Farthest

He gets in the security line for the plane and I don't even wait to see him walk through the door, just wave goodbye to his back. It's only when I get back in my car and see his orange college sweatshirt carelessly crumpled on the passenger seat that pain fills my chest and all the anger and hate of the last few months fills the cauldron of his absence and transforms lead into gold, hate into love.

Tantalus has nothing on me.

Farthest

"No", the man said in a low tone, looking out from the ferry's railing and over the bay, "not there and not beyond there and a hundred or a thousand miles past that." The two small children looked up at him, wide-eyed. "Where I come from," he said, "is oceans and nations from here, on the other side of the world, all my family and friends and the places I know and love and cherish," and while the boy and girl tried to imagine such vastness, a something almost like a tear rose up in the wake of his eye.

Wednesday's Prompt

Keeping with the single word:

Farthest

Flourish!

He pens his final words in blood because it is all the ink he has, the ivory letter opener his only instrument, and yet so much to say. As he carves his finest calligraphy, he realizes that blood is all he has ever had to write with, really, if one isn't too literal about these things, and he laughs surprised at the thought.

Because it is is important that they know, he signs in a great plume the name of his murderer: himself, only himself, like all writers great and small.

Flourish

The tenth of May -- that was the day I stumbled across the second set of sales records in the locked back office, along with the letter. That was the day it hit me like a fist to the face that for the entire goddamn ten years, Sid was nothing by a conniving bastard. That was the goddamn glorious day it dawned on me that I was about to be rich -- rich enough, anyway; one little just dessert for all those goddamn years of hard work and suffering and humiliation.

Monday's prompt

In honor of spring, Monday's one-word prompt is:

Flourish

Use it as you will.

Arabesque

Their matching vine tattoos - glossy green with tiny pink spiral flowers, one twisting up her left arm and one twisting down his right arm - were so beautiful together it was hard to believe that only a month later she'd tried to scour her left arm clean with bleach. Failed, and stumbled through the park after, lost and drunk and stupid and tripping over rocks in the dark, until she saw with wonder a trellis she'd never seen before, vines all up it, the exact shape and color of the design he'd chosen for them -

She held out her left arm and the vines grew towards her, flowers trembling, wrapping at first around her wrists and then up past her locked elbows and shaking shoulders, around and down her neck until they formed a perfect pattern on her body: a pale ancient statue in the moonlight.

Arabesque

Madeleine sits at the table by her two year old son. For minutes at a stretch, she is lost in thought, drawing graceful arcs and whorls on the cafe napkin. For a year now, this has been the only way to efface the constant waking dreams of car accidents, kidnapping, earthquakes, acts of terrorism -- of missing Emma so much more than the husband that Emma stole from her.

Wednesday's prompt

Wednesday's prompt keeps to the one-word theme:

Arabesque

Use it as you will.

Solitude

That last of the musket-shots rang out in the cold morning air. He looked around him; his side, their side -- all fallen, to a one. Later, reflecting back on that moment, he could hardly believe how slow it was to dawn on him that he was alone and free, completely and utterly free.

Monday's prompt

Monday's prompt is a single word:

Solitude

Use it as you will.

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.