Category: Writing

It started with her and I cannot let it go.

Jaclyn7 Comments

Her story begins before the beginning.  Before air and sea. Before light and dark.  Before hot cosmic messes melting elements into mass.  A partner without vowels.  Syzygy to the first. A cross in a circle as if she is a bullseye.  I know it is she who brings my inspiration.  It is she who knows my powers and my weaknesses.  It is she who has been forgotten.

It’s the eve of the primordial forest.

It begins with an army of frogs huddled around the very first puddle.  The air remains still with anticipation, as it does in turbulent times.  The hydrogen and helium swirl in hot messes all around, fusing into heavier elements and lighting the otherwise primeval void.  And still, the puddle does not move.  Their toes twitch, but they do not croak.  It seems they are waiting for something to happen.  They make eye contact with each other in anticipation.  They look in to it, trying to find their own reflections, to make sense of the sludge.

But you already know this story.  You do not need to read these words. They are only signs which will direct you to the place in your mind where this story already sits.  There are infinite paths to get there, and these signs may be misleading, crumbling under the weight of time before becoming paths themselves.  They may lean crookedly, pointing in ambiguous directions, so you may want to stop reading and find another, more direct, reliable way.  Or you could continue.

It’s more correct to say that the army of frogs is actually a mold.  It grows green around the edges of the puddle, tapering off, but having no edge itself.  It is not one. It is not many.  It both grows and does not move, like a tree rooted in cement.  It spasms in the hush.  And still, it watches the puddle, which is suddenly muddled.

And then the mold, the frogs, the army, the void: it sees her in the puddle.  Despite the cosmic lightning storm spiraling around it, she is the most beautiful thing they, it, the frogs, the mold, has ever seen.  She shimmers in a pool of water that refuses to show the reflection of the frogs, or the reflection of the universal birth exploding stars above.  She is perfect, Incorruptibility.  And just as quickly she is gone.

She is the daughter of knowledge.  Passion and fire.  Life.  Incorruptibility.  Knowledge.  She is daughter to all of these, and they reside within her.

It’s a story that’s easier to tell in tiles.  The texts are spotty and it’s long past.  Really, the true story sits somewhere in the shadow of each of our minds.  It’s the reflection in the sea of primordial memory that’s just a bit too hazy for us to see into.  A bit too muddled.  A muddled puddle surrounded by a mold of frogs croaking somewhere just below where memories lie.

Home

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The landscape holds the deafening density of memory. The needles of each slash pine burst with the recollection of some childhood experience just on the edge of my mind. Each oak limb twists in the shape of a person long forgotten, whose name I would only recall if someone reminded me. It’s as if the trees and Florida air are storing the memories for me. They are my Giver, coddling reminiscences in case some day I might want them. I’ve seen them all before. Every sabal palm, every old oak, every casaurina. I’ve left pieces of myself in the sap of each tree. They whisper a promise to hold it, to free me, to lighten my load. It is only in this way that I am able to travel. In leaving behind the teenage worries and prepubescent fears, there is room for Thai macaques and Czech bridges.

But they are not lost.

The Spanish moss dangles with the whispers of elementary school friends. Mistletoe glistens with stolen first kisses. Pepper trees play melodies I know I’ve heard before. Even the formations of clouds seem to materialize into shapes that I’ve seen, in the same sunset, over twenty years ago.

Special thanks to _ryk from Flickr for the amazing photo!

Her Memories Are Round. (Winter 2012.)

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 They sit on the mantle and she fingers them slowly one by one, as if touching them brings back the sights and smells more fully.   They are self-contained, held in proper place by perfectly spherical glass walls, so that the snowflakes of experiences and emotions of each segment do not intermingle. Each one collects its own dust, attracting mites to its cause with sparkling reminiscences.   For each memory, an ornate, dainty pedestal calls out the name of the place and cradles the round, full memory that it holds.

