Quoted in the Grove:
The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world’s joy.
~Henry Ward Beecher
I don’t ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful.
~Pete Hamill
The day will happen whether or not you get up.
~John Ciardi
~~
Posted from the Grove:
~~
Platform Favorites:
Love’s Wanting Its Own
~Sophie B. Hawkins: Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover (4:32)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt6r-k9Bk6o
~Edie Brickell: Good Times (3:12)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
~~
Prewritten for Thurs (08/03) @6pm PT/9 ET is: One or more original knock-knock jokes
~~
@Writers Platform:
Prewritten: furnace, wrangle
~Piffin: July 27
This epic romance
Cold as a furnace in June
Pain wrangles a kiss
~
~Greymane: Furnaced Apartment
Mandy was finally back in her hometown after more than 4 years away at college. She had lost her parents at a very young age and been raised by her grandparents. Pappa had passed about a year before she left and her grandmother just last year. She was alone now as far as family went, yet she returned to the small town she had grown up in. She hoped the familiar surroundings would help her settle into a new life of her own. She had almost run out of money by the time she landed a decent job at the hospital just outside of town. Finding a place to rent had been difficult. The only places she could afford were not to her liking, run down, bad neighborhoods, or too far from work for her.
At last she had found an ad in the newspaper. She was hopeful, the description sounded very nice and the rent was way below her budget. The building was a very nice old brownstone in surprisingly great shape for its obvious age. It was in a part of town she was not familiar with, oddly surrounded by overgrown fields of rubble. It stood practically alone on the block and she felt a little uneasy.
The owner Bernice was a bit old fashioned, it seemed, but very sweet. She loved the place and moved right in. The very first night, somewhere around 2 am, she was startled awake by the heavy smell of smoke but saw none. It was so strong she was almost choking. Out in the hallway and the rest of the building she saw no signs of a fire or any commotion at all. She went back to bed satisfied nothing was wrong. It happened again the next night and the night after that. She asked Bernice about it after a week of the same and all she would say is that it must be a fireplace on the breeze and that she had smelled nothing at all.
Mandy was finding it harder and harder to get any sleep after that as it happened every night at around 2 am. Smoke she could not see, heat from no visible source and fear that she could not explain save for her ever increasing confusion. Her work began to suffer and she lost her job as a result. Bernice told her she would always live there, always, and not to be concerned, she would find something else soon.
She began to lose her mind after a few more months had passed with more of the same, experiencing the same thing every night at the same time, even when she was wide awake. Voices began to accompany the heat and the smoke, frantic, muffled voices, then the faint sirens almost indiscernible.
She was sure that she had gone crazy. Weary from no sleep and weak from not being able to eat, she collapsed on the bed overcome by exhaustion. She saw the date on her clock and noticed that the next day was the anniversary of her parents passing as she drifted into a deep heavy sleep.
At 2 am as always she awoke to smoke and heat and fear but this time the voices were loud the sirens and the commotion outside surely had to be real. She could hear it plain as day. She went out in the hallway and it was blackened and hot, It was wet and smelled of burnt everything. She saw no one. She turned back to her apartment and saw that it was now as black and burned as the hallway. She ran toward Bernice’s apartment and saw that the whole building was a burnt ruin. There were holes in the walls and ashes and water puddled everywhere.
She made her way outside and realized there was no one there. No frantic victims, no firemen … no sirens. She sat, reeling, confused and scared. On the ground, in the gutter, next to her an old yellowed newspaper caught her eye. The headline read “Brownstone Fire Claims Family of Three” Curious she picked it up and read the story. A furnace had blown in one of the apartments and had taken the lives of a young couple and their daughter. There was a picture of Bernice standing in front of the very same scorched ruin that stood before her across the street. She turned to the back page for the rest of the story and there it was, a picture of her and the parents she remembered. She was terrified. The article had mentioned her by name and said that she had died in the fire with her parents. She didn’t know what to do.
She wrangled up the courage and got in her car. She had never been to the cemetery. Her grandparents had never taken her. It took her three hours to find her parents’ graves. Her own she found between them under a smaller headstone. With her realization she turned to smoke and dissipated quietly into everything around her, finding her freedom at last.
~
~BarTalk: Admonitions
~~
Impromptu: used tissue, empty pen
~Piffin: “Locust Avenue, 1996”
Every memory a used tissue
Every corner full of think
Every turn an unsolved issue
And our pen was out of ink
Our love letters
Empty glasses
In the sink
~
~Greymane: The Write Way
Writer on the window seat
The world down below
Another story incomplete
but closer than I know
I cursed my empty pen again
and told it things I knew
I called myself a writer but I limit what I view
I tried to paint a picture of a place I’d rather be
I tried to tell my tale but my voices don’t agree
I wrote my epic novel in the creases of my mind
Wrote on shreds of tissue that my life had left behind
~
~Jessalee: jessa impromptu
in a dim-lit quiet room
months and years now took minutes
and played out the life dream
of the son he was meant to be-
yesteryear visions
of the child’s loss and child lost.
as the letters spelled out
a deafening crescendo,
the end was near.
she let her mind go free
and focused not on the page
but her bony, frail aching hands.
then it was she felt nothing
but the cold wet used tissue
and she saw nothing more
than the pen that had run dry.
~
~BarTalk: kuku
~ . ~
Wordgrove Post & Review 