Game?

Today Pegman and k. rawson took us to a beautiful place, Portmeirion Village, Wales. Another place for the bucket list.

Note: Meet at the blue bench in front of Mary’s statue.
I look from the paper to the benches, there are three.
Note: Sit on the correct one or your daughter will vanish forever.
How does one choose?
Note: Be there by 4 p.m.

3:45: Mary seems to be laughing, mocking, as my heels click-clack across the cement.
My husband is playing our game which has morphed from
Hide-the-Lipstick to today’s installment – Find-Your-Daughter.
Each time he presents the game the reward or punishment runs the gamut from
diamonds or pearls to a night in a cellar filled with spiders.

Before today, the anticipation thrilled me,
never knowing when he would offer a new riddle or what the outcome would be.
Not now. The stakes are too high.
Bench #1 – gum stuck to the seat
Bench #2 – too cold
Bench #3 – last choice
I wait, shivering, while wind rattles oak branches like bones.

(147-words)

 

 

Rooked

As a child, Judy collected all manner of things: fossils, petrified wood, bird wings, seeds. At twenty she began work at the Seattle Art Museum, donating her massive collection, collecting more through travels abroad – used her own money to purchase the most exotic pieces in the museum. Fifty years passed and there wasn’t a building in the world housing anything close to what Judy brought home. Today she opens a box from Africa with her rarest find, a Lintzer Spider mummified with its catch. Down the hall she can hear the governor saying, “To Mr.Evans and his fine collection!”

(Author’s note: To the best of my knowledge there’s no such thing as a Lintzer Spider)

An InLinkz Link-up

The Impromptu Meeting

Slippers slide on frosty deck.  Crisp morning air,  pajamas rumbled, hair wrinkled.  At first glance, the yard appears exactly as it had last night when I whistled the cat in from her moonlit pursuit of rodents.   Two teenage fawns and a worn out doe nest in the oval bed of moss and maple twigs etched into the border between our lawn and their woods. Generations of deer have claimed this hallow as their own. Do not attempt to move them.  They were here first.
Air smells of mushrooms.  A raven calls.  Another answers.  All is right with the world.
Yet, something is different.
Observation 1: Last night’s frost coaxed the dogwood leaves to begin the fall transformation from green to pink to burgundy.
Observation 2: The ever-gnawing banana slugs have altered the fronds of the Not-Jacob’s Ladder from solid green to lacey off-yellow. Not unusual. These snails-without-shells perform this magic trick whenever my back is turned.
Observation 3: Last night’s moon-filled sky now oozes rain.
What has changed? Move close to the edge of the porch.  Peer into the early dawn.
And there it is. An impromptu meeting of weavers.  Tens upon hundreds of miniature nets, silver in the sunrise, shimmer and shine between the branches of the dogwood, among the viburnum leaves, in the arch of the doorway and between the pillars of the porch.  While part of the world slept, industrious weavers took a single silken thread and created their own singular masterpiece.  Some are tight, filling the space between branches no further apart than fingers on a hand.  Others use an enormous amount of space – taking advantage of air and opportunity.
One lovely weaver began her net on the eave twelve feet above the porch.  From there she threw her body into empty space, landing where she meant to  – on the planter beside the door.  Now her spoke lines are filled with silver spirals of silk, off-center in some places, perfectly interlaced in others.
Each weaver cast her lot, hoping to catch white flies and black, bees, moths and crickets.  At the end of the day she will eat her own work, a house cleaning of sorts, then begin again tomorrow.
Good luck to you all, Weavers of Beauty