“We need to talk.”
Olivia made the decision to pedal harder, words like those always lead to unpleasantness, and Olivia as a matter of course always avoided unpleasantness.
“What?” she shouted over her shoulder, hair wiping into her eyes, pretending not to have heard.
“We need to talk.” He repeated, voice louder, tone a mixture of anxiety and frustration. The wind was rushing past her ears, and the gravel crunching beneath her tire.
There is a forest, lying hidden in the shadows of the world in a place where time does not exist. It does not have a name, though it is rumored to have once been called the ‘Mist Wood’, after legends of faerie mist-gates and border regions, places where the Fair Folk could tread back and forth from one realm to another. Some stories even say this was the meeting-place of the Courts, where all the faerie-kind gathered in the starlit clearings, and when they left, they left behind a piece of the forest much transformed from what it once had been. Continue reading “There is a Forest”
She told me she lived on the moon.
“It is the most beautiful planet in the galaxy,” she said. “It’s all washed in soft silver light and surrounded by darkness on all sides. There is no sound, no voices. It’s so quiet you can her the stars singing. They sing to the world. It’s empty of life, but oh is it wonderful. I am the ruler of a beautifully desolate land.”
“All right, moon-princess.” I would say, then laugh and tell her to lock up her imagination before it ran away.
Amaris was my neighbor. She lived one door down at number 11, the old white house with the roof garret and two weeping willows in front. I’m not really sure when she moved in. One day it was empty and the next she was there in her big hat, hanging colored glass bottles in her trees and feeding all the neighborhood cats.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story The Birth-Mark plays around with the ideas of allegory, and the effect symbolism can have on people. In The Birth-Mark, Aylmer, a man of science, can’t let go of the imperfection the birthmark on his wife’s cheek represents, he allows his emotions towards the birthmark to consume him, and ultimately leads to him losing his precious wife. Hawthorne is clearly warning of the dangers of placing too much power and meaning in such a trifling object as a birthmark. The only influence an object possesses is the power we place in it. Continue reading “Consuming Allegory: The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne”
People were so frightened, they hadn’t known what to do. What do you do when you learn Aliens are real? They acted badly, they made mistakes, and as a repercussion, all friendly relations were severed. They hadn’t known they wanted to be friends, their language was beyond their understanding. They assumed the words were a threat. Of course, they did, they always do. Professor Donald Boulder was one of the top linguists in the world and he worked tirelessly to unlock the secrets of their language, and when someone works with that dedication, of course, they accomplish their task, sadly he was too late, the Aliens has already left.
Humanity, embarrassed by their actions, joined together to build the worlds fastest and most technologically advanced spaceship to ever exist. A team was put together, a strategist was brought in from Russia, a scientist from Germany, a robotics mechanic from Japan, a spaceship pilot and a linguist from America. With sad farewells and heavy hearts, the team left their known world and headed off into space, following the thick exhaust trail of the retreating aliens.
First contact had happened and they had failed. But the vastness of space with twinkling lights seemed to offer hope…
(From last year. Not my favorite, but it was enjoyable to write.)
Set apart from millions
a world crafted of eons
stretching into eternity,
a single spark among infinity.
Glittering in the deep
this waking world never sleeps.
Ever-dreaming, ever-living,
around a sun ever-burning.
A planet filled with smoke and scars,
listen, listen to the silence of the stars.
In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury different characters attach different degrees of symbolic meaning to objects. The character of Quentin is one who is obsessed with viewing the world through a philosophical and symbolic lens. One item that receives particular importance is that of time, particularly in the form of the watch Quentin received from his father. Continue reading “Symbolism to the Extreme: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner”
I just spent a wonderful four weeks in Scotland breathing its history and fantasy. I loved every second and here’s a short little dramatization of one of the many adventures I went on. This was the day I hiked to the Old Man of Storr
The world is a faded, hazy mist. Little droplets of water decorate my skin. My hair hangs in wet clumps that cling to my forehead. The grass slopes down the hillside disappearing a few feet away, anything could be before me, a cliff, another hill to climb…a faerie. The air is still. Continue reading “The Soul of the Old Man of Storr”
Throughout Scandinavian shores there are statues called ‘the Fisherman’s Wife.’ They show a woman reaching her hand out to the horizon, in honor of all the fishermen lost at sea, as well as honoring the wive’s whom they left behind. This poem is based on the statue I saw in Norway.
She stood alone at water’s edge,
holding strong her lifetime pledge.
‘Til death do us part’ were the words,
echoing round her head.
The clouds were low and water wild,
winter winds reviled.
Out of sight, out of sound,
In Henry James short story, “The Real Thing” the narration is through that of an unnamed main character, an artist. As such the entire story of “The Real Thing” is altered by the narrator’s perceptions. Every word, every moment is seen through his eyes and as such is shaded by his own interpretations of reality. In one scene the sentence starts with, “I perceived they,” this wording immediately informs the reader that the following information has no basis in fact but merely comes directly from the artist and his impression of the Monarchs. Continue reading “Narrator’s Reality: The Real Thing by Henry James”
Joined at the Authorship 