How do I prepare for a metaphorical storm?

.Wet Leaf.

"Well! What extraordinary circumstances are these!' yelled Petra as she climbed rather ungracefully out of a lavender bush.

"Very! Indeed!" cried Alfred, who just happened to be the perfect height (although for what purpose, no one really knew) and wearing an acorn on top of his head. 

"Alfred! do come and let me examine you, at close range."

Alfred was afraid of trees, and as they hadn't planned to meet specifically in a forest, they were, actually, in the middle of a forest, surrounded by trees and flowers and other positively frightening foliage, it was certainly understandable that he felt a little on edge.

"Oh! Not still peering into every bark curl and chrysanthemum bush, are you?" Petra remarked in disdain as she brushed the front of her petticoat. 

"No! Certainly not!" but he stared around and gave a nervous twitch when a bird descended violently upon a nearby branch.

Petra sighed loudly. Alfred trembled. Petra looked over at the bird, coughed, then marched up to Alfred and smiled. "My, how tall you are now."

Alfred nodded, "Yes, well, height. Who can say how tall I am?"

"You're tall!" Petra commanded unnecessarily, for he was not. "And how very wet everything is." She looked around at the leaves and twigs, flower petals and fading crisp packets, all glistening in the weak sunshine as if covered by little diamonds. 

"The rain..." Alfred started to say in a very unenthusiastic voice, and then stopped because Petra wasn't listening. She was bending over a fat log and muttering a string of 'yes's' and 'I see's' and 'most interesting if I were the interested sort, which I'm not's'.

"Appealing, as it were, to have a dandy chat out here but I must take leave-"

"Alfie! Love, come here."

Petra also wore a hat. Her hat was purple and tall, with a wrap-around black ribbon and looked like it could withstand an armed attack. Alfred sighed and trudged over, watching as she bent with surprising flexibility. 

"Are you into Yoga?" Alfred enquired without care to her answer. He felt his legs start to tremble and wondered if he had chosen appropriate socks that morning to allow for leg-trembling. Ever so discretely, he pulled up his left trouser and glanced down. Orange.

"What are you doing?"

Alfred jumped. "Doing?"

"Stop playing with your pants and look at this," Petra held up a gigantic red leaf, about the size of her face, and twirled it around in her fingers. "What do you suppose this is?"

Alfred grimaced. If there was anything he hated more than trees, it was trick questions. Or questions that seemed like trick questions but turned out to be simple ones, leaving him with a red face that clashed terribly with his orange beard. "Uh, it's- it's a leaf?"

Petra rolled her eyes, "Of course it is! Does it not look like a leaf? Is it not red with soft edges and a thin stem that breaks when you twirl it too fast?" 

"Perhaps."

Alfred stared at a pink chip packet lying near Petra's heeled shoe and thought of his home. He lived in a large wooden house two streets out from the city. He had small apricot trees planted in pots and various-sized birdhouses hanging around the veranda. It was all very calm and serene, unlike his current predicament where the two trees nearest him were having a rude, whispered conversation with loud sniggering and overly passionate branch-pointing. 

"I protest!" Petra exclaimed suddenly. 

"Protest!" Alfred screamed, jolting out of his pleasant yet unsettling yen experience. "What ever about?"

"This!" she waved her hands around at the general area. "I would prefer tea, wouldn't you? We have so much to catch up on, what with having eight years between now and our last visit." She looked him up and down fondly. He felt like a piece of rare candy on display. Cinnamon, he thought with affection, I would like to be something involving cinnamon, and not butterscotch in the slightest.

"Do you do cinnamon, at all?" he asked and flinched as a branch came swooping dangerously close to his head in the breeze. "Oh! It's just all horrible!"

Petra's gaze hardened and she seemed to gather herself up, "You do bring out their violent urges, don't you?"

"I what?" 

"The trees. They seem to have unresolved anger issues whenever you're around. But, forget that!" she gathered up her skirts as if preparing to march onto a battleground, "Shall we have butterscotch fingers and reminisce?"

"Oh," Alfred drooped, as if she had sucked out all his air, and said: "Certainly. What happened to that leaf?" in an interested but obviously fake tone of voice. 

"Leaves, really! How on earth do you plan on achieving anything on a daily basis if you keep stopping to smell the roses?"

Alfred frowned at nothing in particular because he had started walking. 

"I daresay, Alfie, you have so much to learn on how to get on. I fear we shall need more time."

Her tone was absolute. They would, indeed, be spending enormous amounts of time on trifle matters, probably while eating an array of butterscotch-flavoured food around demanding, enraged foliage. 

~

Where do thoughts go?

The mouse and the model are laughing at us,

We'll risk it, we're desperate, for someone to trust.

~

'It most certainly is!'

And it was.

Of course, just because it was, didn't necessarily mean it was is.

