Writing Prompt No. 2

thelotuseater.com

Once upon a time we walked here, you and I. The grass grew tall then, verdant as springtime, flecked with wide white parasols of Queen Anne's Lace and reaching, purple-maned asters, and the sun shone kindly and golden. We walked here as laughing leaping gazelle youths; we walked here as adults, rushing after first one another, then our own children; and we walked here when we were aged, with skin like old leather and sleepy, contented eyes.

All that is left here now is bones and sunshine. Bones, sunshine, and you.

All three are here on promises: the bones, having promised their body never to forget; the sun, keeping his promise to his love the earth; and you, keeping the promise you made the last time we walked here, when I found pitch-skinned Death waiting in my path.

You sat on the bench where we had been resting more and more lately as I let Death take me into his arms. You sat as I let him dance me away to the other place. You sat, and summer turned to autumn, autumn to winter, winter thawed to spring, spring bloomed once more into summer, again and again and again. You sat as one springtime no flowers bloomed, through a summer in which the tall grass withered away; you sat as leaves fell off one autumn never to return; you sat as tree trunks rotted away and broke, leaving jagged scars of stumps. You sat as the rich dark soil eroded away beneath you, as water filled in the hole it left. You sat and watched new trees grow on the copper island bones of the old, as they died when the water drained away. You sat, and when the bench beneath you crumbled away you lent it your bones, and sat still. You sat as the sun grew bitter from gazing on the desolate land, and beat your skin darker until you faded into the wood you sat on. You sat until I finally returned, wispy and faint, to take you to the land of the dead, but your skin had grown into the bench and so you sat on, and so I sat down upon the bench and found with my ghostly one the solid steadfast outline of your hand.

So yeah that's a very rough draft. But I'm sort of fond of it.

Girl in a Bee Dress

Girl in a Bee Dress, Maggie Taylor

Mackenzie and I are doing a writing-prompt-a-week, and then sharing the results midnight every Sunday, finished or not. In this case, decidedly the latter.

Once upon a time there was a girl made of flower petals, and she was the beloved of bees. Her skin was stitched of pure white daisies; her eyes, periwinkles; and her hair, bright golden chains of sunflowers. Her dress was a shifting swirling mass of bees that hung, cloudlike, from her shoulders to her ankles. She ate only sunlight, drank only rainwater, and when she spoke drops of sparkling sweet nectar fell from her carnation lips. Never were they allowed to touch the ground.

This girl lived in a clearing surrounded by beehives in a green-gold forest in a far distant corner of the earth, a place where the world of cars and computer screens and hulking towers of steel and glass could only be smelled faintly on windy days.

It was one such day in early autumn, a crisp, cloudless day with a wind that made the trees shiver and yellowed the edges of their leaves and brought the sharp tang of civilization up from the south, when the girl wandered down from the hill where she habitually watched the sun rise and into a tangle of brush that she thought hadn't been there when she had climbed up.

She felt the brambles pulling her in, bidding her nearer, and she let her feet be pulled forward.