One of the heavy marble steps squirms as you add more weight
to its tired structure. The weighty stone slab wiggles width-wise, making
you wonder if it will give up and drop your body to the staircase below.
What hasn’t she touched? Resilient Venezuelan weeds didn’t
stand a chance against her tugging. With a delicate wipe of a child’s
peachy cheek, she made tears vanish. Her hand was seized as a man led her to safety during
a sudden storm. Toilet paper in her hand was the last sight a juicy spider faced.
But of everything, she has applied her finger to the smooth shutter button of her camera most regularly.
The eggs and flour interview for the job and are hired. The
eggs, crack-free, are taken home; the flour, its deepest white, poured into a bowl. Creamed butter and sugar suit up the cakes, just for the big
day, your birthday.
For fifteen hours a day, during the month of May, sunlight
feeds the growing buds. Each day, the sun floats through the garden, admiring the
new beauties that have awakened.
The husky bridge is on duty at all times. No rest or shift changes. Hour after hour,
year after year, it shoves warm engines across the athletic river.
The whispering fires that ate kindling for fifty-two years
are suffocated. Atop the mountain, a man’s heart is severed from a gushing
aorta. In the blood-flooded hole, a new fire is started. Men with torches
spread the blaze to every dark dwelling, illuminating the empire once again. The
families are calmed knowing that the long rays of the fifth sun would be pleased
and lighten their land once again tomorrow.
Amos tours senselessly with the
train through a gray-colored, industrial Minnesota.
He hopes one day his roaming will cart him to a palm-infested South Carolina. A long time cohort, Static, enlightens
him of a track that floats along a silenced beach. As the ocean swells with
envy of his artificial, from-the-can blues, Amos will long to be as natural as
the ocean.
He can only focus on the beauty in front of him; the rest of
the world is of no importance. Her brilliant
orange freckles, her soft presence, and her distinct scent of lilacs all make
her mesmerizing. He engages in the customary activities of
laboring, consuming, slumbering, but desires she be his existence. To hold her without end in his wings, no richer
would he be.
The boats twirl passively in circles, trapped to the floor
of the lake. After years of this life, like ponies of a carnival ride,
they succumb to the imprisonment. There are no protests, no whinnies.
The hopeless silence establishes their eternity as slaves.
She promises they will reunite here, in the familiar rock-laden terrain where their forever started. The plan is to run away together. He waits twenty one days, nervously with sweats, hoping she's just running a little late.
Clouds formed, rejecting the river of droplets. A girl twirls a delicate hand in the lifeless water and her kindness bleeds energy back into the unconscious being. Spirit flutters across the surface in ripples, resuscitating the depressed molecules.
Harlot lipstick should not be donned while drinking from coffee cups or a wine glass. The stain survives the industrial dishwasher and is reapplied to the next patron's innocent lips.
The knee-deep Minnehaha Creek strolls around Minneapolis, cascading fifty feet into the sprinting Mississippi. Along its journey, it is surrounded by homes hugging the clear water, some whose luscious backyards trip into the lazily moving stream.