Superman, Jr.

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, Sunday Photo Fiction10 Comments41 views

“Your coffee is getting cold.”

“Thanks.” He picked it up,  sipped it. “I had the strangest dream. I was Superman’s son. They named me Superman, Jr. and made me dress in the red and blue suit. I had to wear it to school. The cape was always in the way.”

She started laughing. “That is pretty weird. Could you fly?”

“That was the thing. I didn’t have any of the powers. I was just a regular human. But I still had to wear the suit. My mother was the same mom I have now, only she was a real jerk. Your father works very hard. The least you can do is honor him by wearing the suit. It was awful. I wasn’t super at all.”

She leaned to kiss him, smiling. “Well, I think you’re super.”

That evening they grilled out in the apartment’s rooftop garden, the lights of the Chicago skyscrapers gradually coming on as the sky darkened into sunset. It was getting colder, so for once they had the place to themselves.

Again and again, he found himself irresistibly drawn to the ledge. He looked down on the cars and taxis rolling down Michigan Avenue, so near and yet so far.

 

Sunday Photo Fiction

It Was Never Glorious

Fiction Prompts, Historical Fiction, What Pegman Saw14 Comments42 views

Some say it was glorious, that the Goryani were heroes welcome everywhere. This is nonsense. We were hunted like rats.

You do not remember, but Bulgaria after the war was full of informers. This was not done out of love of the communists, nor even out of fear, but to settle old scores. The greatest crime the communists committed was to take the land from the peasants and force them to work in the cities. It was brother killing brother over the ownership of a potato field.

And so we fought. The Goryani arose out of desperation. We knew we could never win against State Security, but we had to do something. We were organized into Chetas for secrecy. You knew only those in your own cell. There was much violence. Guns, bombs. Eventually they arrested or killed us all. In the end, we were forced to live in the sewers.

 

What Pegman Saw

 Note: Long before the Hungarian revolution and the Prague spring, Bulgarian peasants banded together to resist the pressures of the Stalin-backed Communist government. The movement started after the communist coup d’état against the Nazis in 1944 and reached its peak between 1947 and 1954. By the early Sixties it was gone. The Goryani were loosely organized, broken into individual cells called Chetas. The identities of members outside one’s own cell were largely unknown. Aside from the scattered Polish fighters who went directly from fighting Nazis to engaging the Red Army, the Bulgarian resistance is believed to be the first, and longest lasting, organized anti-Communist movement.The very existence of the Goryani was steadfastly concealed and denied by the Bulgarian Communist authorities, so there is almost no information about them. One thing is certain: they carried on the tradition of Bulgarian national hero Vasil Levski.

 

The Window, The Sea

Daily Prompt, photography, Poetry1 Comment34 views

the window is the window:
the glass, the same
the wall, the same
the same  house

the same sea,
never the same,
not for a moment
not the air, nor the water.

when I close my eyes
to the window’s glow
the sea takes everything:
my lungs, my hair, my hands on the table

the sea is not the same but it floats me
through the same window
the cries of sea-birds far below
me lost in the fog

 

The Daily Post: Glow

This Again

Fiction Prompts, Friday Fictioneers26 Comments68 views

I know this place.

Of course. You have been here many times. Countless.

But why am I here again?

You do not remember? Is that world you cared so much about already gone from your recollection?

It seems like a dream I had as a child.

You have said that before. How do you feel?

It’s not peace, exactly. It’s something else. It’s hard to describe.

Powerlessness is strange to you.

But why am I here?

It seems that once again you have fallen into the old patterns of violence and greed and fear.

Must I go back, then?

Yes.

 

Friday Fictioneers

Those Who Wronged You

Ancient Personal History, PoetryWrite a comment13 views

 

You mere scarecrow
again and again in my youth
You, bully, your shotgun in my face
I found a way to back down, with grace

Oh you wise men
said this as such would happen
again and again, a safe bet
and you bet on it and the bookie

called all the clever fellows
the deceivers, pretending as you do
to risk everything, anything at all
to call. You are, called,

remembered. Oh, but now
old as the luck you possess
allowed it hides these images
unavenged. These who wronged you.

Dear Father

Fiction Prompts, Sunday Photo Fiction9 Comments36 views

Dear Father,

Firstly, you must not believe what you have read in the papers. I am no mastermind. That said, I was not unwilling in this venture. You know me. I am not a fool to jump with both feet into crazy schemes. You also know how desperate the times are here. General Malgawe’s men have increased their levies on the village to an unsustainable level. The children are so hungry they have forgotten how to smile, yet the general’s men still  take what little food remains. To stand up to these soldiers is a death sentence, but they are amenable to bribes. I suppose they are no different than other men in this regard, though what they do requires a harder heart. 

