As the world turns,
you turn with it
always just a little out of kilter;
existing within a land of virtual friends
and made up characters,
submerged in the limpid pools of your mind’s eye,
where with every throw of the dice
you win.
Written in response to Sadje’s ‘What Do You See #5‘ photo prompt.
He’d battled over the Melancholic Mountains of Mythndlore,
scythed through thick forests where Dark Shadows lurk
stumbled across Mind Leaching deserts and now
wading through the stagnant Green Marais
at last he’d found what he was seeking.
The light at the end of his personal
Tunnel of Angst
…
Finally, he types
‘THE END’
Written in response to Sadje’s ‘What Do You See #4′ photo prompt.
Look up at that little tree,
sparkling in the moonlight,
lit up by the stars.
Take a moment to remind yourself
of what is truly precious.
One life, one planet,
last chance.
Written in response to Sadje‘s ‘What Do You See‘ photo prompt.
Freya admired her newly-polished talons. She glanced over her scaly shoulders at her wings, freshly adorned with the finest lapis lazuli, mined by the dwarves of Zendor. The elves had done a fine job on her. It had cost her several gold coins from her secret horde, but it would be worth it. She was ready for the audition.
As a young actress she’d been an extra in the final Lord of the Rings film. She hadn’t enjoyed flying on by herself all the way to New Zealand. It had been exhausting. But there’d been no way she would have agreed to go in one of those flying metal contraptions, crated up like an animal. And then, after all that, her scene had ended up on the cutting room floor.
Her other big regret was to have just missed the part in the BBC TV series, Merlin. She’d have loved to have worked with John Hurt, but they’d said she was too pretty. Fair enough, she’d thought; the role had, after all, been for a considerably older dragon, and a male at that.
Now she was pinning her hopes on the Game of Thrones. This could be her big break!
Written in response to Sadje‘s ‘What Do You See‘ photo prompt.
And in memory of our friend, Hélène Vaillant. I’m so pleased that Sadje has revived this!
I return to the cave behind the koppie one last time. I’m alone. My story-teller has finished his story now. Still I am drawn to this place where the veld stretches out to the smudge-blue mountains. It is late afternoon, when the sun’s red-orange afterglow becomes a purple-haze dusk; when the air is alive with spirits.
Inside the cave, my hand traces the outlines of the eland and the hunter who stands, bow and arrow poised, taking aim at the beast. A shadow moves across the scene and I turn to see the figure of a man outlined against the burning sunset. For a moment I think it’s the story-teller. But no, this is someone else.
He’s dressed in a long blanket; a string of beads decorates his head. He carries a long, stout stick which he lays against the cave entrance before stepping silently into the cave.
The San man.
He points at the eland and at the hunter. He turns to me and our eyes meet. His are the colour of the early morning sky. They tell me that he was that hunter and this was the first eland he ever killed. Killing an eland made him a man.
He beckons me over to another drawing. A lion and a man stand next to a bush which has strips of meat hanging from its branches. The man doesn’t fear the lion, because they are friends. The man shares his meat with the lion and the lion does the same with his kill. They belong to the land and the land belongs to them.
Together we walk to the cave entrance and stand looking out across the veld as the sky darkens; two tiny figures in a vast universe.
When I turn to look at him, he has gone.
“Come sit and write down the story of the old San man,” he says. “Before it’s too late, before the story gets lost.” He wags his finger at me. “Stories are like the wind, they float away to another place unless you write them down.”
“Tell me the story of the old San man then.”
He nods and settles himself more comfortably on the sun-warmed rock and begins.
“When the moon is full and the land is parched and dry, the San man comes. He comes when the spirits call him. Old as the hills, yet he walks tall and straight; his eyes are clear and bright. Dressed in a long blanket and pushing his hand cart. All he has is in that hand cart.”
“He travels from place to place as his people have always done; although few are left. They say: ‘When you lose your land, you lose everything. When the animals are gone, the people are gone.’ And so it is.”
“He visits the places where the rocks still speak and the air is alive with the spirits.”
My storyteller strokes the smooth rock on which we are sitting. I’ve seen the rock art in the cave behind us: faded pictures in ochre and red, showing animals and people.
“He comes to perform his rituals; to perform the trance dance, the dance in which men become animals and their souls travel far, far away, and it is said if they stay away too long, they never return.”
