Have you ever driven on a foggy morning? Diffuse grey light wraps around trees, utility poles and buildings. No hard edges to alert you. Are you traveling fast? Or slowly? Time is compressed, attenuated or smoothed out. Your brain eventually tricks you into seeing black and white dots swimming in the fuzzy air.
Pandemic is like that. Time becomes flat and we are all dots floating in space. Getting nowhere fast. Or slowly.
Image by Jason Strull via Unsplash.com
high above bracken
fern and foxglove Mother crow
sings her lullaby
Image by Robin Anderson
Listen.
Quiet like Sunday on the first of Spring. No traffic, no voices, no airplanes. Only birdsong or a dog barking.
Listen.
Humanity withdraws and the world settles into silence. People in houses gaze through closed windows. They can hear sunlight drip off buildings and roar down empty streets.
Listen.
Image by Harrison Fulop
Sand, rocks and seaweed
Find temporary home on
Ever shifting shore
photo by Becky
In his carefree youth, he and the camera were inseparable. When a daredevil friend took him flying in a one engine plane, the camera went along. They flew off the coast, over the Pacific, getting the bird’s eye of trees, cliffs and sea stacks, cold wind seeping into the cockpit. He clicked the shutter a hundred times. Back on earth, he printed a dozen images. In one, the sepia sea gleams like glass, the sky stretches into silence.
Much later, his adult children gaze at the old photograph, smell naphtha-kerosene and feel the dip and rattle of the Skyhawk.
Image by Chris A Anderson, courtesy of the Estate of Chris A Anderson
Haughty sea gulls hop
Among sparkles of seafoam,
Dying jellyfish
photo BKjelstrom
Up, down, up, down, updown.
The weird choreography of gnats in the late winter sunlight, rising in unison from the incense cedar and bouncing in the chilly, bright air. A constellation of illuminated bioplasm. Is it a communal mating ritual? An invitation to passing birds to come, feast? A celebration of approaching seasonal change? All of that? None?
Faster and faster, the frenzied dance brings their tiny grey bodies together, until they are a single whirling orb of gossamer fluff.
Bang!
They resettle, simultaneously, into the cedar. The sun shines, the breeze stirs.
And then again, up, down, up, down.
Image by NASA via flickr.com/commons
“Quintuplet Cluster”
She had always shared her life with cats and dogs. Still, the transformation was a shock. First came the growth of an undercoat on her scalp. Next, her fingernails hardened and curved. When her arms and legs grew excessively hairy, she covered them. When she could no longer grasp her coffee mug, she dashed it against the kitchen wall. After several decades of vegetarianism, she craved, then ate, meat. Raw.
On the last morning, she stripped off her nightgown, running out the back door on all fours. She vaulted the fence. The pets would have to fend for themselves.
Image by Martin Arusala via Unsplash.com
When the girl found me, I carried no traces of humanity. Unremembered, I became smooth as an egg. Seeing me should have killed her. Though blind, she could hear my stories. As she listened, my limbs and features reappeared.
I kissed her eyelids and dissolved, tethered to Earth no more.
Story appeared in 5oWord Stories
photo by Enache Georgiana unsplash
When I was young, I jolted down this narrow canyon in my hot jalopy, windows open, inferno winds in my hair. The river below green and cool as it raced me to the sea. On the beach, I ran, jumped in the frigid ocean and shouted for no reason. I drank cheap beer, ate greasy food and slept in the sand.
Today, the canyon is a crucible but I glide along in refrigerated comfort. The river creeps, sluggish and yellow. The wind has died. I drink fine wine but avoid the crowded beach. Have I changed? Or has the world?
Image by Simon Matzinger via Unsplash.com
