Waterfall

Waterfall

A drop water of you were if
what you do would?
Cliff the to cling?
Go let?
The waterfall enjoy?


For some unknown reason these words were following me one day and I played with them and tumbled them and imagined them like the drops of water...
I don"t know maybe you"ll find it inspiring...
Inspiration , like water is unstoppable...

The Passage and a Meeting

story by Rosa Anna Nastro in which we learn more about Madame Butterfly...

(For the previous section, see: this post.

It lasted just a second. After jumping into the pond, Cahetel felt like he was fluctuating in an indefinite space, dragged by a force like fog dispersed by a strong wind through a valley. His body had no weight, his mind was completely free. Suddenly, his body was painful and heavy again, the air flowed through his lungs. He was reborned. When he opened his eyes, he saw a pale light surrounding him. This light passed from yellow, to orange and, finally to red. At last, a dazzling blue lightning, then the darkness. After few seconds, Cahetel’s eyes adapted to the dark atmosphere and he realized he was in a round room made by a dark stone. There were just two windows, high in the wall. A pale light enlightened part of the wall and of the floor, where he was seated. He explored the floor itself by his hands and he realized he was in a circle, with some water flowing through it. But, after few minutes the water disappeared, revealing the opalescent stones that formed the circle itself. He looked at the room intently, and even if it was night, he was almost sure it was empty with the exception of some mirrors hanging from the walls. Even the high ceiling seemed brilliant, but he wasn’t able to recognize the nature of the matter it was made by. Paying more attention, he noticed the mirrors were able to reflect the light entering through the windows, giving some kind of lightening to the room. Like a dream, the pale light of a candle appeared at the side of a beautiful mirror, whose frame was accurately carved. Then, Cahetel realized he wasn’t alone in the room. A woman was seated in front of the mirror, brushing her long hair with grace and care. The candle floating in the air. “Finally a pilgrim from Nowhere” said a voice, calmly. The young man noticed the image reflected by the mirror: it was a charming woman, with an indefinable age. “Lately, some fleeting ghosts came from the same place. I let them pass, but they annoy me now…”. She stopped brushing, looking at the pilgrim through the mirror. His eyes were deep, dark with a light inside, a sort of flame. “Dear Madame, my name is Cahetel. The Red Spirits sent me to the Fifth Colony” he said standing up and making a bow. She stood up. “Very interesting. So, they opened the passage. You must be very important”. When she started moving, the young man noticed her face changing appearance: in a moment she was young, but suddenly she looked like an old woman. Moreover, when she started walking it seemed she had two different images, following and, at the same time, overlapping each other. Cahetel wasn’t able to move or to speak. “Give me your hand, so I can see who you are…”. When she saw the circle in the palm of his hands, she looked with her penetrating, mysterious gaze into his eyes.”I can’t stop you, Blue Pilgrim”. Then, Cahetel felt like a heavy force had released him. He breathed deeply. “Do you have any message from Him?”she said while turning back and going to sit at the mirror. “No, Milady” he answered without knowing the reason. “Oh! I’ll wait for Him. I know. He’ll come back”. So, she started brushing her hair again. Calmly. With





grace. In that moment a pale blue light spread from the surface of the ceiling to the mirrors. Madame Butterfly set him free… A disk of blue light extended till the circle on the floor, wrapping the voyager who felt his body dissolving like fog. Again.




The strange tall man took Laura’s hand. The little girl looked at him puzzled. “Who are you? What is your name?”. He smiled “I’ll tell you when you’ll be older”. The man opened her hand and, rapidly, placed something in it. A short lightning spread from her closed fingers but, when she opened them, there was nothing. A wind moved her long, black hair. The man smiled again. “We will meet again, when you are ready Laura”. The girl was completely confused, but at the same time, she felt comfortable. She knew he wouldn’t hurt her. He pointed to something behind the girl. A bird was waiting on a roof. She turned on her side and when she looked again to him, he wasn’t there. He had disappeared.

