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.