Category: vignette

The Teahouse Dance

Posted on by RDP

The rain drives down straight in a torrent, and there is no movement in the air. The humidity of the day threatens to devour a person whole. Everything swells and drips and sweats. The wet wood of the teahouse floor catches and shrieks under the soles of his feet despite his best efforts to honor the serenity of the space, but he is anomalous in this place — clumsy and fraught in his distraction and discord.

Alone, he settles onto a cushion at a low table next to a sliding shoji opened halfway to the falling rivers outside. In the distance, fog rises ethereally from the tall forest; everything is vibrant and verdant for miles. His eyes slip against the vast lushness, struggling to reflex and allow the wholeness of the environment to reach his mind to become experience.

He draws a deep breath, consuming what the environment offers — ions and lumber, damp earth, steam, and brewing leaves and spice. Slowly, the life in his chest steadies, and he allows himself to take in the distant roll of thunder and gentle beat of the rain; such balms for the crashing ocean of his thoughts, one stacked against the next like waves climbing atop waves, colossal and imminent.

Tea is poured; he cradles the petite porcelain cup in his hand and watches the heat drift and swirl into nothingness. The room is filled with similar ghosts, and ones less apparent, shrouded behind his eyes in the root of his memory. Discomfort descends as he tips the liquid against his lips. His body burns, not from the tea’s heat, but the flavor it deploys, crashing into his cheeks and down, coursing through channels to his very core, awakening in him vivid ruminations of their last time together and all the things that had gone so devastatingly wrong.

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We are Like Stags

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As she approaches the longhouse, she can feel his call pulsating in the earth — the vibrations of his musing push deeply under the frozen soil. His song and sound force roots beneath her feet, extending with such intent to reach and coil about the soul of their space and beat with relentless stomping — hooves hammering against the winter’s thickest ice.

Incantations and invocations. Music suspends in every corner; dripping from leaves and stems and breathing flurry and wonder into the settlement with its huts and straw roofs cast in sparkling snow, flashing light back to the sun in its celestial heaven.

Drawing nearer, she can feel his call shaking in the air — the exhalation of life in his lungs, pressed by his throat and fluttering on the inside of his cheeks; his tongue crafts words that deepen the colors of the season. Frost is indigo blue; evergreen needles sway on branches black as midnight — even the wind itself glows in shades of pink and yellow as blinding snow throws crystals down dirt paths and through cracks and dark doorways. Continue reading “We are Like Stags” →

Only Love Can Bind

Posted on by RDP

For Yara & The Elf

The world has fallen quiet; there’s a softness about its edges that brings a somber peace I am not yet ready to accept, and so I bury myself here in the reminiscence of you — in all that you made us — the delicate threads of our connection, woven densely and tightly over so much time, but severed in an instant; petals on the wind.

As always, the river runs faithfully — cool waters cascading over rocks and green life, reflecting the pink and blue-gray of the clouds. Sun washes its banks, and I lie back in tall grasses, fading flowers, and wild herbs. They frame my view and sway on dry, fragrant breezes that hint at the changing season, the turning tide. Lost in the warm touch of summer’s final moments, autumn will leave you behind, forever embraced in the lush gravity of this space. So much life and care in those years that brought us here. Toward the story’s end, I imagine they had become lost to the shadow behind your eyes, but I remember and remain fixed in the moments of tenderness that fastened the togetherness of our hearts; beating as one even longer than memory allows.

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Thrones & ghosts

Posted on by RDP

It is a late afternoon sleep that brings her to the cathedral once again, and he’s there, she knows. The winter wind blows relentlessly, touching the most hidden spaces. Frosty fingers like those of a thousand phantoms follow her through the structure’s heavy wooden doors; she shakes on the inside from a chill that originates in her heart and dances with the music of nature’s unkind bellowing.

The church is abandoned, but consistent; she knows every stone and unearthly whisper — every blasphemous thought that brought it into being. The cavernous interior is perfumed with the reminiscence of holy incense that still clings to the rafters. There are recessed niches on two sides of the space, inset with gothic-style glass panes, and at the far back of the structure, an altar is carved into the very rock of the foundation, framed in the chancel area by three slender oblong windows, and crowned with a simplistic rose window of clear flower petals that filter the sun’s rays with muted textures to give the sensation of a slowing of time that one could feel deep within the core of the chest. Misplaced in its perfection, the altar’s sentinel takes the shape of a bright white throne upholstered in black velvet. Its high back is flanked by two matching points topped by shimmering golden orbs that seem to sparkle from within as though stars are suspended there waiting on celestial cues from their creator.