Rose The One, Happy Birthday Rosa

It is so nice to have another day for celebration:)
Have a wonderful Birthday dear Rosa,
Thank you for sharing with us your creativity and Inspiration:)
Lots of hugs and kisses

Happy Birthday Zoe!

Color of Mind

"I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind."

Emily Brontë

Created for Zoe...additional artwork (inserted card) by Aaron Goland.

Zoe Blue

I love YOU

Zoe Blue

:)

The Sandcastle...Let's play

Rob Gonsalves-Castle on The Cliff

The Sandcastle, it never lasts long.

To build it: is it right or is it wrong?

Nobody ever lives in it.

Why does anybody even bother making it?

The first rain or tide will wash the walls away.

Will children even remember their play?

The splenid Sandcastle will become again

nothing more then a sand, dull and plain.

But what can we ask for more?

We live for new ideas to explore.

Time is not only measured by sand,

We measure it any way we can comprehend.

Vesna

13/04/2010

Please feel free to add to the post...

The Best Thing In The World

The Best Thing In The World

"What's the best thing in the world?
June-rose, by May-dew impearled;
Sweet south-wind, that means no rain;
Truth, not cruel to a friend;
Pleasure, not in haste to end;
Beauty, not self-decked and curled
Till its pride is over-plain;
Light, that never makes you wink;
Memory, that gives no pain;
Love, when, so, you're loved again.
What's the best thing in the world?
—Something out of it, I think."
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Happy Birthday Vesna!

An Ignorant Witch and A Tall Scared Man

I HAD to run. His shadow covered mine. The Moon became his partner and Moon followed me too.

Then she appeared. She looked up and I realized I AM a tall man.
“Can you help me little witch?” I asked,  “I am a monster, a man afraid of himself”.
She couldn’t be less interested. “There is full World of those”, she said and flew away on her broom towards the full Moon.

Revenge

“I have never seen something like this”

John stares the long white bared body on the red floor, unable to move.
“And he is not dead, that’s what the doctor says, he is not dead”.
“No he is not. His heart is still beating slowly but steady, the drug is keeping the body alive in the throes of death”.

He looks around… the shoes on a puddle of blood, a table, two cups, the knife, the wooden rosary and the cassock, …

“John, come here! Look at this!” In one of the shoes he finds a syringe, on a written paper:
“Suffer the long dying, as you made me suffer last two years, father – Emma”


-Migue
(For Prompt 2).

The Incarnated Fear of Forgetting - Prompt #2

photography by Diane Powers

Victor was an ill mannered man of staggering genius. A lean shadowy giant with long wiry fingers dressed in elegant rags. He lived in a dark neglected manor, avoiding all. Shoes creaked the floor boards as he walked the halls. Remnants of a painful beautiful past. Doll creations from a conveyor belt that he fashion from the steel of an abandoned factory. No matter what her face forever appearing in the porcelain.

A Gift

Twenty years passed since she met a tall, shadowy man for the first time. His name was ancient almost like the Universe itself. Laura was playing with a ball in the courtyard when he appeared. The man approached to her:”Fasten the laces of your pretty shoes or you'll fall down, Laura”. Something shining appeared in his hand. “This is a gift for you. Take care of it”. That was the beginning.


--Rosa
(for the March 20/April 12 prompt.

ONE MORE THING

No more supernatural talk, Toots, you never knew what hit you.

More than the weight, it was its bottom edge that killed her.
More than the bucket, my anger. Yoho and a bucket of zen.

She, elegant yet limp in her robe, dragon flame from the mouth of death.

Confess, reader: you made me do it.

--by eric

Prompt: Deadline April 12

Given the character of a tall and shadowy man, write a story in the genre magical realism, using the subject shoes and the theme man versus the supernatural.
Word limit: 72
Time Limit: 13 days



*Don't forget about Madame Butterfly!

The Bucket

She passed by him in the hall. Her handbag flailing confidently at her side. What made him think of her as a little girl, arms flailing her bucket on the beach? "Unaware," he thinks to himself, like the innocent child in the sand. How can she possibly know her fate? That he would be her death.