Prague.  One of the few globes that has snow in it.  You almost can’t tell what century it’s from.  Bridges over the Vltava and Gothic architecture with snowy-tips.  It holds days that were ripe with inspiration.  It seemed that lightning was everywhere.  Circuses popped up in her favorite park and artists chased the buildings.  It was a country ruled by writers and it seemed that Milan Kundera was on every street corner.  Gargoyles caught the eye of old Communist statues from across the river and dared them to join in staring contests.  On tram rides to school, everyone was a character.  War widows and Russian spies, past lives and secrets sat all in a row waiting for their stop.   “Better Red than dead!” her grandmother joked, reminding her of past generations who once lived in this land, when it had another name and held a shameful family past.  This memory holds side trips to Cologne and Vienna, Budapest and Bratislava.  It’s one of the few snow globes that holds pieces of her family.  Aunt and uncle, mother and grandmother, all curious about this homeland.   Nightclubs filled with expats and whispers of absinthe.  Maybe if she drank what they drank, she could write like them.

The house itself is sparse.  Her movements make noises that echo off empty walls and bare floors.  As she places the snow globe from Prague back on the mantle, the noise echoes an emptiness, bouncing off bare walls and floors.

Alaska.   A summer that was constant spring.  The trees were always that new shade of green, as if they were permanently fresh.  Mountains grew into glaciers.  Snow was stuck in crevasses so that it didn’t float as you shook the snow globe.  This was closer to what she remembered anyway.  The water in the globe seemed to be cold to the touch, as if it had just melted, as if it had been melting these past 8 years.  It was bright blue, but not clear, like the run off from ice age giants.  There were toothpaste tubes hidden from grizzly bears and games to show you how to run zig zag away from moose.  Even the plants seemed like overgrown prehistoric remnants, with mammoth leaves and sabretoothed thorns.   There was no electricity or internet there.  Unconnected, but somehow much more connected.  She was sure she herself sat on one of those glaciers, too small to be seen, wrapped in the inciting cold.   The water was 39 degrees, and still she couldn’t keep from swimming.

She wonders briefly how many people have seen this globe.   She doesn’t keep her snow globes in order, chronological or otherwise.  They cluster together in the center of the mantle, as if vying for attention, at odds with each other.   Alaska might be in back most days.

San Francisco.  There are no row houses or piers in this one, like most people would expect.  She didn’t take home that Bay Area.  There was no Golden Gate Bridge jutting out from the water or Coit Tower thrusting up over the bay.   Instead she captured potlucks in the park and quiet BART rides.   No-pants parties and the murals of Mission Street swirled fancifully around pirate stores and parks and parks and parks.  The water in this globe churned, far from pacific, but alive all the same.  There were misplaced bison, grazing on grass from the Golden Gate Park.   At 4pm every day, the fog rolled in, keeping the globe fresh, sheltered.

And all the people from San Francisco stare back at her from inside the globe.  They don’t speak or move any more.  They stand as they were then, snapshots of friendships that only live in this one memory.

Thailand.  Water from the Chao Phraya fills the dome, so packed with life that you can’t see inside.  Water monitor lizards hide in the water as ochre-robed monks send turtles into the waves and birds into the air.  The globe gives off a mishmash of smells, each indistinguishable one setting off a strand of memories that seems unending.  Dried squid and fresh rain and jasmine and incense and sewage mix until you are no longer sure if you want to inhale deep or hold your nose.  Bodhi trees and strangler figs burst from the cracks, tiny parodies of each other.  Rambutan and mangoes and durian bob to the top of the riverwater, beckoning and repulsive in the same call.  Water hyacinth spurt purple blooms and ladyboys call to tourists from beneath temple gates.  Bangkok sparkles with grime and seems to drown in its own development.

Her hair had gotten darker in Thailand.  It went from a fiery red to an anonymous black.  She lived inside that globe so long that she could no longer look through the murky river out into the world.  This globe was both the majority of her adult life and also so, so far away.

The Bahamas.  Tiny sea biscuits float in what she likes to imagine is a little piece of the Atlantic.  Tiny periwinkle shells swim through the water and dance around a junkanoo parade.  The drummers are paused mid-beat and ready to strike.  Horns are held to lips as if they may scream any minute.  Feathers reach every which way.  The sand is pink, reflecting millennia of queen conchs sticking their tongues out at the waves.   The roosters never know what time it is, but it doesn’t seem to matter on the island, as long as you make it to the beach by sunset.   The globe held its own miniature Sargasso Sea, hiding the mystery of deep-blue depths and the growth of sea turtles and eels.  Mermaids’ purses and conchs burst with song.

This snow globe is her newest.

