Practiced and Without Fail

The unifying theme for the week will be “The Bringer of Mist”. Check out the ‘bringer‘ tag for more. I’ll step off from a post from day 51: “Grandma has a Wolf’s Heart“.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37451064@N00/1480066693

The newly fallen leaves stacked poorly in her hand. These red and yellow and gold leaves retained their suppleness. This natural, nearly flesh-like offering, contrasted her brittle metalic fingers. The leaves’ tones wavered through the various shades of autumn. Their organic patterns occasionally punctuated with a spot of green or a tear or an insect-made hole. Haphazard symmetry drew my eyes to the web of veins branching from larger to smaller paths and out to the rim. The brown wind-worn edges showed the future for each.

Her knuckles were stamped and folded tin. I hadn’t seen a tinker of this generation outside of picture books. I would have expected a rime of [chemical name here] darkening the simplistic joints, but she seemed greased and newly made. I knew she wasn’t. Her arthritic posture and shuddering movements betrayed her age. The gleam of her naive but precise frame was the result of care not recent making.

When I did not immediately take the leaves, she spoke.

“Take them or I will unmake you.”

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I felt my seals dry and crack in that instant. I imagined the golden fresh lubricants from my recent tuning bleeding out and staining my distal framework. I would overheat next and lock-up. Grandma would move on with her elegant hunched gait, but I would be here, under this tree, till the mist came.

Then the world came back to the present.

I wiped my greasy hands on the canvas flap of my bag and dropped it to the ground. I rolled my hands from anterior to posterior looking for any grime or foreign material that might taint the leaves. Finding none, I took the leaves singly with my left hand and stacked them in the opposite order of Grandma’s in my right.

As I reached for the last leaf her tin hand grasped my brass one like a bird lighting on a branch in a storm: practiced and without fail.

Word count: 150
Day 243

Day 122: Is Waiting Doing or Not Doing?

Mr. Johnathan Goffe waits to make his picture. He sits cross-legged in the sandy front range soil high on a hill overlooking a greener valley. Above and to his left the ragged mountains enjoy the rain. Johnathan’s brass finger tips tek-tek-tek the counting spell he’s enamored the camera with. He bought the spell from a local shopkeeper. Normally he’d have brought plenty of his own along, but they’d gone stale from the dry weather during his journey. One of his spells would have already made the picture. This one would be a surprise.

Tek-tek-tek-tek. The shutter would snap any moment, but it didn’t and hadn’t, not yet. The picture he’d expected drifted away an hour ago and the rain was getting heavier. Johnathan struggled to imagine how it might become better. That’s how waiting always feels, he thought. Like you’ve over stayed your welcome at a friend’s cottage and now they just wish you’d pack up your gears and leave.

Word count: 172

Day 62: Today I Invent the Word Xenolithically

…and then use it in a non-metamorphic rock sort of way.

Tomorrow we are prepping the garage for the ninth annual pumpkin carving party. If I can eek out the time, I am going to get the tablet hooked up to the computer and start learning to draw.

But that’s tomorrow.

Regarding Bringer, the societal thing eludes me. Birth doesn’t seem doable for a tinker. Neither does physical growth and maturity. There won’t be any restaurants or bars since there won’t be anyone drinking or eating. I’ve flat out decided that fabricating the desire for food is a cop out. But tinkers need to have society. They need a drive to be with each other together and each other apart. That line doesn’t have to make sense to you.

However, I do want them to have familiar activities. Not that I worry about my ability to write tinkers so xenolithically that I need to artificially make the more familiar–I’ll be fine on that score I am sure. What I want to do is find several familiar things that are not dietary that can mimic the non-nutritional values of gathering to eat. Then tweak or taint them just a bit.

jerry chart 62