He stood at a break in the road.
The rocky, muddied path split from one to four, so that he stood in the middle of a crossroads with one stretching to the right, one to the left, and two more before and behind him. Above hung the sky, and the sun, and the clouds, and below spread the dirt and the soil and the dry dead leaves that whispered as they tumbled over the rocks in the wake of autumn’s chilling breath.
Four roads.
Four futures.
One past.
There is color in his eyes, echoing there; jay-bird blue and stormy-water grey, deep mossy silver and yellow like autumn leaves, sometimes brilliant green and curly white. He sees nature as a blueprint for life, and bones as the written history of what used to be. Brown laces the lines of his palms and fingertips, mud edges his boots, and the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up past the elbows. Sometimes there is ink on his face and a pen behind his ear. There is always a notebook in his hand, an extension of his arm. A leather-bound notebook filled with scribbles and sketches, bits of leaves and insect wings taped inside.
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…
The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a tale inexorably tied to water. From the frame story of men sitting quietly together on a boat listening to the tale of Marlowe, to Marlowe’s tale of taking a steamer in the heart of Africa, the reader can hardly escape the importance and the deep symbolic meaning that can and has often been connected to water. For the narrator, water represents a form of romanticized memory. Continue reading “The Imagery of Water: The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad”
An excerpt of my in-progress fantasy novel, a sketch of the history of the highlands in my world.
It was a land of stone and heather, of misty moors and rocky slopes lost to the archives of indomitable time. Mist lay upon the murky meres, shaped by cold winds into the fluttering cloths of ghostly robes. A few raucous birds disturbed the water with their wings, sending ripples wrinkling along the surface as they skimmed across the face of the lake. Roe deer grazed near the shores, blending with the grasses so that they were nearly invisible but for the twitching of their white-tipped tails, while in the brush rustled a pine marten or mountain hare, searching for food. No footsteps marked the damp soil. No smoke rose in the distance. A strange silence lay upon those highlands, a silence made inscrutable by the roving mists and voiceless heather. Barred from civilization as it was, bordered by the trees of the forest, this place was cut off from the world as much as if it had been locked in a cage of iron. Few traveled there, few set eyes upon its expanse, and few hazarded the endlessness of it for fear of never returning. The highlands were left to the silence of the sun, an unmapped wilderness carved from the beating rains and howling winds of the north.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by the talented Oscar Wilde is a tale of youth and beauty, materialism and soul. Dorian, a young man of extreme beauty, sold his soul to a painting for eternal youth, the one commodity he believes to have value. As his life spirals apart Dorian responds in true Faustus fashion, unable to believe or accept his own role in his damnation. Continue reading “Materialism and Soul: Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde”
When you were sad and the world seemed without hope, I offered you a handful of stars freshly picked from the fields of the sky. You put them in a glass bottle and displayed them on the windowsill where the sun could shine through and set them glittering like a thousand diamonds risen from the sea.
The infamous captain Edward Thatch, more commonly known by his illustrative pseudonym ‘Blackbeard’, stood on the rolling deck of the Mary Celeste in the proud stance of one who clearly knew he was being regarded with complete and utter awe, not to mention fear. It was difficult not to stare, for he stood there like a dark phantasm wreathed in mantles of arcane smoke. Fuses were tied in his abundant black beard, sending up grey clouds and shrouding his face until all that could be seen of his features were two fierce eyes glittering beneath his hat. Those eyes were terrible to behold. One might call them devilish, or unholy, or even diabolical, for they glowed with such light I felt shivers run down my back and strange tinglings at the base of my skull, as if I were staring at an apparition which should not have been glimpsed by mortal eyes, for he almost did not appear human. A raiment of stolen red silks flowed around his imposing form, fluttering ostentatiously at the hand of an obedient wind no doubt beckoned for that very purpose. Over his shoulders he wore a brace of three pistols, and in his hand glinted the keen edge of a curved cutlass, the notable weapon of a pirate.
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