Photography by, Diane Powers.

Detective Maddie

I was nervously running to the crime scene.
It was my first detective assignment.
She was passing by, serene,
carrying a bucket.

I thought:
"She is too pretty for a cleaning lady".
I feared:
"You are too stupid for a detective, Maddie".

My confidence won.
Elegantly dressed Dragon Butterfly
Will be in the jail for long.

The Last Case

Here is zoe's offering for the March 9th microfiction prompt:

The end was there in the beginning, in that accidental glimpse of a green shimmer peeking out from what she was calling a neckline. The green shimmer held me so I never saw what hit me. And then the old man with the gold-filled bucket was painting someone else’s name on my door.

--zoe



"The Last Stand"
by Patrick Richardson

The Mystery

Here is Rosa's hard-boiled story in response to the microfiction prompt....

She felt His presence before seeing Him. The red-bright eyes of the Evil were pointed on the black gowned young lady. The waiter poured some champagne from an iced bucket into two glasses. “I feel, he is here”. Firstly,the lights lowered, the detective shivered. In the darkness, a scream. ”This is the end”. Silence.

-Rosa

56 ladies boiling in a bucket

--Migue's 56-word noir tale, in response to March 9th's prompt:

“56 ladies boiling in a bucket”

The detective takes a glance to the bucket and back to him.
“ What do you mean?”
“Stupid”- he sniggers.
…
“Why 56 ladies… in a bucket?” - she notices the doctor’s looking at her legs.
“When he came here” – he looks up again - “he brought that bucket with 54 rings inside.”
“And?”
“A nurse was killed two days later.”

--Migue

Glowing Review, and a Prompt

I think that was the best sentence yet!

So, we have created the character of Madame Butterfly:

Madame Butterfly, a disturbingly womanly dragon, seemed mystified by sudden changes and fleeting ghosts from Nowhere. Her Nowhere was communicating telepathically with a primal Entity deep within metaphysical meaning, wordless. Then little distortions started interfering with the flow, and thus sad feelings overwhelmed Madame's soul. Bright orbs showed visions emerging from mirrors surrounding her ever more.

(PLEASE CONTINUE to explore the life of Madame Butterfly in the comments section!)

PART II:
I am curious, given the limit of 56 words, which is how many we used to create her character, if we could make an entire story, a microfiction piece. If you've read Migue's latest post, you can see where several writers created entire stories in 6 words, so it should be possible! This time, each person is responsible for his/her own entire 56 words. I am giving a prompt below. POST YOUR STORY wherever you like, but also post it here in Continuum! If you do not have access to create posts, hit the "contact me" button to the right, and we will fix the situation.
Have fun!

**Given the character of an elegantly-gowned young lady, write a story in the hard-boiled detective genre, using the subject a bucket and the theme man versus the supernatural.

Word limit: 56
Time limit: 2 weeks (deadline is March 23).**


I got this microfiction prompt template from:
http://www.wgz.org/chromatic/projects/microfiction/

Save Madame Butterfly!

photograph by, Sarah Moon

Madame Butterfly, a disturbingly womanly dragon, seemed mystified by sudden changes and fleeting ghosts from Nowhere. Her Nowhere was communicating telepathically with a primal Entity deep within metaphysical meaning, wordless. Then little distortions started interfering with the flow, and thus sad feelings overwhelmed Madame's soul.

Collaborators, Don't Give up Now!

All right, we're on our way to a paragraph, here...Let's give Madame Butterfly's telepathic communication a purpose, shall we?

Madame Butterfly, a disturbingly womanly dragon, seemed mystified by sudden changes and fleeting ghosts from Nowhere. Her Nowhere was communicating telepathically with a primal Entity deep within metaphysical meaning, wordless.

A first word....?


I thought I might add a bit of inspiration here, now that we have a character. I was thinking....
a disturbingly womanly dragon...