I put the pen down, rub my head and turn to the boy next to me. "Does that make sense?"

He looks over at the paper. "Not in the slightest."

"Oh-"
"But! Actually, you've got is and was next to each other."

I frown. "Is that wrong?"

Before I can stop him, the boy with straight, straw-coloured hair has snatched up the sheet of paper and scrunched it into a  ball. "Haven't you ever noticed how much better you feel after chucking out the stuff that weighs you down?" he leans back on the chair legs, looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

I honestly cannot say that I have ever felt that way Or that I have ever chucked anything out. "Hang on-"

"And!" he lets his chair fall forwards, "that sometimes, it's not what is getting you down, it's the other way round. It's what you're getting down about. See?"

His brown eyes sparkle as he smiles.

I ponder this. Can it be true? Maybe we have a choice?

"The opposite of 'you're' is not 'is'," I reply because the prospect of choice is too much at the moment. My head throbs harder at the endlessness created from such mass variety, and the continuous effort required to keep it up.

"Ha! What would you know?' he exclaims in a gleeful gesture of friendship, "You've got ink all over your fingers and no paper."

"You took  my paper!"

He leans closer, suddenly- so suddenly that he topples slightly but seems not to notice- with a cheeky grin, "Heard about Mara?"

I glance over at the new girl. Every day this week she had come with a red headband, a different pattern each day but always red. It went beautifully with her shiny brown hair.

"Yeah?" I said, eager to hear some headband-colour-type scandal, maybe involving a boy or a stint in prison.

"Yeah," he said, leaning closer, "she ate those mushrooms out in the garden, those red ones?"

I turn, sagging slightly like a deflated balloon at the mundane direction this conversation had taken, "oh..."

"Yeah? So when she ate them, you know when that was?"

"Yesterday?"

"Last year. And she was a thirty year old man called Gurtred."

Did you think this plan would work?

Meet me in the shadows...

Won't you come out
We could paint the town red
Kill a little time
You can sleep when you're dead

It isn't over yet...
      (Remember what I said)

Won't you come out
I've been waiting for you
Holding my breath
Til my body turned blue

       You've got everything to lose

How many nights do you stare at the moon?

.Eight Light-bulbs.

He sat in his rickety two-story house and he was happy. Planks of wood were nailed over the windows; the chimney bricks fell every few days, either through the roof or down into a pile near the front door, and everything smelled of age. The house was very old but he was very young.

I’m not that young, he scowls over my shoulder, and I tell him to quieten because this is my story.

So he was young. He sat in a room upstairs that was absolutely empty apart from eight light-bulbs attached to string and tied to the ceiling.

He was young, alone, sitting in an empty room and he was squinting. He’s the forgetful type (you are); he’d rather play with paper dolls than turn up at an eye appointment.

But he was not alone. No, someone found his weary house that smelled old and decided to let herself in. She was brave, or foolish. Sometimes bravery can seem like foolishness until victory, but whether she was brave and foolish or one or the other is beside the point. She opened that squeaky door and walked through the narrow, dark, eerie hallway, and she was quite ignorant of the faceless portraits hanging on the walls and the broken lamps scattered about.

She was brave but she was also impatient.

She was not impatient, he scowls again. I remind him what I once said about scowling and I tell him that he is quite right, of course. One cannot assume impatience isn’t fear. And fear can make you fast.

I watch as he reads and assesses, and then I ask him if I can continue. He nods noncommittally.

So she was fearfully impatient, glancing around and not seeing, wondering who could live in a place that echoes loudly and sighs despondently. She took the stairs quietly and crept past locked doors until she came to the room with the light. The room she had seen from outside in the darkness. She had counted the windows and now she was here, she was standing at the closed door but was not ready to open it.

He didn’t see the way her hands shook or hear her breath hitch in her throat. He was too busy sitting in his empty room staring at the light in his hands.

Light is power, he says from behind me. I smile because I know he wants my opinion so he can argue his point, and I continue.

So. She stood in the faded hallway with peeling flowered wallpaper and she took a deep breath to calm herself. Then she opened the door.

He turned around slowly, surprised at the spontaneous intrusion and stared at the girl who had just walked into the room with eight light bulbs.

“Oh,” she said when her eyes fell upon the lights hanging from the ceiling.

“Who are you?” he asked.

She looked down at him, crunched up on the floor in summer clothes while the snow fell outside. “You’re the boy with too many light bulbs.”

He watched her as she stood silent and still. He liked her sandals but couldn’t imagine her wearing anything else. “You’re the girl who lost her way.”

I could, he says, I imagined her wearing those lace-up shoes with flowers on the toes.

“You’ve got so many,” she remarked. Now that she had entered the room and found the light, she wasn’t afraid. She walked over to the nearest one and reached up, as high as she could, and because the ceiling was low she was able to touch it with her fingertips.