It is sudden and confusing when the house begins to shake.  At first it’s as if someone very large is trampling down the stairs, but in the back of her mind, she knows she is alone.  As it gets stronger, she holds the corner wall that hugs the fireplace for balance.  The snow globes begin to jostle and bounce, dancing side to side and right off the edge of the mantle.  They throw thirty years of dust into the air like confetti and she briefly wonders what they are celebrating.  They jump, glass heads first, freely into an ocean that begins to form on the floor, free diving out of their prescribed places.

The ocean they create is choppy and alive.  Gargoyles and Buddhist monks swim like fish amongst each other.  Gothic buildings and Alaskan mountains jut out from the sea like islands.  Friends from Thailand stare in awe at the aurora borealis that plays on the water.  Lizards play junkanoo while park-bison dance along.  The interactions are rich and charged.  Alive and fresh.

Creative Commons love to http://www.flickr.com/photos/_vini/ for the photo!

Kanchanaburi

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The river slithered out of the mountains with such speed that it seemed the forest must have been on fire. This should have been our first clue, but we pressed on, past rice paddies and the Death Railway, past water monitors and banana trees, past lotus fields and check points. We curved around roads unable to watch where we were going because we were mesmerized by the sun setting through the jagged dragon’s teeth jutting out of the landscape. Even as night began to fall, we did not stop, further into the heart of a jungle so dark that the moon and stars could not be seen, as if we were no longer in a world surrounded by other planets and galaxies. The fauna grew more massive and the flora grew more crowded until we were shouldering our way into a deafening density. Frogs croaked wood against wood, geckos sounded like birds, and cicadas imitated longtail boats.

Beetles and dragon flies landed on us as if we were sticks. Park rangers told us to turn back. Kitti bats stayed in their caves. Street signs shaped like royal crabs scuttled away from roads. And yet we persisted, driven on by an incurable bug for adventure, a sickness that pushed to see more and more unseen, a fever that made our hearts restless and drove us from our homes.

The mountains became billowy the higher we went, as if this far from the city even they were not fixed. Mist gathered round, blurring the edges. Bamboo plumed off cliffs, looking like giant feathery ferns from a distance. Animals jumped off limestone bluffs, floating into elephants and crocodiles and gibbons of cloud. Forests sank into reservoirs, as if the earth did not know where it stood. The road twisted, uncertain of the ground beneath it. On motorbikes and bicycles and boats, we pressed, closer toward forbidden lands where borders were blurry, into frontiers decorated with coconuts and cow skulls, where cowboys wore rice paddy hats. Into a west so wild that centuries and continents fell on top of each other. And we, naturally, lost our bearings, too.

Ficus roots floated in midair so that we wondered briefly if we were underground. Strangler figs wound around trees so tightly that the buttressed giants choked and fell, leaving exoskeleton trunks of vine, hollow ghost trees that still sprouted leaves and fruit. We climbed inside and nestled there, daring the vines to squeeze us, too. They were slow to respond to our taunts, as careful foliage often is. Hidden inside that creeping constrictor, we were not so cautious.

Deprived of the embraces of elkhorns and newts, we clasped each other. As tigers turned to clouds and mountains gaped into open dragon’s maws, we held hand to hip, mouth to mound, cheek to cheeks. Arms flattened into banana leaves. Hair transformed into mountain fog. Feet flew into branches. Eyes grew into papaya. Bellies became karst formations and breasts danced into spinning seed pods. Fingers split into ferns. Orchids turned and cooed at the rustling, lizards clucked, birds whistled, mangoes dropped like dumbfounded jaws, and gibbons whooped.

We were no longer sure if we were astronauts or crickets, dinosaurs or gods. But the knowledge no longer mattered. I did not return from that heart of darkness, and nor did you. But we came home, as frangipani and limestone, passion fruit and snakes, tree frogs and jasmine, the earth and the sky.

Creative Commons  love to purplekarma, axelsaffron, and beakatude (in that order) for the photos! Thank you!

Making Love to Clouds

Jaclyn17 Comments

I did not flinch when I saw her, though I knew she expected it.  My face did not mirror hers, eyes pulled wide, lips forced apart by the sharp intake of breath she could not control,  brow clenched upwards by a mind which could not believe.

A small breath of air made its way from my lungs, but my lips could not form her name.

Her eyes moved away from mine to the ground.  She did not want me to see her this way, I knew, and she would rather have never seen me at all than to meet me like this.