The above drawing is Milton Caniff's Dragon Lady, drawn for Terry and the Pirates, a comic strip from back in 1934. He based the drawing on Joan Crawford. The eponymous Terry was a kid who had inherited a treasure map, and the friends he took with him on his journey. Lai Choi San, the Dragon Lady, was one of the many dangerous pirates they came into conflict with along the way--but perhaps the most dangerous, as sometimes she appeared to be an ally, and other times, a villain.

Anyway, nothing wrong with pirates, and we needed some kind of visual stimulus, right?

Collaborators, Continue to Unite!!

Let's allow Madame Butterfly an entire paragraph of existence, at least, shall we? So here, we have the first sentence. I added an "ly" to woman, in order to pull disturbingly and dragon together, and dropped the "ly" from ghostly for the same sort of reason. Any other suggestions are always welcome.

Madame Butterfly, a disturbingly womanly dragon, seemed mystified by sudden changes and fleeting ghosts from Nowhere.

SECOND SENTENCE, FIRST WORD:

Her...


NOTE: a suggestion has been made which seems to me (zoe) very helpful:
"After reading the first sentence of "Madame Butterfly" (I contributed with a "woman"), I thought that, if you write "nowhere" as "Nowhere" it becomes an imaginary place. This way, the "womanly dragon" will interact with a defined imaginary place and not to nowhere, that is difficult to imagine for a person. In this sense, the second phrase "her nowhere was communicating telepathically with a ..." could be continued mare easily... maybe! :S This tale seems to belong to the fantastic literary tradition.. "
--Rosa

Collaborators, Unite!

A week ago, I discovered the blog of the author of one of my top, top favorite books. The book is The Manual of Detection; the writer is Jedediah Berry, the blog is The Third Archive. On the blog, I found this post:

"Some weeks ago, Wah-Ming Chang and I started writing a sentence together. We took turns writing it, one word at a time, in the comments section of this post, and completed it yesterday. Here it is:

Mr. Bluemoon, of that exceptional tribe named for its perpetually growing sense of devotion towards miniature galaxies, never once imagined he himself would stand, with thirteen engines sounding like thirteen ghoulish mourners, aboard the Flying Wastrel, hand flat against the lever that directed heaven’s temperament.

We’ve decided not to abandon Mr. Bluemoon quite yet, so the rest of his story will be written right here, using the same method. I for one am curious to find out what happens to him."

Ladies and gentlemen, this is, as I recall, a collaborative projects blog...and we have been lazy. I suggest that this is the perfect task for us. Each person contributes one word every day, and we will meet back here to pet and coo at our first sentence.

Just add a word in the comments section. Once there is a complete sentence (the person with the last word also adds the punctuation), we will start the next post, which will contain the first complete sentence, and so on until the end of time. Or something.


FIRST WORD:
Madame

Passing Through the Curtain

Entering the Magic Garden:
A new collaboration with the lovely Vesna:

A New Scent


At first, I saw only the bright light, I sensed something new. My mind couldn't immerse itself in the beautiful details until the heart sent its approval. Or, was it the other way around?
Is it all right to enjoy this? May I go on with this adventure now, here? How will this change me? Should I warn somebody that I may be gone forever? Will I be recognized when I come back?
"I can't come back", I said to myself. Time travels only forward, and life just goes on.
So, I relaxed, and let myself indulge.
It was a new scent.
The scent filled my nostrils and therefore forever changed my breath.
The scent covered my face and softened the way I look.
The scent gently landed on my eyelids and made me close my eyes and see more.
The scent flooded my mind, it sank old chains and balls and let new ideas be born.
I felt the scent as it traveled down my spine.
It was powerful like an ocean wave; it was unavoidable like an arrow arched from the birth of the Universe.
My body became the house to the fire, like a volcano. My hair turned red like lava.
My lips and my heart became One: Speaking of nothing but Love from that moment on.
--poetry by Vesna

The painting was also inspired by this piece by Vesna:

Inspiration
Her hair today again had a new shine. It was more red and made a different kind of frame around her face. “I’ll never finish this portrait”, he thought. He really needed the provision from this painting but he didn’t feel angry that the work was prolonging. Little Elizabeth, his daughter, brought light and warmth to the studio with her presence. One day her hair would have the color of gold, the other day the color of a young chestnut, or, like today, the shine of bronze. He looked through the window and saw his wife planting purple flowers. It seemed to him like the grass around her was all blue. His heart sent colorful fireworks through his eyes. “Maybe it is time to paint what I feel, not what I see,” he thought. Then the inspiration came by itself, he didn’t have to call it.

