Sink or Swim

The first time I saw

the sea, I knew what it was

to drown. Held fast by

a line from the bow

of a sleek ship, the sky like

glass. Dunked in the waves.

Breath

turned to salt.

33 words added on to's original five: The first time I saw...

Tickled to be awarded silver for Trifextra 100 :)

The Writing Process

Spread manure. Weed.

This weekend,   are asking for us to sum up our own writing process with just three little words.


Pleased to note this entry took silver in the Seventy-Sixth Trifextra challenge, the podium for which is found here.

Too Much Old Desire

She was lonely. Adele tsked to herself. That was all, she was just lonelier than she had allowed herself to recognize. She leaned her head back in the armchair and looked again at John, who sat splay-legged on the couch, intently studying the laptop while he drummed his long fingers against the coffee table. She knew every inch of his skin, every curve of every muscle, every sharply protruding bone, every deep wrinkle in his brow. She recognized in the depths of her entrails the almost square paunch of his belly, the sleek fall of his straight, dark hair. She followed the shadow along his jaw, a smattering of whiskers that brought memories flooding back. At first flush they were welcome, like old, intimate friends, but after consideration she drew in her breath, and turned away.

‘You are obviously too lonely,’ she told herself. ‘This cannot be.’

She pretended to count back, but she already knew the answer was ten years.

‘It’s been ten years,’ she told herself.

Time had raced past while standing still, and John was living, breathing testimony to that. There were flashes of him that had made her smile from the very beginning - a certain way of holding a knife, of crinkling a nose - but there was also a particular insistence on order and coherence that took her breath away, filling Adele with a longing she would never be able to shake.

Those graceful hands were the same ones that had held and caressed her, that wrinkled brow was the same one she had smoothed and kissed goodbye. He was his father’s flesh and blood alright, so much so that Adele could feel herself falling in love with him all over again.

‘But he’s not Jack,’ she told herself.

Adele patted John on the knee and stood heavily and slowly, her heart aching, her soul disheveled.

"You hungry?" she asked her son. "How about some dinner?"

   gave us quite a choice this week: BLOOD (noun) 3 a :  lifeblood;  broadly :  life b :  human stock or lineage; especially :  royal lineage  blood>  c : relationship by descent from a common ancestor : kinship d : persons related through common descent : kindred e (1) : honorable or high birth or descent (2) : descent from parents of recognized breed or pedigree

[Title taken from Michael Cunningham's Flesh and Blood]

Trifecta week Seventy-Six Silver!

Town Called Irony

Suzy was born to hit the ground running, destined to change the face of the earth, starting with the smallest town in the ugliest corner of the world.
 Two doors over, Laura rarely ventured outside her yard unless it was to go to school, and she had every intention of breathing her very last breath in the house her grandfather built. She learned how to bake at her grandmother’s knee. Her father taught her how to drive out on the back roads that took them to the empty shopping plaza parking lot on Sundays. When she wasn’t petitioning the town to keep the old Lawson water pump in working order, it was to protect the hundred-year-old oak on the village green.
 Suzy was aching to shake the dust of her hometown off her shoes, scared if she didn’t she’d soon be seeing her own reflection in the faces of her neighbors. Those old farts who stuck around town waiting for their high school reunions to roll around every year were like taunting demons. ‘I won’t let you catch me,’ she wanted to shriek after burning the rubber off the tires of a smart little import that would let her peal out of town again and again every Thanksgiving.
 Laura always smiled at Suzy’s fantasy and tried not to dwell on Grandmother’s words:
 ‘That girl moves too fast for her own shadow.”
 Of course it was Suzy who noticed the new kid in town, and the first thing she did was introduce him to Laura. They were destined for greatness, she claimed. If only one of them had declined the dare, backed down from the challenge, been willing to concede to the others.
 Laura still bakes. Suzy never misses a high school reunion. The new kid left town in a smart little import right after graduation.

    DWELL 3a : to keep the attention directed —used with on or upondwell on my fears>

Silver for Trifecta week 64!! (http://www.trifectawritingchallenge.com/2013/02/trifextra-week-fifty-five.html)