Her hair, which I had never seen down in all our years together, even through sleep and childbirth, fell in front of her face, intentionally hiding it.  In the darkness, it was hard to tell the two apart, now that the night of her straight hair had spread down the length of her body.  It was the blackness of her face from which I could not take my eyes.  Not the decay of her skin, crawling into strange formations as it fell from her flesh, nor the worms escaping from within her and being more eager to return to her to feast, but the pure tar of her face.  It had been one of her more powerful features, lighting the sky with its whiteness, its power making men run for cover.

“Do not look on me,” her words were loud, quick.  I wondered if she knew I had been chasing the young nymph which had just passed her, giggling melodically, curls and young breasts bouncing teasingly around the corner.  I wondered if it had been long enough since her death, or if it ever would be.

“I miss looking on you,” I offered.

She scoffed under her breath.  I could hear the tightening of her hard face through the darkness.  It was a sound I had not forgotten.

She crossed her arms, jagged elbows sending small bolts of lightning at the ground.  In the light, I could see a cockroach on the ground, near her dirty, bare feet.  It was the first time I understood her shame in being seen in the underworld.  Her usually tidy, glowing dress looked like what a peasant mortal would wear.  Instead of her usual shining shoes, her small, sharp feet, were caked in dirt, and being eaten.  I wondered if it was difficult for her to walk with the same poise that she had always carried.

“Please,” I said, knowing she would notice that my voice was not that of a god, but of a mole.  It did not happen often, but I knew she always noticed when I lost my composure.   “We will never see each other again.  We are lucky for just this moment.  Please, just look at me.”

“I-”  It was not often that she stuttered.  Her uneasiness grew to fill the small confines of the underground cave in which we stood.

Maybe she also feels as if it were my fault.

Perhaps she did not recall her last days, after the birth of the fire.  The way she screamed as the flames came forth from her womb burned my insides also.  The tears that sparked her electric face for days afterwards as she whimpered in pain each stung me as well. And I could no longer live forever when her immortality was taken away.

“I am not the same,” she said, her voice beginning to crack.  I knew she would not cry.  I struggled in the darkness to see better the prickly lines of her long body and face, the points of her nose, chin, and hips.

“I know,” I said.  I still missed looking on her.

   He did not know. 

            I could see his misty face, churning with emotions — for me!  If he knew, he would not be taking the time to steal a few moments with me before his return home.

            He moved towards me and I was within his arm’s reach.  I moved away.

            “I know,” he repeated, taking a small, determined step forward. 

            That was the moment when the memories flew past me and I was forced to turn and look at the decaying wall.  This gave my unruly mind free reign in recalling my memories, but at least I did not look at his face. 

            The tree came back to me first, but I knew that did not mean I loved him more.  The nights I had stolen away with the tree in a forced, hushed passion were just easiest to remember — there had been so few.  Always after dark.  Embracing without kissing.  A dainty removal of his own splinters.  All so the clouds could detect no signs when I returned home.  The splinters were my favorite part, even then.

            But there were more nights — since the beginning of time, in fact — with the clouds.  After all, what is lightning without clouds, or clouds without lightning?  The best nights were always the ones spent over tropical islands — hurricanes and our children, the thunder, the rain, and the tornado, were all conceived from the swirls of our passion on nights like those.

            So, when I first realized that I was having the fire child, I stopped seeing the tree.  I had no doubts about who fathered it.  But, then again, neither did the clouds.  Perhaps that was the most painful part of the ordeal:  the clouds trusted me so much that he was sure the child was his.

            “I am sorry,” he tried.  I knew he was fumbling for words, and it made me want him to hold me.

            “I am as well.”  But I stayed cold.  Who would want to hold a sack of maggots?

            “If I had known what would happen –“

            “You should not apologize.”

            “It was my fault,” he said.

            “It was not your fault,” I insisted, my voice rising with tension.

            “I should not have–” he stopped.

            I could hear him turn, his arm brushing chunks of dirt off the crumbling wall, and return the way he had come.

 

 

 

 

 

Creative Commons Love to Liamfm on flickr.  Thank you!