It went out.

“Oh!” she cried and jerked her hand away.

He leapt up, “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to touch things that aren’t yours?!”

“I’m sorry!”

He stared at the dark globe and the shadows it cast and he felt something go out inside himself. He felt empty and he had never felt empty before.

“Get out! Go on! Who told you to come in anyway?”

She looked down at the worn floorboards and said, “It’s cold out there.”

“Yeah? Well you’re not welcome in here!”

She felt a sudden rise of anger at this stranger for telling her where could find welcome. Certainly, if the boy didn’t want her company then the walls and doorknobs would?

“Why shouldn’t I be allowed in here?” she retorted angrily and waved her hands about.

I found her hand gestures tiresome, he says and I tell him that the small, irksome habits of others are the things we miss the most.

Her hand grazed another light-bulb, as she had moved a few paces while talking, and it, too, went out.

“Stop!” he called, his eyes wide and frantic. “Don’t move!”

She stopped moving and caught sight of his left hand clutching something so hard that his knuckles were turning white. “You have a light yourself. Why are you so worried about these ones?”

He glared at the clumsy, impulsive girl who took up too much space. “There’s no room for you in here. Go!”

She laughed at his words, a giddy feeling bubbling up inside her as if she were a can of freshly opened soda, and she said, “There’s nothing but room in here.”

“It’s full!” he yelled. The emptiness he had felt before seemed to double as another set of shadows settled into the room. “Go away!”

“Stop telling me what to do! Didn’t your mother ever teach you to share?”

And this foolishly brave girl reached up to the third light, she pushed up on her toes as far as she could and stretched her arm as high as it would go, and she snatched it free from the string.

“STOP IT!”

Nearly half of the room was now bathed in blankets of black and he felt as though he had suddenly started falling.

I thought I would never breathe again, he says quietly. I tell him I remember and continue.

She looked down at her own dark light bulb, shook it carefully at first, glancing up at his as she did so, and when that didn’t bring it to life she brandished it so hard he thought it would break.

“Why did mine go out when yours is still alight?” she demanded.

He took a deep, trembling breath and said, “Leave n-” but he didn’t finish.

She had reached up once more while he had been steading his nerves and thinking up reasonable requests. This impatient yet courageous girl had reached up, as high as she could just like the last time, and yanked down the fourth light.

“NO!”

He lunged at her as the fourth bulb went out in her hands.

“Why does it keep doing that?!” she cried in frustration, oblivious, yet again, to her surroundings.

It is hard to see in a room that is only half lit up and even harder for someone who spends all of his time never seeing anything for how it really is. But fear made him strong.

She looked up to see his furious, blurry figure and she, too, felt fear. Fear pushed all the sensible thoughts out of her head like a dripping tap until the only thing that made sense for her to do was the one thing she shouldn’t.

She threw the two broken light-bulbs up into the air.

I pause and wait for him to comment. Surely there is something important to add at this crucial part of the story?

There is nothing, he says. I recognise the undertone in his voice and continue without a word.

So she had flung the two bulbs away in regrettable haste and they had sailed up into the light. He crashed into her as the two dark bulbs hit two light bulbs and there was a monstrous smashing noise that had never been heard before in such a dispirited and sensitive house.

They fell and glass rained down around them like the falling snow.

“WHY ARE YOU TOUCHING EVERYTHING!?” he shouted.

“Get off!” she screamed.

His free hand grabbed at her cardigan in rage and she, in turn, tried desperately to push him off with both of hers. Anger, like fear, enhances strength and he was overflowing. His lonely, sad, bright world had been safe without rash irresponsibility, her rash irresponsibility.

“WHY?!” he yelled with so much force that his throat ached, “WHY?!”

He glared, wide-eyed, down at her scrunched-up face streaming with tears, and he quite forgot himself. She stared transfixed up at all his fury and she watched as his left hand suddenly moved. His arm rose up, seemingly without instruction, while his right clenched and clawed, and the brightest light she had ever seen flew out of his grasp.

Shadows descended around them. She felt his other hand join its brother around her neck but she was waiting. Her eyes followed the glowing trail as it flew up to meet the others.

I would have killed her, he tells me.

And so he would have, had the last two light-bulbs not shattered upon impact and plunged them into darkness. 

Where will I stand tomorrow?

