A lovely billbergia bromeliad flower…
They bloom in the fall and often in the spring here in Florida. I think they get confused by our weather patterns. I have masses of them growing under and climbing the trunks of several large live oak in my yard.
If you would like to join the Festival of Flowers: Week 12, please visit and link up.
Window of nature
Radiant dewdrop of life
Slips away unsung
This weekend Trifextra challenge was to write a haiku. The photograph of the morning dew on my rosemary plant was my inspiration. I love the reflection of the plant in the water droplet.
Something must be wrong with me. I’ve contracted a sweet writing disease. Fear not. The disorienting poetry fever will pass, and I shall return to my roots of the melancholy and weird, soon.
You linger. You lurk. You loiter.
Day after day, as the sun ascends, you appear to passersby.
Dark. Shifty. Mysterious.
They watch you. Walk over you. Wonder about you. Your ephemeral manifestation only intensifies their bewilderment.
The sun descends unhurriedly as you shapeshift, elongate, transform, until the light evaporates into the horizon.
In the darkness, you slip away.
This was a difficult photo prompt, Visdare 35: Ephemeral. I was unsure how to define my writing, as a short story or poem. It’s sort of a combination of both. Since I’m not much of a poet, I went with short story. I seem to be in a bit of a creative slump this week, so don’t judge me too harshly.
Photo credit: Mustafa Khayat / Foter / CC BY-ND
The obnoxiousness of the bowling alley was overwhelming. Harsh lighting. The reverberation of incessant chatter and distorted music. The climatic wind-up of rolling balls as they thunderously cracked into the helpless pins. The roar of celebration.
I wanted to be anywhere but the lanes. The achiness I felt was imbedded deep within my core. My team was winning, but it was little consolation. I was exhausted, worn out. Maybe it was time to retire. Bowling had consumed my life. I needed a change.
“Your turn, Warner” yelled Jack. “One more strike and you got a turkey.”
I cringed. Another strike was beyond my capability.
Warner’s enormous hand yanked me from the ball return. He thrust his fingers into my three holes and assumed the position in front of the lane.
It was torture waiting for the toss. When it finally came, I felt as though I would shatter when I hit the wooden floor. The spin was dizzying. The collision with the pins was catastrophic. It was my final strike.
As I rounded the return, Warner let a moan of disappointment. My glossy green finish was disfigured by a gaping crack.
“Ah, man, Lucky Clover is cracked. He’s dead,” Warner said with regret.
I felt relieved. My career ended with a turkey, and now I could spend my retirement years as a crafty, embellished lawn ornament in the sweltering sunshine state of Florida.
This week’s Trifecta Writing Challenge is to use the third definition of the word…
TURKEY
3: three successive strikes in bowlingThe story had to be between 33 and 333 words. I did it in 233 words. I hope you enjoyed my take on the challenge. I didn’t know what a turkey in bowling was until this writing prompt. It was painful to write.
And so begins my first tale of what I’ve coined Matchbook Fiction: Strike a Prose!: flash fiction under 500 words.
I’ve collected matchbooks for almost 30 years. That seems like I’m giving away my age, so let’s just pretend I started collecting matches on the day I was born. They’re scarce these days, but I still find one here and there. My collection has been stuffed in a plastic tote for so long; I decided to bring them to life with short stories based on whatever the matchbook inspires. Continue reading
In honor of randomness, and because I like using that word, I’m sharing some arbitrary photos for The Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge. This week it’s about focus. Something I often lack in life and can’t achieve in a photo.
I picked these photos because I don’t know where else I would share some of this odd stuff, if not on my blog.
The beachy photos were taken in Florida. The catamarans are a shot from the island of Dry Tortugas National Park, 70 miles west of Key West. One of the least visited national parks in the U.S. You can learn more about the park here. It’s a spectacular place to visit. I used the tilt-shift effect on the photo.