Amenhothep IV

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         Amenhothep. That was what he had been called. Named after his father. But even his father regretted that. He was clearly not his father’s son. He came out misshapen, with a head too big and the shoulders of a woman. Not fit to be a king. Not even fit to be a prince. He didn’t hope to be invited anymore. He didn’t ask to go to ceremonies or carvings. Family sculptures were for the princely children. Siblings who came out looking normal enough, generic enough that any sculptor could make them beautiful, could make them look like a pharaoh should. Broad shoulders. Small waists. Perfect faces just waiting to be framed by royal adornments. His was truly a face only a mother could love.

And love she did. Fiercely. With a strength and ferocity that scared him.

But Amenhothep (Amenhothep IV, to be precise, because Amenhothep III was every bit the ruler he should have been) was different. Too different. Not eccentric in the way that was permissible for pharaohs. Not egocentric in the right way. His mother Tiye insisted that this second son bore his father’s name. Amenhothep. Amun is satisfied. It felt like such a lie. Even to the boy himself. Just imagine how his  father felt. How could his seed produce something so perverse, so… otherworldly.

He spent his time alone. His mother called him special and he was sure that it was not a good thing.

Together, his family was set in stone. Older brother, two sisters, Mother, Father… without Amenhothep. Festivals, reliefs, religious ceremonies. Left alone, staring at the sky.

It was always Sopdet that caught his eye. The Dog Star. Sirius, Sothis, Sopdet. How could it not? The brightest star in the sky felt like home to him. It seemed to shine for him, to call his name in whispers in the night. The days when Sopdet disappeared were the worst. 70 days straight without that bit of comfort, that tiny speck of support from afar. Each year it brought a winter to his heart.

One night his mother even caught him.

“Your world is here, Amenhothep.” Tiye surprised him.

“I know,” he said, nearly disappointed.

“Are you watching Sopdet?”

“Yes,” he looked at the ground.

“It’s special to us. The birthplace of Isis.” He had heard the mythology. It was not new.

“And of your father,” she intimated. He turned to look at her. Was she being mythological? Spouting the stories that kept the pharoahs divine? That was unlike her, he knew. His mother was straightforward, powerful, and not prone to indulging folklore. And yet… His father was just a man normal and mortal, as much as he pretended otherwise, Amenhothep knew. He narrowed his eyes and Tiye sensed his suspicion.

“Not that father.” She walked away, ending the conversation.

Creative Commons love to Archer10 on flicker for the photo!  Thank you!

Akhenaten (Winter 2012.)

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Even when history is written in stone, it is re-written.  This is the nature of the story.  Suns and hawks and buffaloes are erased, scratched over to be reused in the temples of the future.  Reunderstood.  Re-envisaged.  Repostulated.  This is how Akhenaten was lost, struck from the roll of the pharaohs, a distant memory of a monotheistic heretic, a madman with only one god.  He built cities and temples and sculptures of stone and gold and they were quietly erased in the span of a generation.  Father of history’s most famous pharaoh, the first individual, founder of world religions and yet … forgotten.

Even when etchings are deep, the vengeance of history is deeper.

His lips were full, and so was his stomach, as if he were the bearer of life:  Mother and Father in one.  Son of the sun, he named himself.  Descendant of the stars. Yet “He is the sun, as compared to the stars,” the people wrote.   He shone and spun with energy and life.   He was daytime and dawn and we were drawn to him.  The pull of his large middle seemed to keep earth in orbit and suggested that he was … different.

His head was large, too.  And not just metaphorically.  His skull was not round, not adorned with the dress of kings.  Instead it jutted, backwards.  As if his brain were trying to leap out of his head.   As if he came born with too many thoughts for a human skull to hold.  Or too many questions.

His face was not manly and beautiful.  It was strange and androgynous.  His lips pouted, asking to be kissed.  His nose barely fit on his face.  And his chin, his chin was so pointy.  It turned his giant skull into the shape of an upside-down tear drop: a large, rounded cranium that ended in a small, pointy face.  And then there was the matter of his eyes.  They were big, but not round, enormous almonds that seemed to fill his brow.  With his mouth and eyes and nose, there was very little room for a face, to speak of.  Instead he was an immense head, full of features.   It wasn’t normal.  It wasn’t human.  It was almost alien – as if he did come from the stars.

He did not recline the way other pharaohs did.  He was not somehow both always at rest and gifted with an athletic, sculpted body.  His shoulders were small and his hips were large.  His arms and calves were so spindly that some likened him to a spider.  His thighs were so large that there were whispers amongst the people “Is he Oedipus, swollen foot?”  His mother was, after all, beloved.

