Oct 13 2008
Word Shot – 13 October, 2008
Thank you all for contributing to last week’s Word Shot. This week I’m throwing out a whimsical photo that should get your imaginations churning….
Look at the photo. Really look at it. Now submit a comment (go to “Leave a Reply” below) with a phrase, sentence, paragraph, vignette or story that speaks to the photo. Let your imagination run wild with this one! Then check out the comments for this Word Shot in the coming week to see what others have written.
Remember, if you participate in 10 Word Shots, let me know via e-mail and I’ll e-mail you all three of my e-manuals. (Yes, it’s a blatant bribe, but for a good reason: if you play this writing game you will become a better writer.)
Ready to give it a shot? Do it now!
PS. Be sure the check out the entries for last week’s Word Shot.
The roof bends under the weight of her wishing star.
“But you’re so young,” Mary said, still staring in disbelief.
“So I am. Is that a problem?” The woman asked as the night breeze ruffled her poofy skirt..
“No, it’s just that I expected somebody. . . older,” May said reluctantly.
“Well, I’m the only fairy godmother you get, so get used to it,” came the terse response.
Suddenly Mary felt very foolish for asking this woman for help. It was going to be a long night.
“My fairy godmother, I knew you were real,” said the little girl.
With one flick off the wand she watched as the little girl disappeared. This turned out to be easier than she thought. People were so gullible.
Every time I look at this picture I can’t help but giggle. After the party at school we were in high spirits. It was Isobel’s idea to pose on our roof top for a picture. After the picture was taken Isobel went off to fetch the ladder back and that was when the new new couple in the neighbourhood came running excitedly. They were calling out prayers and asking to forgive their sins. The raucous brought my parents out of the house. They were astonished to find the new neighbours falling on their knees and asking for forgiveness. It took some time for them to see what was actually happening and explain the same to the new neigbours.
Why on earth did I let Mum talk me into this? I know Granny wants the annual Christmas photo but there is a big difference between dressing a two year old as a bumble-bee and posing them in a flower pot with a sunflower clutched in a fat fist and this embarrassing set up. What if one of my friends sees it? My life would be over.
Take the picture for goodness sake,before one of my friends see me. Are you even aware that I am sitting on a roof that not only sags in the middle but is doing untold damage to my tailbone? If I breathe too hard I will slide off and break my neck. Boy then you will be sorry you asked me to do this for you.
Smile? Give me a break. Look how my arm is shaking from holding up this silly wand. Why I let you talk me into this is beyond me. I don’t really care if you want to sell magic wands. This one looks stupid; and this mosquito netting over my rock climbing shirt is not, I repeat not, going to fool anyone.
No I do not look like an angel. I look like the villiage idiot. The least you could have done is spring for a realistic wand and a really, honest to goodness, dress.
I promise you little brother, you are going to pay and pay and pay for this favor.
I first noticed her sitting upon the roof amongst the smoldering ruins as the smoke lazily drifted and curled around the smoldering Moon.
I started to approach till she waved me away with that wicked wand of light.
Yet I swear I KNOW her.
Was I longing for her beauty? No. Was it that Mona Lisa smile that so enchanted me? No that is not it either, charming and mysterious as it may be.
Was it my physical hunger? Not having a decent meal in days during my long journey? No, the acrid stench of burnt cookies stuck in my throat, no it is not hunger.
I turned to walk away, then I turned for one last glance and I remember. YES!
That frightful night when I was but a young boy and I lost my first tooth and Momma said, “Don’t you worry, just tuck that tooth under your pillow so that the tooth fairy will come visit and take it to add to her castle of teeth”
I swear she came to my bed that long dark lonely night and slipped away before the morning light with my precious tooth. I know because I SAW her. But no one will believe the stories of a small child.
And no one will believe me now when I tell them I saw her again. And that the Tooth Fairy can’t cook to save her life…
“Don’t make me have to use this.”