The seaweed comes from Ft. Myers Beach, as well as the sand dollars. The sand dollars were dead when I found them. I decided not to remove their prickly spines or bleach them. They are all natural. In case you didn’t know, some sand dollars are brown and furry in life. The white ones you typically see are bleached and cleaned over time by the sun or humans. Both photos were shot in macro/microscopic mode.
The weed roots and the lizard skeleton were taken in macro/microscopic mode. I suppose I should explain the skeleton. He was found that way in the pool skimmer; snuffed out by drowning in chlorine water. Poor thing. A moment of silence would be nice. He’s commemorated in a grotesque photo for all of eternity now.
Using tilt-shift again, I created the effect on the Pike’s Peak Cog Railway atop the mountain, at over 14,000 feet, near Colorado Springs, Colorado. It’s a dizzying ride up.
I hope you enjoyed looking at my focus photo ensemble. Please let me know what you think. Feedback is always appreciated.
This is my contribution to Flower Friday. If you would like to join the fun, visit Festival of Flowers to link up.
This plant is more than just an exotic weed that invades your groomed lawn and sprouts up through cracked sidewalks. It’s a hearty, edible flowering plant that makes a delicious accompaniment to salads, soups, stews and even omelets. It contains surprising amounts of beta-carotene and Omega-3 fatty acids. After I took the photograph this morning, I nibbled on a leaf. It has a lemony sour taste with a hint of saltiness.
It’s usually found in milder, warmer regions, hence the reason it’s so prevalent in my neck of the world, Southern Florida. It grows like a wildflower, if given the chance.
“Part of the reason for its evolutionary success is that a single plant can produce up to 52,300 seeds. What’s more, purslane seeds can survive for up to 30 years in undisturbed soil.” Source
Beautiful! Edible! Tolerant! What else? It has medicinal properties. European cultures have used it to relieve arthritis and inflammation, and Chinese herbalist reaped the benefits of improved circulatory and respiratory function. Research has shown it can aid in lowering blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
It’s a magical plant! So, the next time you see one, don’t just toss it in the mulch pile or ignore it. Eat it!
She was a blonde of magical proportions. A legendary bombshell who defied gravity and broke hearts. The moment she bounced into the reception, lust radiated from her glowing skin, her sensuous, crimson lips and her wedding-white slip dress. An imagination wasn’t necessary.
The quieting of the crowd and the eager look in the male guests’ eyes signaled the bride’s black sheep sister had arrived, uninvited. She made her rounds and charmed a captivated audience. She swigged champagne, dirty danced with anyone who would oblige and performed a modest striptease on the luxuriously adorned tables, while the portrait of a pompous monarch looked on with disdain.
She made a mockery of the wedding and of her sheepish sister. And when the night had ended, she fearlessly sauntered off attached to the groom’s dishonorable arm, clutching her sister’s shattered heart.
The photo is from a fascinating collection by Justin Dingwall that you can find here. At first, I thought the photo was bizarre, but after I looked at the other photos in the collection, I like the quirky sheep.
Amid the usual cafeteria hubbub of chattering teens and raucous laughter, she sat isolated in the corner. Always with her back against the wall, she watched the others play out their appointed roles.
She loathed them, yet deep within her core, she yearned to be one of them. They advertised their brands with gusto and played the stars in their Hollywood soap operas. The popular one. The funny one. The slutty one. The athletic one. The fat one. The anorexic one. She was the no one.
It was a brand she hated. To them, she was nonexistent. She drifted through long days of silence and indifference, from peers and teachers.
As the cliques gathered and shut out the rest of the world, she smirked at the thought of what she concealed in her backpack. She would show them that mediocrity was not her destiny.
She unzipped the pack and carefully removed what she called her payback. The journal gave her a feeling of power. Her pen became her weapon. While the others overlooked her, she effortlessly eavesdropped on their lives. She documented their secrets, recorded their exploits. She was a fly on the wall. Soon they would know that no one was listening.
