pre-April Flash Challenge – 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Prompts from Amygdala:

#11: prompts – thick headed and thick bellied, glacier lily, blue spruce – 15 minutes

The winter had covered over the boughs of the blue spruce by our door that year. It had buried the branches like I wish we could burry the past – distant, icy and dismal, knowing that our attempts to stuff it down would only make it come back that much stronger. We had a history of betrayal, and that winter, it came to life like a blizzard of fire, one minute icy and hateful, the next hot and lava-full. You were thick headed and thick bellied, skin tough against any rationality I could throw at you, far superior to my own sound thinking, if you didn’t agree with my original premise in the first place. Your skin was tough as tar cooled over, and you’d yell at me across the apartment, casting words and blame across the empty rooms that used to be full of at least sentiment, in the absence of furniture. You were resolute against emotion, standing tall like a warning beacon against my surrounding darkness, glaring into brilliance at the most surprising of moments – then fading away again into barely a flicker. I hated the fighting, the arguments, bickering back and forth with no resolution in sight, my resolve dropping like the petals off of one of those stubborn flowers in the front yard that was too incorrigible to realize the winter had set in, and spring was such a long way off – if it came at all, this year. Sometimes the seasons stuck, pivotal moments in our lives when we realized that we were holding onto something that had already slipped through our fingers long ago, that all that was left in our careful grasp was tiny grains of sand, the rest long having blown away to be carried off by the wind in whichever direction it was traveling. But I hated the silences more. The aftermath of the verbal destruction, where your words had toppled my world over, and I wished, just once, you would actually knock the paintings off the walls – throw kitchen utensils, unmake the bed or smash the stereo – something tangible to match the mess you had left inside me. You never did. Your temper was never an external thing, which is why, probably, as much as it ate me alive with its intensity, it did worse to you. It’s probably why I woke up on that snowfall morning, and I knew. As much as I loved you, I knew. You had become my glacier lily, in this land of harsh winter, and bitter reality – that’s what happened when a water lily freezes over, hard as ice. And like a mountaineer climbing in the wilderness, I had to write the rest of this story alone and let you go. There were no tears. No begging, just a calm surrender. You knew too. And really, it was better this way. We died that winter, but my spring was coming, never too far off the horizon, awaking and waiting for the sun.

# 12: prompts – fruity-eyed; mutters and snores; ribbons streaming – 8 minutes

We awoke in a tangled mess of limbs, sheets and blankets that morning, sunlight filtering through the cracks in the blinds like ribbons streaming, a night full of midnight awakenings for connection, mutters and snores from both sides of the bed, dueling pillows and late-night talks over tea. And you lay there, staring at me – fruity-eyes and gleaming with the remembrance of things passed. I knew that we both remembered exactly the nature of our declarations the night before, despite how sleep deprived and over-tired we had both been by the time we made our way to the bedroom, after long walks, gourmet dinners and patio reflections. I remembered everything. The sunlight burned like crystals in cut glass, reflecting off the walls and bouncing back, lighting the whole world with its insistence that it was time to be up, and moving. But up was the last thing I wanted. We took turns in the bathroom, brushing our teeth, staring at our mixed reflections in the mirror, pushing past each other in the narrow hall and smiling. I was going to make breakfast – I really was. But I got distracted by the sway of your hips as you bent down to recover lost articles of clothing that lay scattered like puddles on the floor where they had been hastily discarded. I jumped on you with a playful pounce that sent us both tumbling back into the mess of bed we had just stumbled out of, a tangle of arms and legs again, the warmth of your skin radiating like a space heater as our lips met and introduced themselves after a slight time of separation in our sleeping, where your name had rested on them along with the curve of your shoulder as you lay curled against me in the dark. I needed to reintroduce them to many things, and I was full of the joy in that moment of knowing I had all the time in the world – although the illumination of today would fade with the setting of the sun in constant movement, that the dark would shine with the pinpricks of sparkling stars, and that brilliant orb of light would rise again in an endless march onward of time, days carried little meaning in the grand scheme of things. They melted one into another, like we faded into each other, blurring the lines of where I began and you ended, distinguishing only vaguely where the joining us began. We were chasing dreams here, and blending them into reality in the mixing bowl of what was, and we were but two ingredients that were joining like flour and milk in a puddle at the bottom of a bowl that would be licked clean by fate, hope and chance and the knowledge of a final ever-after.

#13: prompts – the heft of a crowbar, the clutch of circumstance, feet of brass – 20 minutes

