Tag: water
600 Sailboats in a Circular Sea
The Moon Reflects on a Pleasant Evening
Water
Water Over Stone
Feet First
Red Plaid
Write with Your Heart, Edit with Your Head
Writing has to flow, like water. Writers thirst.
Imagine, though, if you were dying of thirst (you are, you’re a writer) and the person holding the hose kept shutting it off so they could adjust something. Spurt of water. Shut it off. Adjust. Spurt of water. Shut it off. Adjust.
You’d strangle them. Just give me the water!
Continue reading “Write with Your Heart, Edit with Your Head”
Feet First
He looked down the cliff’s face to the water. It wasn’t the distance that concerned him; he’d gone into water from far higher than the 30 feet it looked to be.
No, what concerned him was the dark surface. It might mean deep water.
It might mean shallow water with a dark bottom.
Even deep water could have jagged rocks, old tree trunks, any manner of solid sharp debris.
If you have no choice but to go in, it doesn’t matter whether the water is deep or shallow, or so he told himself. What matters is that you go in feet first. An injury to one or both legs could be survived. Head injuries, out here in the middle of nowhere, probably not.
The first arrow hit the dirt close enough behind him that he heard it, felt a tiny shock in his feet. They would wait until they were close enough before loosing any more.
He leaped.
And as he went over the edge feet first, one foot snagged in the tangle of a tree root sticking out, flipping him completely, holding for less than an instant before he dropped again.
Head first.
Water Over Stone
When writing about deep emotional trauma inflicted by those we should have been able to trust it helps to keep abstracting until there are no emotion words left, only the images they evoked.
Late last year memories of some childhood trauma surfaced and messed me up for a while.
Music is a safe way to rage at people.
No Pursuer in the Desert
9 Days Earlier
The sand rose and fell in miniature dunes as far as he could see. Unless he looked straight up into the cloudless sky, it was all sand, sand in two-foot dunes.
He turned, just his head, then his upper body, as far as he could, all the way right, all the way left.
Sand.
Jarring not to see footprints behind him. As a tracker, no trail was out of his experience.
His pack grew heavier as he listened.
The silence, too, grew heavier.
No wind. Not a flutter.
He brushed his right hand on the rough canvas sleeve on his left forearm. Heard the light scratching noise.
He could hear. There just wasn’t anything to hear.
He turned again, this time his whole body, stepping a few degrees at a time in a circle.
There.
On the horizon.
Being on the Dangers of Badly Designed Bathrooms
At first it seemed as though the blinds had been installed a bit too wide at the top and cut to width around the shower. Further reflection during my aqueous impalement suggested another answer for the strange inverted L shape. It appeared that the almost human-sized glass box I was in had been installed after the window and blinds already existed.
Continue reading “Being on the Dangers of Badly Designed Bathrooms”