The joy of wriggling feet in wet sand as waves tease toes with cool kisses, one after the other in the rhythmic love of touch. Whet sand sticks to heals. Tinny particles embedded in natural valleys of skin, playing as if they lived there when it’s vacation day. The sand paper feel of brushing particles of rocks from flesh, and finding them attached to palm and fingers and hiding in, in between places. Better to walk the shores barefoot, letting the warmth of sun and wind do their work? Watch the dark sands lighten to dry dust. Brush hands together to cast tinny stones aside. Now ankles can be cleared of minuscule boulders, only the finest of glittering flecks remain as reminders of earth and skins dalliance. Sandals laced. Only a stone here and there, stealing a peck from human follicles. Goodbye, kisses. Reluctantly brushed aside.
“Tomorrow.”
We whisper to the waves as the beach house light beckons. The courtship of human hearts and beach lasts only a day. In the morning waves crash and clouds weep their farewell as a drizzle, on our last beach walk.
We can hear the gulls cry, “Don’t leave!” The salty breeze seals love like heartache to our memory with scent we won’t forget. He holds the suitcase as I hold him.
“We’ll come back someday.”
The sand hiding in spaces between sandal leather and sole won’t let me forget this promise.
Ordinary. It’s a word we dismiss, and a state of being we overlook. We search for the special spark of the EXTRAordinary. In doing so, we miss so much.
The gift of an ordinary love. The strength of an ordinary family. The hope of an ordinary marriage. The protection of an ordinary house. The wealth of an ordinary life. The seeds of an ordinary faith.
For when ordinary built and maintained, storms reveal how it has grown the extraordinary. Don’t cast aside your ordinary.
When you find the right home for a story, it’s always a blessing. I struggled to find a home for my story ‘Fireflies of Red and Blue’. Many editors had great things to say about it, but ultimately it was never quite the right fit for their magazine. That is, until I submitted to Honeyguide. It thrilled me to get an acceptance from them and I true believe their magazine is the perfect home for this story.
“I wanted a magazine that examined the intersects between the human and animal experience, how one fed into the other, and although we are very different, our lives, questions, struggles, hopes and fears are very often the same.”
The word ‘art’ usually invokes images of paintings, drawings, or maybe woven tapestries from a different time. Or maybe the word ‘art’ brings a favorite story to mind, or a famous poem, or sculpture. But art is so much more than those things, and lives in so many places.
The hands of come in all shades, sizes, and from all places. They stir cooking pots, pull stitches through fabric, and yes, weld iron beams into place.
I am much more of a night owl than a morning bird. I love the quiet whined down after a long loud day. Because of that, I have only caught a very few sunrises, yet, they are a miracle that happens every day.
What beauty have you been missing out on? