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Prompt 39 [11 is next]

🕑 Added 2025-04-27 20:57:22 +0000 UTC

Comments

Amanda

I love the strength and resilience in this piece. While our past cannot be altered and the echoes of pain may persists, consciously reframing our inner narrative is profoundly restorative. Our reality is not solely shaped by external conditions, but by the lens through which those conditions are interpreted. It’s not about denying the struggle, but about refusing to surrender to the hardship.

Katakora

I'm totally in love with the entirely surreal atmosphere, your narrator like a sphinx-like goddess. But how apt, because who else may have the right to narrate our fate? And there is your beautifully confused protagonist who understands nothing and at the same time everything. Just beautiful. 💕

caroscope

sorry this is so long, got the bug! I blame my recent rereads of Discworld and The Book of Dust for this. and dissertation woes. love yours, Doc! […] “And I wasn’t gazing ‘hopelessly’ either. I was gazing ‘thoughtfully’. Or ‘contemplatively’ if you need a more pedantic word.” “Pedantry is on the tongue of the beholder. Or was it in the ear? I mix those up when the grains run slow.” She gestures around us: “This white sand. It slips like eyelashes blown away as wishes and what you might call geological time and I call weight. Un/tethering. You can only sift through the sand like minuscule shreds of paper pulp in the small hours, before those waves of ink dash up up up and drag us down down down. It’s in the depths that we touch bound spines, that we’re lovingly tucked into the great crevasse between each page. Suffocated, subsumed. Oh, it’s fun, the fall.” Disconcerted [terrified, intrigued, tempted, most likely fucked], I watch her move closer to the shoreline. She’s humming in overtones and polyphony like a train whistle and a choir for old gods or was it something I saw on Eurovision? Anyway, an oil-washed steam mists from her skin with the same rhythmic exhale of a hydraulic press and an expensive perfume atomizer. It smells like lilies and funeral homes and newsprint. And I think her beautiful and horrible, but it’s only because I’m scared. I have so many questions for her. But the fifth question jumps the first four in the queue to do away with Who/What/When/Where and skip to Why. I splutter through gritted teeth: “Why were you narrating me?” And I surprise myself when “And why festooned?” also cuts the line. My nose tickles and I compulsively fiddle with my piercing with nerves like I’m 17 again and about to be kissed or bullied. She turns back to me and it’s three-quarters, nearly her whole mysterious face highlighted with moonbeams and something else, and she offers: “A rose by any other game, you know.” “What?” I’m not following this. But my feet are following her, though she leaves no footprints. I feel loopy, heavy, caught up in shipwreck and this creature and fantastiphysical white sand and lilydeath and stories. And questions bounce off me like water off a duck’s back or red wine off that material the ever-smiling woman on QVC splashed extravagantly with dead eyes. The questions bead. And I have no explanation for this one, but I blurt it out anyway: “Do you think god made the muzzle holes or the whiskers first when he created cats?” “Now you’re asking the right questions,” she replies, though she proceeds with more threat than answer: “You know, there’s this ancient killing method with cat whiskers…cutting them up into tiny spikes into food…it’s slow, undetectable. Unless you’re Father Brown, apparently. I learned that reference from reading you, you know. Visions beyond your own two wide eyes. I have nine eyes, last I counted, but it’s been a while and I can’t reach the base of my spine anymore. Do you understand why festooned yet?” I shake my head. It’s all I can do, she’s speaking like a Mad Lib, a crossword puzzle. But then again, I think I’m going mad. Cat whiskers? Where the hell did that come from? She answers me, though I thought I’d been monologuing to myself: “From your childhood. You asked your mother one day when you were petting your ginger cat. Children ask the right questions.” To this, I nod. I can’t do much more. I see my own pale, sun-starved winter ankles begin to bleed, blend, fade into the paper-white sand and creeping ocean, the ink wet. My calves are next, and a shiver runs up the insides of my thighs. It's funny what you remember at the end. She turns to me head on now and she’s sinking too. She modifies her question: “Do you know what festooned means?” I do. “Decorated, ornamented. You know, for a celebration. Hanging lights or garlands of flowers or mistletoe or streamers, something like that.” “And festooned on the island? What do you suppose that means?” I blink. And she and the island blink back, like a glitch or a mirage or turning a page. “D-decorating the island?” I’m stammering, trembling…calm? I have no legs. The sand, like paper, and the water, like ink, are at my breasts as I lose my shape to greater forces. It’s not long before I’ll meet the spine, that ocean trench of pages, my bed and desk and coffin and playground and cell and observatory of futuremagic filled with fictivereal pasts. She takes me by the neck and it’s a grip both firm and soft and nothing all at once. And we’re gone. There’s a shell there now, where I stood. Festooned on the island. Wanna hear my story? Pick it up.