The plan as presented to me was far from foolproof, but the use of the lifeboats to escape seemed sound enough. Cruise ships are seldom armed, and the passengers of the Queen’s Line are known to be wealthy. The plan called for a quick takeover, a rapid pilfering, an elegant escape.

It was never our intent to initiate a slaughter, yet it is true what they say: intentions are the stones that pave the road to hell. 

I pray you will bear no shame for my crime, and that you will one day forgive me.

 

Sunday Photo Fiction

Ditat Deus

Fiction Prompts, What Pegman Saw13 Comments59 views

Illustration of Dutch colonists planting sugar cane on Mauritius, mid 17th century

“I believe there is truth in the saying it is an ill wind that bloweth no good,” said Maestre Rodrigues. He was garrulous for a sailing master, but Diogo Fernandes did not mind because Rodrigues seldom required an answer.

Besides, he was right. The cyclone that had blown the Cirne off course had brought them here, wherever here was. There was no record of these islands in any of the navigation rutters or charts.

Fernandes scanned the shore with his glass. “I see at least a score of enormous tortoises on the beach. Perhaps there is a source of fresh water was well. Let us get the launch over the side and go ashore.”

“You will need to name the place,” said Rodrigues. “Perhaps you can name it after me?”

Diogo Fernandes laughed at this. “I think we’d better thank our deliverer instead. To which saint does this day belong?”

 

What Pegman Saw: Mauritius

Historical note:

The three islands that comprise Mauritius were uninhabited  except for brief visits by Arab sailors in the fourteenth century. The ship Cirne, under the command of Capitao Diogo Fernandes Pereira, sighted the island later known as Reunión in February 1507.  Diogo Fernandes named it “Santa Apolonia” in honor of that day’s saint.

The creatures of the island included prodigious amounts of giant tortoises and flightless dodo birds. The birds had never known predators, so the ravenous sailors had an easy time killing all they needed to provision their ships. The cats and rats they left behind devastated the ground-nesting birds’ habitat. The Dutch, who colonized the island over the next century, further depleted the island fauna. By 1710 the dodo was extinct, as were some distinct species of giant tortoise. 

A Walk Among The Bones

Daily Prompt, Poetry2 Comments41 views

The museum is climate controlled
with inch-thick glass
between the dioramas
and me.This hushes
the history. Sobers
all the miniature people
frozen in time, hand-painted.

A birds-eye view,
I observe the modeled activity,
the huts, the plains. Look:
the hunters have killed
a deer. I cannot see
the women waiting inside

the smoky hut,
the central fire, naked
toddlers pissing in the dust.
Vermin-riddled beds of sticks and hide.
The darkness, the stench.
Each newborn shrieking
a chanting woman biting the cord

I grow bored by imagination,
walk away quietly
to another part of the museum
where behind the glass are genuine bones
painstakingly articulated to show
this long-dead woman stirring
a pot. I see every tooth in her head.

 

The Daily Post: Scale

 

D.O.S. (Disintegrating on Schedule)

Fiction Prompts, Friday Fictioneers26 Comments70 views

I don’t recall the picture, only that it starred an actor who was young and handsome at the start of his career fifty years ago but was now an aged relic. Dark thoughts in the darkened theater as I watched the folds of wizened skin beneath  the famous chiseled jaw, pouches beneath the steel-gray eyes.  Projected on the screen at fifty times life size, .

He’d been a hero once but had changed into the old man in front of millions.

On the drive home, I keep glancing at my own eyes in the mirror. My private degradation, just as certain.

 

Friday Fictioneers

Why We Live in Milo

Fiction Prompts, What Pegman Saw8 Comments30 views

I was born in Mingo County, near the town of Matewan. My family was all coal miners. After them Baldwin-Felts men killed Pa and Uncle Jess during the strike, Ma wanted to leave West Virginia. I talked her out of it on account of our family being five generations here.  In a new state we’d lose that.

I took out a map. At the top edge stood Littleton, which used to be called Milo. Eventually, I wore her down.

Me, I never wanted to be no coal miner. Wildcatter was more my line, being mechanically inclined and all. I heard that oilfields were the coming thing in our state, and Littleton was said to be like Oklahoma in that regard.

We sold everything we had and boarded the train.

Only there wasn’t no oil. There wasn’t hardly even a town. Quarry closed the year we got here.

You can likely guess the rest.

 

What Pegman Saw