visual dare – Yearning for Wonderland

Visual Dare: Grimalkin on 5th Avenue

Here are exactly 150 words for Angela Goff’s Visual Dare. I couldn’t pass up the photo this week.

“Bubble, bubble, toil and—”

“Can it, Flo!” Margie barked.

“I’m freezing,” whined Sue. “I want to go home.”

“Not any warmer in Scotland, ninny,” said Margie, fumbling in her purse for a stick of gum. “Chew this. We promised we’d meet again, in thunder, lightning or rain.”

Sue huddled under her umbrella, “My new pumps are ruined.”

Flo stared off at the rain-smeared Manhattan skyline, “Fair is foul, foul is fair.”

Margie resisted the urge to slap her. Flo always imagined herself as the poetic one: Flo is short for “flowers”, she used to say.

“Florence, please get in position.” Margie smiled till her teeth ached.

They all took their place at the base of the courthouse steps.

A man in a pinstriped suit with perfect creased pants hurried past them.

Margie raised her voice, “Mr. Macbeth, who shall be king hereafter.”

The lawyer turned and they had him.

Visual Dare: Engraved

Sometimes when your heart is hurting, all you can do is write. The prompt is from Angela Goff’s Visual Dare.

Even after fifty years of adventures, of hand-holding and dish-breaking, of her winding his watch and him ironing her newspaper, Solomon had thought she’d live forever.

“Set me as a seal upon your heart,” she used to sing, “as a seal upon your arm. For love is strong as death.”

She’d tease him about his name and those Bible verses. “They’re the naughty ones, y’know,” with a mock-demure look through eyelashes.

Now she lay inert, a madonna enwreathed with wires and an irritable chorus of machines.

“…something for the pain,” he said, again.

“Not long now.” The nurse removed the untouched lunch tray.

He held her transparent hand, traced deep blue deltas winding sluggishly to the pulse, that metronome keeping her here.

Solemnly, ceremonially, he detached each plug, then wound his arms around her. He laid his deep-furrowed cheek on her still breast and set his seal upon her heart.

Visual Dare: Precarious

Despite my best efforts to avoid flash, Angela Goff’s excellent Visual Dare image has lured me in. Curses!

Rain pattered on glossy magnolia leaves, sliding down with an audible plop. Early summer heat was an omnipresent background actor in her life. It shimmered on asphalt and pasted the hem of her thin cotton dress to her legs. She’d grown up on this porch, sticking pennies between the boards in an orderly line, but now that she’d buried her mother it was just an assemblage of creaking windows and doors and damn it if her consolation pedicure wasn’t already chipped.

Humidity ravaged the tuning of the old piano, but her mother loved to sit on the porch and play ragtime. Husband left, mother gone, and all she had here was a broken-down house and a tuneless piano. And the heat.

She hitched her skirt and stepped on the bench, bare feet walking the keys. She danced, playing her own ragtime, and the music floated out through the summer rain.