was this dust and stone all about?

            Pulling the items out of my pack, I unfolded a trinket wrapped in newspaper and scanned the headline. APOKALIPSA DOLAZI! Huh. So the apocalypse was here at last. If Daddy had bothered to read the paper maybe he would have stuck around to see the action. After all the delays, or rather, miscalculations by the so-called experts, I smiled and breathed a sigh of relief. After all, if there’s one thing we Westerners expect, it’s our money’s worth, and we paid good money for our tickets. The rest of the article said midday, I think. That was in a few minutes’ time. There was no way Daddy’d make it back.

            After I found the chunky lady, I tugged at her sleeve. Her wild eyes settled when I smiled at her. That was nice, I guess. She wasn’t my first choice, but I’d have to make do. I tugged her back toward the ruins and gesticulated as I enunciated, “I’m Katherynne Lee Child, ma’am. Kath-errr-ynne.”

She whimpered when some of the columns teetered, but I held on to her and tried my best to assure her she wouldn’t want to miss this.

            “Do you think,” I said to her in English, “this will be as good as the katerdrala?”

            The skies parted, and as she opened her funny little mouth to say something, I shushed her.

            “Sorry, not now, ma’am,” I had to say. “It’s starting. The end...it’s beginning.”      

Author Bio:

 Amaranta DeBrefny writes flash thrillers and spec fic for discerning readers on the go. Free reads, including her latest publication, "Dark Justice," are available at http://www.amarantadebrefny.wix.com/author.