“Why wouldn’t I want you to? Aren’t you supposed to be good?”
“What is good, really? There are consequences, always consequences, but whether they are good or bad depends on who is experiencing them. So my question is: are you willing to live out the full consequences of your wish? A trick question, of course, because no one ever knows exactly what the results of their actions will be. But they still have to deal with them.”
“Yes! I can’t remember when this wasn’t what I wanted. Any consequence is worth having the life I want to have.”
“And you can’t bring this about by your own power? This is your final warning.” She chuckled.
“Did you not hear me the first time? YES.”
“Very well.” And nothing was ever the same again.
Twinkle twinkle little star,
Twinkling in my hand;
Thats the way it shining like,
Signing of my land!
She ran through the front door to escape. Her plan – though that suggested more thought than she’d had time for – was to make it down the steps and around the corner. As she crossed the threshold, another eruption of flames seized the drapes covering the window near the door. She felt the heat eating through the air, trying to pull her back inside. Down the steps, her dumbstruck feet touched each step, moving slower than the rest of her body and stealing her balance.
Touching down on the flagstone path leading out to the road, she replayed the last few seconds, desperately trying to place what was familiar about the thing. At first she thought it was just a young girl, but now she didn’t know what else to call it. Though it surprised her, appearing in the house without warning, and more frighteningly, without sound, she hadn’t felt threatened. She had let out a hiccoughed laugh at how the thing was dressed: an ultra-white crinoline skirt, a sleeveless brown top, open at the throat with beaded ties hanging down, and no shoes. It had thick pancake, stage-like make-up, accented by clownishly bright colors at the eyes, cheeks, and lips. She still wasn’t sure what to think as it raised a large wand, complete with an oversized star at the top. The incongruity of the thing’s childish costume and its invasion of the home produced the first pangs of danger. When the star began to glow and she felt the temperature in the room start to rise, she’d decided not to stay and watch the show. She never saw how the wand worked but each room she ran through seemed to boil and then explode into flames. With every step to the front door, she was nagged by the feeling she’d seen this thing, this fairy warrior before.
In the front yard, a few quick breaths of crisp air quenched her lungs. She gave one last look over her shoulder at the house as she fled, much as Lot’s wife was compelled to do. There, on the apex of the tiled roof, it was perched. Smoke billowing out of the chimney enveloped her attacker and offered evidence of the wand’s destructive power. The thing raised the wand again, puckishly glaring at her with a daring tilt of the head. The glow of the wand and the menacing posture stopped her just a few steps down the path. She turned.
Recognition raced through her mind. Sitting atop her burning home, threatening her with a comic book wand, was a creature who somehow had taken the form of her imaginary childhood friend, a fairy princess named Chloe. Chloe had helped her through a difficult third grade year when she was short on friends and long on awkwardness. Typically, no one believed Chloe was real, including her parents who eventually banned any mention of the ‘friend’ and demanded that she admit the fairy princess was only in her imagination. Save a couple of juvenile drawings, colored in bright, unusual colors not commonly chosen from the box of 64, no one except her knew what Chloe looked like. And that knowledge was buried so deep in her mind, tamped down with decades of adult thinking, she had struggled to recognize the old friend.
What was this thing? Where did it come from? What did it want? How had it divined Chloe’s appearance?
Bracing herself, more confused and frightened than ever, she looked into the sky behind the twisted Chloe. Several other stars, like the one on top of the wand, began to take shape, growing ever larger as they approached. And just over Chloe’s bare right shoulder, glowing fluorescently, a thumbnail moon was wrapped in smoke. Magnified beyond its usual size, the moon hung in a crisp fall sky on a night which was supposed to feature a full harvest moon.
I felt myself floating upwards, slowly, deliberately. Out of the room, and up toward the roof of my house. I was not in control of the situation. Then, in a halo of moonlight and a background of stars, I saw her.
