What Pegman Saw: Forever Change

Image: Google Street View

The island speaks of forever.

Rock the colour of a whale’s back. A fathomless sea that leaps into the sky, swallowing the horizon .

Everything is as it has always has been and I want to be part of it, lie in the waves, let the barnacles clump my skin, the worms burrow into the warren of my bones.

A dash of red draws my eye, the colour so bright it hurts. The colour of pillar boxes, of telephone kiosks and buses, of change.

I want to be alone with the sea, but the colour grows, becomes a girl in a red dress. She battles her hair, the skirt that tangles round her calves. She bends, plucks shells from the whale’s back, tucks the stolen treasures in her pocket.

She smiles as she passes, the shells jingling, that smile pulling me back to life, the possibility of change.

***

Written for What Pegman Saw, the prompt that uses Google Street View. This week we visit Guyana. See here to join in – it’s a fantastic prompt, so do come along.

Nailed to the page

Goodbye was the word that jumped out from the scrawl.

Some of the phrases were lost forever, rinsed away by the rain or crushed to muddy pulp by my footprint.

I cursed myself for being so careless. But if it hadn’t slid beneath my boot, I wouldn’t have seen the words or cradled it in my hands as it dripped brown water between my fingers. I wouldn’t have carefully dried the fragile paper by the fire.

The letter held together, but what remained was fragmentary, shards of emotion nailed to the page.

It rested in my hands, light as a leaf, yet heavy. I looked around the room.

My books leaned drunkenly on the shelf where yours were missing. A dusty rectangle on the stand was all that remained of the television set. I remembered the conversation: you’d paid for it, you said, and by then I was too tired to argue.

I put the letter in a cheap frame and hung it on a vacant picture hook as I listened to the rain fall.

---

Day Five of Writing 101 and the challenge is to write about finding an emotionally-charged letter in the park – as briefly as possible.

A great exercise for me, as my fiction tends to rabbit on, and on, and on…