I was a dumbass. That much was certain, when nothing else was. I had company coming over, the mashing of friends together who had seldom if ever met, a four course meal on the stove, a house in the midst of cleaning, and as I was taking the trash out for the umpteenth time, I locked myself out of the house – the one place in the world I really, really needed to be. What’s worse is that my cell phone was still trapped inside, along with the dinner, the half-baked cleaning plans and my cats who I feared would find an empty house with food strewn about in half-prepared piles a playground of epic proportions. I leaned my back against the door after several moments of head pounding, as if that would do the trick and the lock would unbolt itself and recognize my presence and let me in. It didn’t work. I took a deep breath, trying to remember where the nearest pay phone was – did anyone use those anymore? Did they even exist? Did they have phonebooks? I realized at that moment how dependent I had become on technology – I didn’t even have my home phone number memorized anymore, it was tucked away safely in my cell, which I had to turn to any time I wanted to remember how to contact anyone – even myself. I heard footsteps on the stairs, seeing the top of my neighbor’s head cresting the wave of the landing. I must have looked a mess – hair tangled and humidity damp, clothes lopsided and damp from dish residue, barefoot and frustrated. I deserved the smirk that briefly crossed his face before he probably recognized, given the look on my face, it was not the smartest of facial expressions. I was caught up in the clutch of circumstance, unable to challenge the tide to move in a different direction and now he was stuck in the undertow with me. “need some help?” He asked, his slow, southern drawlwrapping around my shoulders like a blanket. I horrified him by choosing unwillingly that moment to burst into tears. I was such a girl. Somehow through the frustrated sobbing, I managed to spit out a few words like “locked” and “dinner” and “help” along with “thanks”. He laughed, slipping his key easily into the lock of his apartment across the hall. “I’ll be right back”
A few minutes later, he re-emerged, weighing the heft of a crowbar in his tanned fist, smiling. He handed it to me. He must be joking. I took it gingerly, as if it were a coiled snake about to strike. When I inserted it into the narrow gap in the door frame and tugged, my bare feet slid easily across the floor, while the door didn’t budge an inch. I found his laugh to be calming, rather than infuriating, which was new to me. He carefully stepped in front of me, sliding me out of the way. Damsel in distress, indeed. I blew my bangs out of my face with a carefully measured breath, watching his every move. When he stuck the crowbar in the doorjam and tugged, he didn’t move an inch. He must have feet of brass – or the shoes. Maybe wearing shoes helped. The jam finally splintered under his muscular weight, and the deadbolt slid back an inch or so – enough to allow me access, anyway. “I don’t know how to thank you” I said, leaning against the doorway, looking up into those gorgeous azure eyes I had somehow managed to never notice.
“no need” he smiled, waved and turned to walk away.
“no, really” I paused. “so…I was having a dinner tonight…
You never know how these things are going to happen, do you?

#14: prompts – she kept three diaries, natural impulse, redemption machine – 11 minutes

She kept three diaries that year, one for the truth, one for lies, and one for the person she wished to be, attempting and failing to meld her worlds together. When she wrote, she became her best ideal, floating and free above the crap of an every day life. When she spoke, she stuttered over her words like cracks in the concrete, unable to keep her stories straight enough to shoot from a bow and winding up as kindling wood in a mess of missed arrows. It was her natural impulse to lie, to weave half truths around blatant falsehoods, sewing like a master seamstress, trying to impress, trying to become – trying to maintain the falsehood of existence. It was just a summer thing, that lasted for many years, riding in her wake like dolphins trailing after a speedboat in the salt-water taffy of an empty world. Sooner or later, the truth was going to come for her, and she was prepared for the onslaught, prepared for the revelation and awaiting hopefully the redemption machine that would carry her far away from this place – hanging over the balance of a new start and fresh beginning like standing on a diving board above a smooth, ripple-less diving board of the new. She was going to dive in, splash around and make waves, that one. I knew the truth behind those eyes and I watched her carefully those years, seeing the reflection in that vacant expression and knowing the reality of that end, knowing now the brevity of the heartbreak at the end of the struggle, and the long stretch of eternity once the worlds collided and calmed. She was me, see. And I was finally ready to become that which was – the most genuine, real and vulnerable shade of myself, mirrored shadows on the walk, clouds floating overhead with hints of raindrops on a hot summer concrete, wiping the slate clean and starting over. Now let it rain.

#15: prompts – heaping praise, dewdrop words, the neck of a bird – 25 minutes

The weight of this was too much, too much. The pressure was insurmountable, and I felt like Atlas under the burden of the world. You were heaping praise on my shoulders and I was unworthy of the accolades, knowing the truth that I had tried to hide from you for years, that it wasn’t enough – you weren’t enough. But you still rained dewdrop words on my shoulder like your wayward kisses after a morning shower. We played pretend very well, going about a daily routine, ins and outs – maybes and could have beens, but weren’t. I awoke every morning, turning over on my sweat-damp pillow, still surprised to see you laying there, as my dreams had told me that you had gone at some point in the night like a shooting start that had, for a time, lingered too long on my nighttime canvas. I wanted to brush you out of the world- paint over the backdrop, create a new and empty melody from blank space of where furniture used to stand, now missing. Boxes of books that I’d never again read because they had been yours once. I wanted to see the missing spaces on the walls where your paintings had hung, my toes curling into the tread in the carpet on your path from the front door to the bedroom every day after work to change clothes and get comfortable. After 10 years, you still left your wet towel on the bed, making a large damp place exactly where I was supposed to lay – some things never change. Other things, however, do – like how I had gone from an aching longing to an adult playing at a game of house that should have been over in childhood. I wanted to snatch this imposter of reality by the throat, fragile as the neck of a bird and squeeze – if only to have you realize that there was no air left in it to strangle out. That it was dead and buried and we were nothing more than ghosts, an unintelligent haunting just repeating the same patterns because it was what we had gotten used to – not because we wanted to. I honestly didn’t know if we had ever wanted to. It had happened in a rush in the beginning, when feeling were at least genuine if not spur of the moment, and I settled then for something I thought I should want – not something I did. I had been miming the afterlife ever since, trapped in an invisible box of duty, not passion, devoid of the scream across my lips that offered hope of escape. There was no sweetness left in me, here. I couldn’t imagine you could pretend there was. Even the way you looked at me had changed. But you still placed me, pedestal high, where I knew it was only a matter of time before I toppled. That it would only take one moment too far before I fell from my lofty resting place to crumble in ash on the cold floor, and then you’d realize. I always hated the way that you snored in your sleep, mouth wide open, inviting a fly to zoom in and make a home. That should have been a sign, really – from the beginning.