Instead, he was lively, as if stone carvers always caught him in the act.  Each carving seemed to be a live-action photograph of a son of god engaged with his surroundings.  The cartoon pharaoh, always animated, surrounded by loved ones, animals, and the outdoors.  Not only acting as a ruler, but acting as a father, a man, a lover.  He was a king of movement: orbiting and revolving through the universe.  His pull and the pull of the world around him spun together, and inspired each other to dance faster and further.

You can see how the present had fallen in love, and how history was not amused.

Response to a previous prompt: http://lightningdroplets.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/prompt-rasputin/

Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/zinetv/ for the photo of Nefertiti (?).

listening to icicles (Colorado. November 2002.)

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listening to icicles

they giggle softly

dripdripdrip

drop

drap

rods of burning cold

tensing their muscles

to break free of the shingles

crackackackackackle

they blind with the light

of a reflected winter sun

and mirror the calm

of soothing soft snow

blipblipblip

blop

blup

slowly melting now

making waves of ice

beneath them

to be suspended from

the sky the snow

anything but the roof

buckleuckleuckleuckleuckle

.               .               .

floating among the snowflakes

little brothers of ice

the ground beneath

comes near

the icicles reach

trying to embrace

crassssssssssssssssh

Darunsikkhalai (Thailand. May 2010.)

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(Reposted for Ram (:  )

Norea wondered how the scene in front of her looked to the tour group.  A woman framed her mock-surprised face with her hands as she backed away from a set of high-heeled feet dangling lifelessly.  In a circle around the computer screen, 8 orange-striped ten-year-olds in pleather rolly chairs listlessly watched the drama.  Only their Thai teacher seemed enrapt.  In the corner, the teaching assistant scrolled through pictures of cookies shaped like Lady Gaga.  From the window outside, the five professors on Norea’s tour tittered like overexcited hamsters.

“Very… unusual school,” one of them said to her.  Norea nodded.

Norea turned around so that her silvery eyes met the horizon. On the eighth floor, she had an uninterrupted view of the city.  In the distance, the most recognizable bridges in Bangkok batted golden eyes as they coyly skirted behind the smog.  They dropped gray-brown veils onto the vibrating city below as they shimmied in the heat.   The distant downtown towers looked as if they had donned their best khakis and sidled up next to the stage to enjoy the show.   The scene was suspended, a sepia photo with blurred edges and a highlighted blue sky.  All the smiles were frozen.

The wet, climbing ivy that was the Chao Phraya River evaporated inexorably up the sides of skyscrapers, covered the cars parked on bridges, and hid the street vendors, encircling the city in its grasp.

“The children learn by creating,” she told the group, still looking at the hazy sparkle in the distance.  “In this class, they are learning Thai culture and language by studying curses.  In the coming weeks, they will make their own drama about curses.”

The group nodded in unison and Norea guided them downstairs.

“And does it work?” a professor with too-red lipstick and an unmoving-shell of hair asked.

“The sixth floor has science labs and the facilitator’s offices,” Norea said.

Creative Commons love to http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebehnken/ for the picture!

Cicadas (Thailand. May 2010.)

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She could hear his abdomen, even from eight stories above. She knew he waited for her, dressed in new skin holding the bark of a mango tree. For thirteen years, she had dug and hid, dug and hid, a pale pearl of a nymph sheltered in flooding clay. Prematurely buried. She had fed on rootjuice and waited.

And now, the time for burying herself was gone. She no longer wore the tough soil skin of the past. The brightness of being was nearly unbearable. She was green and larger than herself.

She sat exposed, mesmerized by the equatorial sunlight and the scene in front of her. A kaleidescope of rounded, dark-haired girls with lightning eyes and cloud-colored skin. Mirrored and moving the same. The repetition of girls had no expression on their faces. Their mouths moved at the groups of people surrounding them, but their dream-time eyes looked through the scene.

She heard him again, dry-fly ribs rubbing together to blot out the sounds of metropolitan traffic and children. The vibrations called to her.

She looked down at the expectant mango tree and imagined the future she would create. Millions of shimmery nymphs sprinkling from the branches, raining onto the soil below, christening the ground with their sparkling selves.

There was nothing for her to do now, except let go.

 

 

 

Creative Commons love to http://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersmith/ for the photo! Thanks!