seanessay.com (over 900 words)
Falling down the rabbit hole, writing on Free Fall Friday.
prompt- transferred
My values have transferred. Once, if I sincerely wanted the doctor to come, I would hitch up the horses to fetch him. But once we installed (lazy) telephones the doctor wisely declined. Call it a transfer of values, from old world to new.
Once I kept carbon copies of every letter I sent, kept every letter received from friends and lovely Aunt Linda. Not now. Now an e-mail is nothing to keep, it’s as quickly thought out as a memorandum sent through an office tube like on that Paddington movie, as ephemeral as something spoken on an interoffice communicator, or intercom.
…
Prompt- we’re so quick
I was working in the lab, late one night.
I needed a beer, to calm my fright.
From in the freezer, where nothing could move
I heard a sliding, like steel in a groove.
My ears were buzzing, I was in a black hole,
When from the freezer I heard, “Gimme back my soul!”
,
When I have a hangover, or depression so blue
I have no use for fools, or experiments too.
So I sprang to the freezer, stepped back with the door
Prepared to scold, and give the ‘what for’
But there was nothing there but molds, and a wolf cadaver
“Who ever yelled, you better get at ‘er!
For I’ve got work to do, as I had such a fright,
So that’s why I’m here, working at night.”
,
The molds were silent, though I saw them ooze
And I wondered if should pour over them some booze
Though if they hadn’t yelled, I wondered what did?
When the wolf turned my way, and spoke like a kid.
“Did you think I was nothing, a mere dumb beast?
In life I was a werewolf, who liked to feast
On old men and young virgins, and whoever I caught,
Now life is over, it’s all gone for naught
But I was a creature, who played his role
And now Lucifer, so ungrateful, wants my soul!
,
I said, “Give him a bite, and nothing less;
I have no time, for tonight I’m afraid
Of the IRS.”
…
prompt- the library
In old Alexandria stood the mightiest library in the world. On the edge of the wine-dark sea of the Mediterranean, at the end of the mighty Nile river, of which no man had seen the source, stood the city of Alexandria, raised by the Great conqueror himself, before he strode off with his mighty army east unto the edge of the known world.
Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon, began in that city something that was to last longer than his empire: a library, a library to capture the imagination of people throught the classical world. Here scholars would take the millennia old oral poems of Homer and put them down on papyrus, in definitive form. Here the experts would come from Ethiopia, the palace of Solomon, Athens and Argos, seeking out the shelves of rolled papyrus to dwell among the thinkers of ages past.
Did you know that, before Homer, the Greeks had an alphabet? Called linear-B, it lacked capitol letters and word spaces, but there it was: memory stabbed out of the air and fixed to paper. It existed until the fall of Atlantis, and the disaster at Crete. After that, no man could read it. All the heroes at the plains before Troy? Illiterate, every one of them. And so Homer’s great epic was recited, memorized, improvised on by generations, but never read, not until quite late, when all we knew of Atlantis was that it lay to the west, towards the setting sun.
By the time of Alexander, the age of bronze, celebrated in The Iliad, had given way to the iron age. There were colonies at Syracuse and Carthage, and time to read and write. And the library was a wonder of the world. It was a beacon of knowledge, right up until men of the sword, from Rome, strode the Egyptian sands, and caused the death of fair Cleopatra. Call your child Mark, or Anthony, or Julius, but not Cleopatra, no, for she came to a bad end. And the fires of all those scrolls burned and burned and singed the monitor of history.
The library of Alexandria, like a harbinger of a future dark age, has burned and passed on into legend.
…
prompt- snowfall.
Somewhere, snow is falling. All around the globe, in lands hushed and white, snow is falling. Perhaps in white flakes like so many geometrical crystal beauties, twirling and sighing to the ground. Perhaps in irregular big bits that slop into water as soon as they hit your skin. So interesting, so hopeful, when the land is at the zero point and snow on blades of grass stays white, while snow on black asphault and grey sidewalks turns invisible, giving hope that the ground too will turn green in good time.
Somewhere, snow is eternally packing down, year after year, decade after decade, into blue ice for building igloos, into ice for carving permanent staircases leading to fairy casements. Fairies, how European, how like a land of summer and easy forage. Not like out in harsh igloo land where everything supernatural is cold and heartless and wants to kill you. Everything.
But all around the world, in every time and space, snow has fallen around human activity. The viking longboats sailed as snow fell into the water and curtained off the lands of plunder. Patrols in Korea stiffened and kept moving. Ah, snow.
…
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Sean Crawford
Speaking of Snow: Today, mid-May, it is snowing—So how do Canadians play football? Easy, they paint the ball black.
Music video costume play: Surfing the Web, I don’t remember any U.S. gatherings for Japanese culture (anime and manga) being filmed with snow, not even bits in the background; meanwhile, these wholesome men and women, shown having a life with such great fun in Calgary, ignore the snow, as well they should.