"Gnome! What on earth are you doing?"
The Height of Trolls- or the One Troll from the Seventh Troll League- paused whilst fiddling with his jacket button and looked at the scene before him in puzzlement.
"It's nothing! Not a thing !" cried the Gnome as he flurried about the dozen or so thick stumps in the forest clearing. He appeared to have fashioned one of the smaller stumps into a hat.
"Are you wearing a stump hat?" asked the Height of Trolls, forgetting his buttons altogether so his jacket flapped open in the breeze, displaying numerous unsightly stomach hairs. This was not a pleasant vision.
"Of course not!" the Gnome stopped at the largest stump in the clearing and took a few deep breaths.
"You know," said the Height of Trolls, "You shouldn't be worrying about these mere tree spirits when th-"
"Tree spirits!" spluttered the Gnome. His reddish-orange hair stuck out at weird angles and even though his eyes looked extremely bloodshot, his insulted glare was sturdy and almost painful to witness. The Height of Trolls certainly turned his privates discreetly out of view.
"These are homes! Sacred sites and memories! These are lives."
The Height of Trolls nodded, growing weary of such a topic, "Of course, of course, it's quite alright. Now, do tell me how you made that hat."
"Hat?" the Gnome shook himself, "This isn't a hat-"
"Beg your pardon, do," the Height of Trolls inclined his head a little, "I can s-"
"I've forgotten your name," interrupted the Gnome tersely. "What is it?"
The Height of Trolls blinked, "Barry."
"Oh I see."
And there was a long pause, probably to ponder about such a name for the highest of Trolls in the Seventh Troll League and consider alternatives, such as Club or Stonehenge or even Herds the Horrible. Barry flexed his thick, hairy, greenish arms and the Gnome stared at the ground frowning.
"Barry the Height of Trolls..." the Gnome said vaguely, glancing up only to catch sight of the chest hairs blowing in the breeze. He turned hastily and hit a stump.
"And why is it 'height of trolls'?" he exclaimed, rubbing his knee, "Just answer me that!"
"Dear Gnome, brash and fearless Gnome, am I not the tallest troll in the land?"
The Gnome let out a grumble, "How would I know?"
Barry stopped expanding his chest and the dazzling grin fell from his face. "How would you know?"  he repeated, almost in a rasping, horrified tone, rather like one would use on finding out their Beef and Kidney pie had only cooked around the edges leaving the middle frozen and gloopy.
"Yes, exactly!" the Gnome started limping to the stump at the very back, "How would I ever know? You are the only Troll I ever see, and good riddance for that!"
"How would you know?" Barry stared unseeing into the forest. He felt something fall out of place. He wondered how he had suddenly become unsure of how brilliant he was and why his height had become a question.
"Yes! Am I to repeat myself until morning light?" the Gnome turned to retort with passion but found Barry the Height of Trolls frozen to the spot, one arm in mid-flex and a droopy smile akin to how most of the forest flowers looked these days. The Gnome yanked up his boxers in a huff. "Come on then!"
Barry glanced at the Gnome with wide, yellow eyes. "To where?"
The Gnome grunted again and picked up his finest walking stick, which was alarmingly leafy and much too tall for walking long distances, "To measure!"
Barry's arm fell. "Grand!"
"Mmm."
And the pair set off on their adventure to lands unknown. Barry looked down at the Gnome stumping along beside him, "Tell me, rather, what is your name?"
The Gnome cleared his throat in an offhand gesture. "Barry."
.:+:.

Who would you invite to a magical tea party?

"Look at you," said the fairy in a gushing and admiring tone, "All grown up."
"I am," the girl said confidently.
"Oh, dear," the fairy smiled sadly, and the girl felt as if she were being mocked somehow, but it didn't fit in with the situation. "You're not grown up at all."
"But you just sai-"
The fairy gestured in fake surprise, "Yes, and look at how easily you believed what someone else had to say. You're tripping over yourself every day."
The girl put her hands on her hips and pouted, "I am not."
"Ah," there was that mocking tone again. "Just like a child."
She shook herself out of the pose quickly, took a step forward and said, "Who are you to be telling me what I am? I can be anything I choose, anything at all!"
The fairy watched the girl for a moment as she floated serenely above, like a Guardian Angel or a women who had been taken over by a condescending spirit.
"I believed what you told me, not because I thought I was wrong, but because I knew you were right!"
Again, the fairy smiled sadly, "Life is like a rubber band, little child, always stretching and shrinking and slowly wearing away..."
But the the girl stopped listening and glared around for something sharp to knock this bitch out. She found only bits of twig and drooping flowers. "Does no one paint the flowers anymore?" she asked incredulously.
"... and if you stop paying attention it will snap."
The girl looked up and saw the fairy fading. "Hey!" She yelled, "Where are you going?!"
And just like a happy memory, the fairy disappeared into the wind and left the girl clenching her hands in frustration with something rather like emptiness in her heart.


There's a blue light in his eyes, so that tonight I might see.

Are we waiting for this hurricane?

In Life:

ART

MOVIE

That is all.


#I found a silver coin, and made my bed,
believed in all the signs.
There's nothing here that wasn't there,
I've never looked it in the eye.