Flash fiction 12: Cold comfort

Well, it's Friday, so it's time to write with JD Mader over at his website, Unemployed Imagination - www.jdmader.com/2015/06/2-minutes-go. The idea is you write for 2 minutes - some people write longer - and you just go for it, without looking back and editing. Head over to play or just read. This one took me about 4 minutes cos I revised it. Have a great weekend! :) We actually have summer sunshine here in the UK!

Cold comfort

She hasn’t called since Christmas, but I know the game. I’ve played it far too often over the years and this board bends under the negative energy. I can tear the pieces off the walls, ripping the coloured squares into nothing. A room bereft of this. I need circles – endless curves of possibility.

My skin prickles. This shower of emotion can stagnate in the corners, creeping beyond. I will sit here and read this book, my mind never wandering to the phone, wondering where she is or what she’s doing.

I can hold out longer. I have done before. I think the last record was a year. It’s a control thing, but I know her gameplay, know it by heart.

Like a chess master, she’ll keep her silence until the loss grows like a seeping wound and I’m beaten into submission. Usually the guilt will sway my hand. But these days I’ve come to terms with guilt and looked it in the eye, and we came to an agreement. It no longer kills me.

copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 26, 2015

A Poem a Day (50): The beach

The beach 

Walking careless lines

Drawn deep in sand

Where white crabs crawl

In an endless scrawl

Dodging watery rivulets

Into kingly castles set

Again, I wonder why

Upon this bluest sky

Frail yellow petals torn

Drift on the air forlorn

Finest seaweed scattered

Misty dawn rain splattered

Below, seahorses pump air

Majestic in a cerulean lair

Dwelling on such things

Life appears to hinge

As the horizon runs free

In a silken symmetry

Dragging my mind afar

To where it fails to jar

And as it all comes to jell

I listen to this curved shell.

copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 24, 2015

A Poem a Day (49): The tree

The Tree – written in a pub in Copenhagen

As a tree rises

Leaving its roots

To cherish the sky

Lifting clouds beyond

A fragmented hand’s space

Only this big

Only this wide

If you touch upon it

You will see it glide

The mirrors melt together 

In the mind inside.

copyright Vickie Johnstone, May 2015

A Poem a Day 2015 (48): The time

I wrote this one in the art museum in Copenhagen about a week or so ago. Loved it there. Terrific place. 

The time

It's the time I spend
Ever being
Ever moving
Ever consoling
Never watching any more
As movement soars
Marking water
With its own new path
Without missing
This scourge
The urge to be gone
Only to reappear
In the waking
Of a dream
Always lived
In the time we spend.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone

Flash fiction 11: Time

Another one written for JD Mader's 2minute writing challenge, #2minutesgo, which you can join in with on his blog, Unemployed Imagination, every Friday. Cheers :)

Time

I can peel it back. Time, my old adversary. He who stagnates so solitary in the corners, idly studying me from beyond his web. The dusty, silken lengths hang the things in life that mattered. The items we lost and won, the ones we treasured so dearly until they lost their shine, outlasting their worth or meaning. Now and then it was boredom cutting them lose. I slink from the memory.

He strays beneath the flickers of the lamp. Without seeing, I feel him, ever near, encroaching on the distance between us. Mindless. Cruel even. I wonder how long he will remain still. Can he be still?

Something darts, my eye follows and the light disperses. I follow yet the thread spins with me, hooking on to my arms, all my limbs, tugging me back from my curious self. Laughter. It is he. I stagger, caught in the net, plagued by my belongings and the things I let slide; the people and ties I discarded on the endless journey to here.

copyright Vickie Johnstone, May 22 2015