She pulls her coat around herself more tightly and paces cautiously into the nave — the soles of her boots connecting with the granite floor, each step like a slow heartbeat reverberating into the bones of the old structure, threatening to waken it from sleep. There is no warmth in the space, but her palms sweat, and her face feels hot. She is anxious and a bit afraid. Consuming the air here feels like sinning; the scene represents legions of noisemakers in her mind, only some of which are rooted in the real world.

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From Red to Black

Posted on by RDP

In the camp of the undead soldier, torches blaze with great fury as though an anger hides on the wind, whipping embers and dragging flames into the air with great points that swirl in funnels toward the blackness of night.

The air is dense with the fire’s heat, but the ground grows cold and there is a damp chill in the air that makes mortal flesh yearn for shelter and comforts. There is nothing like that in this camp, however — no relief or fellowship, at least not for her. She pauses in the distance and takes a last look at the velvet blanket of sky above and beyond, speckled with celestial diamonds. She must force her heart to stone. As much as she wishes to recall their time in the pale caress of the star-cast glow, she leeches the feelings from her very bones. The sun and moon have danced across the sky many times since that time, and he has changed from light to dark; from red to black.

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We are Like Ravens

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The raindrops are gray ravens, their call resounding in his ears and brushing at his full cheeks with a feathery and woeful constant. He exhales spirit mists into the blue dawn and rests his tired spine against the slippery wooden bones of the hut’s exterior. There has been a sound in his mind since she left, something like a sigh, a whisper, or a wanting suggestion of desire on the wind, the kind that whistles through the trees and around mountain passes during the winter’s coldest chill.

He pushes his bare toes into the black earth and reaches, eyes closed, for the worn wooden lyre at his side. The sky’s weeping moistens and swells the soundbox and bridge, and like tears on lashes, it slips off the horsehair strings. He is a dark echo of Freyr, conjuring the day’s weeping with his existence, but revolving and drowning in this boggy domain so far in his mind from anything that resembles a shining sun.

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We are Like Wolves

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There’s a feeling in the air. Something dense, full, and saturated with memory, sadness, and desire. A cutting wind whips around the wooden threshold and the cold assaults the flesh like thousands of pricking daggers. It’s tireless, unrelenting, and impossible to escape or ignore.

              Cast the runes on the white furs. Cast the runes till the spirit stirs.

Orange shimmering flames spark and pop in the middle of the small room — their heat colliding with the damp freeze that pours into the hut through aged cracks and carefully aligned seams and beams. The sensation of snow is all around, despite the fire, fresh straw, and pelts that pack the space.

His deep exhale emits feathery apparitions, and with each breath, it’s as though the pieces of time that comprise him are wrestling to break free and realize a place somewhere in the immortal plane.

              Cast the runes for the fighter lost. Cast the runes for the heart betossed.

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The Dark

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Stranger, bring me to the dark. There are salty swells that lull the hull, and I am swirling, hurtling toward the abyss.

A cold ache spreads throughout — a voracious desire beyond the quell.

Those books bang, such a ponderous sound, the vibrations and expectations.

Bring me to the dark. The candlelight and the anxious warming breath, unrelenting, fast and impure.

Lieutenant, we feel the difference in the darkness, and honesty uncaged and wild. Leadership surrendered and our minds bear, forcing toward the blue-black of spattered stars.

Secretive voices are wispy rasps, and I lament my life’s beat; how far I’ve allowed his hands.

Pirate, please.

Golden knuckles and calloused touch — the skeptical brow and petrified gaze. That pounding, desirous pulse. Bring me to the dark again.

The Thieves Spell

Posted on by RDP

He is heavy in the chest — his limbs like petrified bark. Sweat dapples his brow, and there is a cloudiness in his sight – a type that even enchantments cannot correct – a poison that courses through the tiny tubes of his existence, striking and thwarting all that makes his matter.

She is a summer storm as she works, her hands muddling and concocting. He eases as he hears her careful worrying, ad he minds the beating of his heart: fast, then slow, then fast again, and then slow. Sun behind clouds, then moon, then sun again, and then dark.

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