My storyteller stares off into the distance.
“Once, long ago, when I was a still a boy, I followed him.” He turns and points. “I hid behind that big rock and watched, thinking I was unseen.” He pauses, nodding slowly, his body swaying gently, as if he’s listening to a song.
I grow impatient. “Go on, what did you see?”
“As the sun slipped behind the mountain, he lit the fire he had built, just down there, on that patch of bare earth. Then, as the fire took hold, he began to shuffle around the fire; his feet scuffing the dirt, raising little eddies of dust. The dance began, he raised his arms and threw back his head and started to chant. Then the chanting stopped; he spun around and looked at me, beckoning me to come.”
He looks over to the mountain, where the sun is almost gone. His voice is a whisper.
“I was afraid, but I went. He took my hand and I followed him in the dance. And then I was flying like an eagle, looking down from the sky at me and the San man dancing far below me. I saw the San man turn to me and put his hand over my heart and I felt his spirit too, running with the springbok, the kudu and the eland; the great herds of the plains.”
The storyteller fell silent.
“What happened next?”
“It started to rain. Out of a clear sky, it started to rain.”
Capturing the Rain Animal is an important mythological and symbolic aspect of the rock art of the San People. Read more…
From my Flash Fiction Collection
Great Being Five was having a bad day. The worst day she’d ever had since she’d decided to delete planet Earth. She’d known she had to do it, but still she regretted it. What she also regretted was agreeing to collaborate with Great Being Nineteen on his newly relocated planet. What a nightmare that had turned out to be.
After the destruction of Earth, Great Being Nineteen had given his barren little red planet a nudge, moving it gently into the Earth’s old orbit. Deferring to her experience of the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ he’d asked her to set up the basic building blocks for life, most essentially, the liquid water. The planet already had important elements like carbon and nitrogen; it even had ready-made continents and a slightly defunct volcanic system which just required a little kick-start to give the planet more energy.
She’d carefully retrieved the Earth’s old moon and substituted for Mars’ own two moons which she felt weren’t really up to the job. They were too small and misshapen and she hated their forbidding names which reminded her of all the worst qualities of her erstwhile earthlings. Who in their right mind would call their nearest heavenly bodies Phobos and Deimos – fear and dread?
Being thrifty she had put them in storage in an empty part of the universe. They might come in useful for something, although Great Being Nineteen would probably auction them off.
She sighed as she looked across the surface of the red planet. It had gone so well initially, especially after she’d introduced the blue-green algae. The warmth of the now-nearer sun had allowed them to photosynthesize and voilà, oxygen levels increased rapidly, an ozone layer formed and the plant developed an atmosphere. It had been a long wait, but as far as Great Being Five was concerned, it was party time.
As she and Great Being Nineteen toasted their success, the bickering began. First of all they couldn’t agree on a name. It needed something new, bright and vibrant, but all their brainstorming only ended in bitter recrimination. Great Being Nineteen wanted something tough and macho-sounding. Five told him tersely that it really wouldn’t do. What sort of tone would that set for a new world? Eventually, they decided to ‘park’ the problem until the planet developed a character of its own.
The next bone of contention was how they would develop the aesthetic. Great Being Nineteen really had no idea. They browsed among the galaxies, searching for ideas, but nothing really grabbed them. Eventually Five decided to show him her lovely planet in Alpha Centauri, proudly lifting the subtle cloaking device she’d installed to keep it hidden from predatory interstellar life forms.
He wasn’t impressed. “Just birds and trees and flowers? Where’s the interest? Where’s the ultimate struggle for survival?”
Five had turned away in disgust, washing her hands of the whole project. Let him do as he wants, she thought, and turned her attention to adding some pretty pastel coloured animals to the dappled woodlands of her lovely planet; all herbivores, of course. And then, finally, she settled upon its name. Her lovely planet would be known as Orea.
But over the millennia she couldn’t resist the odd little peak at Nineteen’s handiwork.
Over time, Great Being Nineteen had named his planet Ferox and had introduced an interesting collection of flora and fauna. He’d raided the Earth archives she’d shared with him and picked out the most predatory creatures he could find. Huge raptors circled the skies, carnivores red in tooth and claw stalked the plains and forests, killer whales patrolled the oceans. Happily there were no war-mongering bipeds… yet.
