Click the graphic for Sammi’s page and to read more 63 word poems or prose.
Down Together
Helicopters are big-ass, noisy targets — preferred bullseyes for AKs or rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers. They’d get enemy kills and loot from the dead machine with one lucky shot.
To live, we flew high or desperately, dumbass low — at treetop levels or less. Other altitudes made things too easy for them. They heard us coming. We did our best to live and to kill.
Look both ways and be a zigzagging target. It’s hard to hit what’s moving.
Mind the gaps so you know where the shots came from.
The video with this Billy Joel song is six minutes, but it was my inspiration to the prompt word.
Click on graphic to go to Sammi’s blog page where more 71-word poetry or prose are key.
Whispering Cuts
Lost in a familiar sea of grave reality, my dysfunctional heart not yet surrendered, something of which none are certain. Worry descended like a pall over my will. Sadness has taken control of my soul. Well-intentioned, high-riding key influencers are wheedling me into their delusional corner. Life, lies, and what matters: shut down before I hit the ground. I ponder death, or better, conceivably, never to have been born at all.
Look both ways, but in the end, it is just the end.
Nothing more.
Mind the gaps of life’s traps.
Sometimes it’s your fault. Sometimes it’s not.
Lying on the Cath Lab table, oxygen
up my nose, needles in my everywhere,
nurses and technicians asking questions.
Technology all around.
It’s like a Federation starship sickbay,
or a Starbase infirmary
with many more actors vying for a role
and space at my table.
There are two main characters. The protagonists are
the Chief Medical Officer and me.
Other smart young wonders,
called residents, watch.
Also, a consulting rep from
the manufacturer of my shiny new transcatheter aortic heart valve,
to be snaked into place and magically,
guided, angiographically trough my veins and arteries,
and into my beating heart, which will soon almost stop,
scaring all except unconscious me,
to replace the defective OEM part.
They all look alike in masks and caps. I’m naked on a procedure table,
surrounded by X-ray machines, big screen monitors,
procedure carts, lights, and computer workstations.
In some other room nearby, more medical miracle role players
wave from behind large windows. I needed a Playbill.
No TV doctor medicine-show drama. Okay, maybe a little,
but two days later I am home and ready to rock.
Ya gotta love modern medical science.
Look both ways and ask lots of questions.
Mind the gaps for diagnoses and prognoses.
One day I was chopping weeds.
When I looked up Libby, our toy poodle, was gone.
I knew she would go home with virtually anyone.
But she’d been fixed years earlier, so she could go play.
I noticed a familiar SUV driving away. I was unarmed, but I felt, maybe,
Libby had been dognapped. I called for her and looked around.
After a while, the car returned and pulled over near me.
The lady driving rolled down the window. She held a small black dog
in her lap and asked if it was my dog. I said, “I don’t know. Lemme check
her license right here on her collar.” Libby was calm. I got semi-sarcastic.
“Yep. Last seen right over there in my yard sniffing her own shit.”
The indignant do-gooder gave me a look and said, “I’m a dog
rescuer. I rescue strays.” I took Libby and said, “Today you’ve
moved up to dognapping. Last I checked that was against the law.
Now may I see your rescue license?”
I could tell she was getting pissed at me.
Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall started pounding my mind and I turned up my volume,
“Hey! Lady! Leave this dog alone!”
All-in-all, look both ways when tending your flock.
Your poor wretched strays may get “rescued” the minute you look one way.
Mind the gaps in the minds of those dumbly righteous souls who do good to feel better than.
He didn’t marvel at that momentous moment. After many years, she had become sanctimonious.
It wasn’t the stupendous vision he hoped for. It was horrendous, not tremendous,
seeing her now as portentous.
Look both ways but the past was then, this is now.
Find and mind the gaps for hidden reasons for change.
Kicking off the twelfth month of twenty-twenty-two, artist, businesswoman, swimmer, writer, mother, wife, sister, (I could go on), and our friend and fictioneer leader, Rochelle, has provided us with a peek out from Roger Bultot’s window with his inspiring photo as a bridge to creativity.
It goes like this. We look at the picture and write whatever story (beginning, middle, & end) we want. Easy, right? It’s doesn’t even have to be pure fiction. But we must prove our micro (or flash) – (non-)fiction bone fides by trimming our stories to any number of words under 101. Try it!
The directions are simple and available on Rochelle’s blog page, reachable with a simple tap, click, or press on Roger’s picture, like it was a detonator.
Genre: Espionage Fiction
Title: Truncated Bridge
Word Count: 100
***
Looking out the window, I felt stress. Ignorance fed by fear. After this job, I’d comfortably retire. To what? Sad.
The morning sunrise lacked hope. It was threatening. A foreboding bloody sky in a randomly meaningless universe. I didn’t care. It was time.
I lit what I promised myself was my last cigarette and sat by the window as I’d done hundreds of times before. When I saw the target on the bridge, I pressed the detonator button and watched the explosion. I always hated all the collateral damage. The news would blame the old bridge. Everyone lies. Everyone dies.
***
Look both ways to find happy endings.
Mind the gaps because that’s where the bridges collapse.
Click on Tom Hanks in the Bridge of Spies movie to read more stories based on Roger’s photo.
And for the music lovers among us, I present the Eagles singing “Seven Bridges Road.” If it works. I suppose I took the bridges thing a bit too far.
It was one of those warm and humid days.
When it’s like that in LA, it is
miserably smoggy, but here
it is just moody and gloomy—no rain—
in the mid-seventies, like me.
Drove and hour to Temple, Texas,
for tests (the answers to which I thought I knew)
and to see a new PA-doc
and then to get gas
and drive another hour back home.
It’s boring sitting and waiting,
but since this is a hospital, boring and routine are good.
No, “I’m sorry, Mister Bill, but … ‘oh, no’.”
I saw nicely dressed police or correctional officers escorting
a mildly overweight bald man in an orange jump suit
and fake shoes
with handcuffs in the front,
all making it hard for others to not stare and wonder.
It was not so boring thinking about that.
Got an obit email that morning.
Another high school classmate had died
(they say he passed to be euphemistic
as though he just kept driving).
Patrick Murphy (Murph)
was an artist and philosopher
of Irish descent, and a Vietnam War vet.
His obituary was more interesting than most.
Anyway, I shall not be
characteristically pointing out problems or deficiencies today
because Murph is dead, and I am not. It’s all good, thanks.
So, I’ll just sit here trying to remember him
from art class, I think,
and be happily bored on a gloomy day
in a hospital clinic waiting area
in Temple, fucking, Texas.
Looking both ways at the days of gloom and doom. Mind the gaps in loose cuffs and I wonder who wipes his butt.
Click the photo of Robin Williams and Matt Damon to watch this scene from the movie, Good Will Hunting.
Our Literary Journey 