The trees that took in the summer light, give it back in winter’s hearth. On those coldest of days how the sunny flames leap. To the whoosh of a sledding wind, her crackles are as a sparkly giggle, merry and bright. Sitting at the hearth from daylight into the star speckled hours, is perhaps my favourite thing to do. Add a good chat, a book and a hot chocolate or two and it’s the rest I need once the day’s work is done.
‘Twas the sallow orange of rotting jack o’lanterns, that flame-scarred kettle. In the hut, long devoid of either gasoline or electricity, it was a cold and dead thing. Splatters of long digested meals were burnt-on moles, not pretty as freckles are, yet a blight on its enamel. Its handle bore grease. The spout cover hung loose. Capless, the open top gap-tooth, under shadow’s breath, was a gleeful monster gape. Leah backed away, taking in a sharp juddering breath.
Beneath a blushing sky, threading cherry blossom puddles, Anna’s bicycle surrendered to gravity in the advancing dusk. Feet free of the pedals, giggling with childish mirth, homeward she rode. She negotiated turns with balletic poise, her gravitational centre just right. Soon a new night would usher in the stars, the constellation choir of her eclectic dreams. With a lungful of eventide air, cool and fresh, she sang a new song into the breeze and whooped for giddy joy.
The blue light fell at the end of the day, washing greens to their softest hue and raising purple’s to their most vivid. Even the clouds that had been white an hour before were an enchanting steel blue. With the golds of the dawn and midday banished, all that was left was for the sky to wash black and herald the return of the moon. So we sat there, Earnest and me, feeling the cooling air that ran the valley floor, resting our limbs and feeling our heads prepare for a dream-filled slumber.
All twelve points of the clock were demarcated with alligator teeth. Even the trite ticks, the trite tocks, arrived as clouds of muffled edge, soon to dissipate into a formless fog of deep-set cold. Alba stared, her loathing escalating to a feverish peak. She traced its scaly-skin rim, its scaly skin face, its femur and tibia hands - if that’s what they were. It was a gruesome thing built to measure the era of monsters. Flammable, she thought, and her mind sought the location of a match, a lighter, and perchance an accelerator.
River nibbled the frost bitten field as the last mean straws did rot. Footfalls found no cushioning, yet a jolt of ice-baked land. No tear could fall into winter’s hand, so cold embattled was that site. The sun could rise to full power, ignite every hue to full-bright, and still it would go on in subzero grumble, still it would shun spring’s extended hand. Bitter, so bitter, was the field, and ne’er once did I figure out its sullen rationale.