Notes from Zoe:
The plants that her image begins to appear through are all versions of the Hellebore. I had been thinking of the hellebore because of its legendary ability to cure insanity--thus, it formed a symbolic curtain between this world, filled with insanity, and the world of the magic garden, where one could suddenly and naturally be cured of it, and filled with magical abilities as a result...The idea was for there to be a certain location in a garden where, at a certain hour of the night, one could pass into an otherwise invisible garden, where certain plants grew that one had to have special knowledge to use. The hellebore is one of those plants.
In A Contemplation Upon Flower: Garden Plants in Myth and Literature, by Bobby J. Ward, it says:

“...the black hellebore, presumably Helleborus niger, was supposedly favored by witches who used it in their charms because they believed that one ‘finger’ of its lobed leaves was evil. According to legend, only a witch knows which one!....
Traditionally, even the collecting of black hellebores was considered dangerous because of their connection to witchcraft and sorcery. It had to be done in a specific, prescribed way; Pliny instructed drawing a circle around the plant with a sword and while lifting the root saying certain spells or prayers, entreating permission from the gods. The mystic rites for collecting, according to some versions, suggest looking to the east to be sure that no eagle witnesses the process; if it does, the gatherer will waste away and die within a year.”

Legend has it that the Black Hellebore (so named for the color of its root) successfully cured many famous cases of insanity, including that of Heracles, and that of the daughters of Argos, who had been driven completely wild by Dionysus.

Its use throughout history went in and out of fashion, because of the dangers caused by using it carelessly--whereby it became a poison (Hellebore is the ancient Greek word for food that kills).
In The Anatomy of Melancholy, it says “They that were sound commonly took it to quicken their wits, (as Ennius of old, Qui non nisi potus ad arma--prosiluit dicenda, and as our poets drink sack to improve their inventions)...” but later it began to be rejected as a poison; for example “Constantine the emperour in his Geoponicks, attributes no other virtue to it, than to kill mice and rats, flies and mouldwarps...” Later, it was picked up again as a medicine, and those that use it say it only has to be prepared correctly to work as a medicine: Brassivola “brags that he was the first that restored it again to its use, and tells a story how he cured one Melatasta, a madman, that was thought to be possessed, in the Duke of Ferrara’s court, with one purge of black hellebore in substance: the receipt is there to be seen; his excrements were like ink, he perfectly healed at once...” Some used a linen dipped in a warm concoction of hellebore and placed on the forehead to cure melancholy, some put it in an inhalant or a perfume.
And Paracelsus told us, “It is most certain...that the virtue of this herb is great, and admirable in effect, and little differing from balm itself; and he that knows well how to make use of it, hath more art than all their books contain, or all the doctors in Germany can show.”

The large bloom at the bottom left is from the type of Hellebore called the Christmas Rose, because it blooms as early as December. Its delicate scent and large, lovely petals bloom heartily even in the snow. We were imagining these winter blooms appearing in a corner of a larger garden at a secret hour of the night, their dew-strengthened scent opening the curtain between worlds, and the girl shimmering out of one and into the other.

Question

Photo by Diane Powers

Question

I have clouds in my pocket,

I have Sun in my hair,

many rivers in my body

and a blue star in my head.

I have forest in my heart,

I have a tiger in my foot,

I have a white rabbit in my left hand

and coloured lakes in my veins.

I have a China Wall on my skin,

I have a handkerchief at my eye,

I have a train on my lips,

I have oceans in my ears.

I have a silver dolphin on my shoulder,

every finger is a different wind,

I have sand on my face

and a one-way ticket.

Will you come along with me?

by Vesna