Five had to admit his collection of big cats were beautiful, as she scanned the planet; but, wait, what was that tiger eating? She peered at her viewing screen more closely. What she saw filled her with horror.
She flicked her monitor over to Orea. Where were all the furry mammals? She roved among the woodland glades. Not a pink fluffy bunny in sight! And where were the birds?
She returned her attention to Ferox just in time to see a raptor gobble up one of her red-gold sun-birds in mid-flight. Everywhere she looked were signs of the carnage; a handful of bright feathers here, a sorry lump of pastel-coloured fur there.
He’d ransacked her lovely planet. It had to be him! No-one else knew about Orea. How could he do such a thing? She wept for the loss of her beautiful benign creatures.
Finally her lament ceased. Great Being Five brushed away her tears.
She had a plan. She would re-set her planet. Ctrl-alt-delete, turn back the clock, then repopulate.
Then she had her best idea.
Adopting an anonymous thought-pattern, she sent a mind-message to Great Being Nineteen. “I have some very exciting new stock you might be interested in.” She smiled to herself as she dropped the thought into his brain. “It will add a real ‘wow factor’ to the planet I hear you’re working on,” she floated an image of a couple of dragons in flight in front of him. “But you’ll need to come in person.”
She gave him the co-ordinates.
Great Being Nineteen arrived on the surface of the planet. It looked familiar, very much like that soppy planet of Five’s, but he was certain he’d never visited this part of the Dark Universe. He stared around. Where was this new stock the dealer had offered him?
Over on the bright side of the universe Five hit the keyboard, glancing at her monitor to see the empty space which Orea had previously occupied.
She hit the keyboard again and entered another complex sequence into the system. Orea reappeared, recently returned from the furthest corner of the universe where she had dumped a few unwanted items. Orea was as lush as ever and ready for new life.
Suddenly it wasn’t a bad day after all.
©2019 Chris Hall
Come sit with me
here on the stoep
and tell me your stories.
Tell me about
when you were a girl
with a flower in your hair
on the first day of spring.
Tell me about
the games you played,
the friends you made
and the songs you sang.
Tell me about
the parades and parties,
the festivals and dances
and the secret stolen kisses.
Tell me about
the man you married,
the children you had
and the plans that you made.
What were your hopes?
What were your dreams?
Who was the woman you wanted to be?
Come sit with me
and sip your tea, and
tell me your stories.
From my Flash Fiction Collection
And now there was nothing left of what had been her beautiful blue planet. Great Big Five sighed. She had given them chance after chance. She had very nearly deleted the entire human race in Earth Year 2018. Only that little message which flashed up after she had hit the big red button had given her pause.
Do you really want to DELETE?
No, she hadn’t. She’d cancelled the request. Sat back and watched and waited for fifteen Earth Years more. She’d watched the greedy, selfish humans squander more and more of the precious resources of her pretty planet. Barren soil blew away, the oceans turned to acid, the very atmosphere was toxic. Some of the little humans had tried to avert the crisis. They’d spoken out. Even important, influential ones had acted, added their voices. There were protests, social media campaigns, new policies agreed and implemented; the planet had staggered on, but it was all too little, too late.
Meanwhile others had been working on a plan. Done with the Earth, they would move on. Move to another planet. Their neighbour: the red planet. Clever little humans!
Never mind what they’d done to the animals and birds, the trees and flowers, the mountains and lakes. All her best work they’d left in tatters.
She had mind-melded with Great Being Nineteen. The red planet was under his jurisdiction. She had suspected he had plans. With Earth out of the way, he could move his smaller red planet nearer to its sun, into what her imaginative earthlings called the Goldilocks Zone, after one of their sweet little stories. Allow something new to evolve. He’d even let her collaborate on his project.
You have activated Planet Total Destruction. Are you sure you want to do this?
She did.
They couldn’t be allowed to spread their wicked ways.
©2019 Chris Hall
You were there when I arrived
You nodded in my direction
And I felt the warmth of your smile.
Your wit lit up the room
Your laughter sparkled
Your stories enlivened, inspired
Touched a heart; a nerve.
And then you left.
And it was as if
You’d never been there.
luna's on line 