Cruel and sudden, hast thou since / Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?

"Ow!" Cassie said, and hopped up, dancing in pain, waving her injured hand around in front of her, "what the hell, Leah?" There was no way she could have known that the fight they then had over one pricked finger would end their seventh-grade friendship. She couldn't have known the monstrous enemy she'd create, two years later, bent on making her high school a living hell.

Monday's prompt

Monday's prompt is taken from one of Donne's more famous -- and modern -- poems:

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?

-- John Donne, The Flea

Traced in the Shadow/An Indecipherable Cause

She didn't want me to see her face after the fire, so we sat silent silhouetted in darkness like on some crime drama: identity changed to protect the victim.

But I knew who she was. And the way she turned her head ever so slightly when I asked how it started - the way she whispered that they thought it must have been an electrical outlet sparking with all the dramatic over-conviction of a soap opera actress reciting lines - I knew with a sickening certainty that she was not the victim here after all.

Traced in the shadow, an indecipherable cause.

I studied the far side of the room from the quiet dark of my chair in the corner. It hardly took a rustle: my gun hand flew up and shot the small form, which fell giggling to the floor. Tommy staggered up, holding the foam bullet to his heart, laughing and moaning at once, "you shot me, I'm hit, I'm hit!"

Wednesday's prompt

Continuing our observance of National Poetry Month, a small snippet from a poem about blackbirds:

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Observe the Sky Begin to Blanch

I stumble into the desert and keep stumbling forward just to try to escape the darkness that lurks even beyond my own eyelids. It is only hours before my wounds and thirst overtake me and I collapse to my knees, parched as a lover denied, just as the sun reaches its apex and spills pure white light onto the sky, the sand, my own red and blistered flesh.

For one such as I who has always feared the dark, there can be no greater blessing than to die in this way - eyes closed, but still full of light.

Observe the sky begin to blanch

The months of accreted data, notes, plotted graphs taken from the high, lone telescope in the Andes does not lie: she has proof, certain proof that the white mantle of the Milky Way is spilling from its mold, billowing into space. The world has to know, and her newfound mission takes its toll on her life, beginning with the stressful opprobrium of her peers, then the loss of her grants, her position, her marriage.... And in the end, as more data pours in, it grows painfully clear that she was not quite right and not quite wrong, but had ultimately staked a revolution on hardly an evolutionary footnote, made a waste of her life for the semblance of the shifting shape of the haunting light of distant stars, no more.

Monday's prompt

The prompt for Monday is a spare line the fictional (and aged) poet in a play:

Observe the sky begin to blanch

Tennessee Williams, Night of the Iguana

Lay your sleeping head, my love...

All that night and until the sun rose and scorched the endless ribbon of road, she leaned her little five-year-old head on my arm, so I made do driving with only my left. It was peaceful with all the quiet intensity of a hundred suns, that father and daughter pose, and I didn't have the heart to think -- to think about it all. About where we were going, about the hell I'd have from Susan when she found out, about the madness of it; mad and wild and free and impossible and absolutely every-fiber-of-my-being unavoidable as a headlong fall.

Friday's prompt: Auden

Friday's prompt comes from the first two lines by the modernist poet, Auden:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

Human on my faithless arm;

W.H. Auden, Lullaby

A child is sleeping...

Every morning for as long as he could remember he heard the delicate footsteps descending and the rough loaf of bread and clay jug of water slammed on the ground beside his straw mat, every morning he recited prayers after the voice's even-toned instruction, every morning the voice instructed him to not remove the blindfold until he counted to one hundred, every morning he listened to the footsteps moving away and out of the cellar and he counted to one hundred and took the blindfold off. One day a great rebellion arose in him and he removed the blindfold as soon as he woke up and waited for the footsteps.

And when they did not come that day, or that night, or the next day, and there was no bread or water, he took his first halting terrified steps up the stairs, marveling at hearing the sound of his steps for the first time.

A child is sleeping: an old man gone.

"Just who started this damn-fool pissing contest anyway," she asked, "your father who's been gone ten years?" 

"That's not the point," I said, "that's not the goddamn --"

"No," she said, hotly, "just because for the last forty years him and then you've mowed that patch of grass you claim is on our property, when you  know damn well it ain't, doesn't mean you can just send your son out there for Williams to shout off his lawn -- you can't do that to him, you can't."

Wednesday's prompt is the short end of a short poem. In a sense, it forms a two sentence story of its own:

A child is sleeping:

An old man gone.

O, father forsaken,

Forgive your son!

- James Joyce, Ecce Puer

All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born

They say that when the princess rose from her sleep after a hundred years, she was far more beautiful than that innocent young girl pricked by a spindle (though she had not aged a day). But the first royal command that passed her rose-petal lips was to execute all the spinners in the land (just to be safe, you see). 

And so now I hide trembling from the conquering queen who wears a crown of brambles, stained with the blood of failed princes, in her golden hair (and a look like that of one who has lost something even she cannot comprehend in her eyes, always).