“Be careful what you wish for,” she told me as she gently waved her star shaped wand effortlessly through the air, silvery glitter following its movement.
“I didn’t think it was a bad request”.
“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. The heart is fragile in some, don’t wish for things that might hurt others in the process….”
With a wink of her eye I awoke with a start. The moon glowed brightly through my open bedroom window. Maybe I need to cut down on the sangria before bedtime. Shaking my head to clear my thoughts, my eyes focused on the framed photograph sitting on the dresser across the room. I rememebered the dream. With a sigh I resigned to the reality, he was not coming back to me and it wasn’t right for me to wish his new “friend” an accidental demise.
“My prince will come today”, she thought. The shining star will help him find his way.
The last thing on my mind before the flash blinded me was the woman in the photograph. She had a rather heavily made-up face: lashes heavy with mascara, cheeks blushing with rouge, penciled eyebrows. Beneath the painted mask I could see that she was young, still a girl by my mother’s estimate. Her thin lips were drawn slightly back, as if she was caught between smiling and looking bewildered. Perhaps she was afraid of falling off the shingled rooftop before the camera snapped her up; she was sitting at the very top, where the two sides of the roof met in an upside-down V, and she seemed to be supporting herself on her tiptoes. When I was little I thought she was wearing glass slippers, like that heroine from the fairy tale, but she couldn’t have been - for one thing, she most definitely was not a heroine, and for another, she wasn’t allowed to wear shoes of any kind. Neither am I.
I used to fantasize about the clothes she wore in the photograph. As a young girl I had heard stories about the fairy-garb from my cousins and aunts and grandmothers - stories of wonder and adventure, of beautiful, lithe maidens sought by lords and princely warriors. My mother, however, never said a word to me about it, not even on the day I donned the garb. That day, before I left, I tried to imagine myself becoming like the woman in the photograph. Although we were of different birthrights, her garb was quite similar to mine, and it gave her similar powers. A white veil from a runaway bride clung to her waist and thighs; it made her mysterious, elusive, a free-spirited nymph who could belong to nobody, perhaps not even herself. A low-necked, tight-fitting top, the color of a young deer, gave her innocence and gentleness; she thrived on the willingness of strangers to divulge their innermost desires to her. Her feet were bare, in part because she no longer needed footwear - what for, when she flitted from town to town like a butterfly among flowers? - and in part because no dust or dirt would cling to her soles. Her drawn-up knees hid the belt of leather cords that held her little corked vials of powders and mist; I have a similar one, although my powders are of a different shade. Her wand had a five-pointed star - her powders were likely silvery or flaxen in color, like the locks that flowed softly at the side of her face. She was a creature of the night sky, light as the wispy clouds that sheltered dreams. Her skyborn protectress was the moon, the hope of anguished lovers and abandoned children.
My protectress was the sun, and it shone mercilessly on my bare arms and heavily made-up face. My bare feet rested on dry, fresh-cut grass, and the smell was making me a little dizzy. My waist and thighs were sweaty underneath the veil; my ample bosom was in danger of popping out of my vermilion top. My powders were a spectrum of bright yellows and oranges, potent, forceful things which I was told to use sparingly. My right arm was getting tired from holding up the burning discus on my wand - my photographer was taking pains to capture the sun somewhere to my left, in line with my own miniature sun. “Face a little towards your left,” he said. He wanted to make sure that my hair caught the blazing light from my wand.
When he snapped the picture I was whisked away through swirling space and darkness, to unknown lands where adventurers and princes thirsted for the immortal majesty of the mighty sun.
–
again, i’m sorry that this is overdue… ^^ i hope i stretched my imagination enough. can i post this one on my blog too?
I was so sure that the lantern in my hand and the Lamp up there in the sky would be enough to find my shoes.
I am all dressed up to go to the dance I was finally invited to, but how can I go without shoes?
And then, suddenly out of the chimmey came flying to my hand the most beautiful crystal shoes you can image.
I did go to the party!