I wrote this short story based on the Trifecta Week 91 word prompt (the noun not the verb):
BRAND (noun)
3a (1) : a mark made by burning with a hot iron to attest manufacture or quality or to designate ownership
(2) : a printed mark made for similar purposes : trademark
b (1) : a mark put on criminals with a hot iron
(2) : a mark of disgrace : stigma <the brand of poverty>To join the challenge or read some of the other stories or poems, click here.
Let me start by saying poetry is not part of my repertoire, nor is happy writing. For the Trifextra: Week Eighty-One prompt, Trifecta asked for “soul-soaring happiness” because we’ve turned too gloomy and doomy, of late. I tried some light and joy in the form of a poem, a little alliteration overload. (I can already hear the snickering.) Oh, and it had to be exactly 33 words.
Our inspiration this week was this fantastic photo: One year in one image by Eirik Solheim. Each thin section of the photo represents a different day of the year. It’s quite an amazing image.
Perennial Love
Our passion is perennial
enduring the blossoming of brilliant beginnings
the heat of feverish firsts
the frost of fleeting farewells
a blizzard of bonding breath
Our evolution of the endless seasons of love
I skimmed by with 149 words on this week’s VisDare 33: Indifferent photo prompt. The max was 150. Enjoy the story based on this glamorous photo!
He froze when he rounded the corner of the department store. His mannequins stood in the middle of the avenue in a stance of indifference. Rain pelted their multi-colored parasols, dripped from the edges and spoiled their once flawlessly coiffed hair. They had ruined his window display.
He approached his beauties and asked, “Why did you do this? Have I angered you?”
They didn’t move, their faces impassive. He waited.
Ingrid gave in first, “You made us look matronly. We want sophisticated. Hollywood glamorous.”
Facing forward, Hedy pouted, “We’re better than those frumpy housecoats and slippers you put on us.”
“We’re making a statement. Plain Janes in the rain with a sexy secret underneath,” sultry Elizabeth exclaimed.
A crowd gathered. He realized their conversation seemed disturbing.
He scooped them up by their stiff waists, dashed to the front door and said, “We’ll discuss this inside, ladies. You’re embarrassing yourselves.”
As the city bustled, the flyovers unleashed a delicate vapor, barely detectable to the unaided eye. While I sat on the restaurant’s open-air patio, sipping wine and reading, I felt it touch my defenseless skin, seep into my exposed pores and drift into my nostrils. It burned, ever so slightly, as it infiltrated my lungs, surged into my bloodstream and signaled my brain that something wicked was unleashed.
Shrieks pierced through the commotion of daily life on the street. They grew in intensity and frequency until all other sounds were drowned in their deluge. People crumpled to the sidewalks like discarded rag dolls.
I stood, knocking the wine glass and book to ground, as I tried to grasp the horror of the situation. My body began to shut down, the poison taking me into its dark oblivion. Continue reading
I wrote this based on a daily prompt from The Daily Post: The Art of the Open Letter. Some of you will understand why I wrote it.
August 13, 2013
Dear Mosquito,
Your fixation on my blood has become quite disturbing. You lie in wait, watching, hovering until my scent elicits action. The covert attacks happen anywhere and everywhere. In my house. On the screened in patio. In the yard. While writing, shopping, eating, sleeping, swimming. Continue reading
Just one press away from manufactured happiness, her index finger hovered over the iPhone 9 screen. It boasted a money-back guarantee of the ideal man in just five easy steps. The app asked if she was ready to Submit. She thought it was all a little surreal.
The fine print on the client agreement used buzzwords like faithful, durable, lifelike, obedient, programmable. The personality and physical trait options were infinite. Continue reading
Here is another attempt at the weekly photo challenge from The Daily Post. A landscape and portrait shot of the same subject.
This is an aloha lily leia with a perfectly posed water droplet. Beautiful pineapple shaped spikes teeming with tiny, pink flowers. It’s one of my favorites.
Chronic Nonsense 