All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.

"Senescence," the cracked, crone-like MP's voice intoned, "unlike our own species, the rate of genetic mutations mounts geometrically with age." The small blue thing rattled around the cage, its several arms all ending in minute, elegant, theatrical hands. 

"The point is," she said, "its so-called powers are off the charts, but its mental stability, the sheer damge it could do" -- she sighed -- "what this is, is a diplomatic nightmare."

Continuing the theme of National Poetry Month, Monday's prompt is taken from a poem by Yeats, a concluding sentiment happily stripped of its context:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

-W.B. Yeats, Easter, 1916

The Pearls That Were His Eyes

He took off his sunglasses to expose eyes blank as glossed bones in the desert and I drew on all my willpower to not recoil as he leaned in close to rasp:
"They say never to stare at the sun, kid, but I didn't listen."
And I forgave him his anger, because the slight tremor in his rough voice and the trembling flesh of his ruined eyes told me that what he had seen was more beautiful than he could ever explain to someone like me, someone who always listened.

This are pearls that were his eyes

Jack threw fricking gravel  at my bedroom window for ten minutes until I put my face in the glass and gave him the finger. It was warm and I remember the smell of the recent rain and how the wildest thing we could think of doing was to crawl down from the bridge and walk along the river. And that's when we found it: dark and waterlogged and strangely, obscenely bluish pockmarked, the dead woman's eyes turned up in some sort of milky-white epiphany.

Friday's prompt: yet more Eliot

Friday's prompt is both an Eliot quote and a Shakespeare quote. Because that is how T.S. rolls:

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland...

or

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

At the second turning of the second stair

"I talked to dad," she said, shifting her glass on the table, "they're fighting again--"

"Yeah, you know what, I've moved on -- moved up, even," I said, "and left their little -- little fucking dramas behind."

She sighed and her eyes couldn't seem to leave her plate as she murmured, "no, no -- she cheated on him and this time... I think it's really over."

Wednesday's Prompt: More Eliot

Wednesday's prompt comes from a poem appropriate for the day (and one of my favorite):

At the second turning of the second stair

I left them twisting, turning below;

-T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

Portrait of a Lady

April tried not to think about what he'd just said and twisted the lilac stem between her thumb and index fingers, feeling only the delicate membranes of the stem. Flowers were living things too - did they have a pulse, did they breathe, did they feel just like she did?

The pressure of her anxious fingers severed the stem in half, green and sloppy, and the flower fell helplessly into her lap.

Now that the lilacs are in bloom

The boy in the black t-shirt crumples the sheet that he has covered with pencil lines and tosses it aside.

Cressida lies on the platform, naked, holding lilacs. She used to enjoy her second job, but she is beginning to feel like her representations - graphite-blackened, twisted and balled up, a thing to be viewed or to be discarded.

Now that lilacs are in bloom...

Every day, the princess was allowed from the tower to pick fresh spring flowers for her room. Her step-mother smiled cruelly, never suspecting. When night fell, however, the princess tiptoed over to the vase, twirled the sprig of blossoms three times, and they became a green sleigh with a team of flying horses, ready to carry her off to her prince.

In honor of the fact that April is National Poetry Month, prompts will be taken from various poems. This week, T.S. Eliot, who had some choice words for this particular month. Here is Monday's:

Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

T.S. Eliot, Portrait of a Lady.

Abecedarian

They had practiced cursive every day together before the stroke, his crinkled hands gently guiding the child's chubby fingers. When he came home finally from the hospital, the child sat outside his room with ink and paper and refused to listen when his parents said he'd need a different tutor, and they thought he didn't understand what had happened.

But then every day after, he was in his grandfather's room, impatiently guiding his grandfather's stiff hands to form the elegant sloping forms of the letters they had studied together for so long.

Abecedarian

"That was a breakup," she said as the door slammed. He stormed through the kitchen, stomping loudly and knocking a plate off the kitchen table as he went -- and one of the blocks as well. His brother looked up from the colored letter-blocks still on the table that, at 27 years of age, he barely understood, his idiot lips apart and his wide idiot eyes brimming with surprise, incomprehension, and tears.

Friday's Prompt: A Word!

Friday's prompt is a word, defined and grabbed as randomly as possible. Write about the experience of the word without using it in the story, trying to capture the meaning or essence.

Today's word is abecedarian - a person who is learning the alphabet.

Post your story by 6 pm Friday. Happy Easter!

Butterflies In His Stomach

We're too old to play doctor, he protested laughing, and I caught his arm, rolling him over on the fresh wet grass, laying my head on his stomach. Fine, what do you hear?

Just his heart racing so fast it overpowered everything else: the hidden birds trilling all around us, the skateboarders and bicyclists speeding by, his anxious bursts of laughter, my own heartbeat and breath and thoughts: all that overshadowed by the faint infinitely fast fluttering of his pulse.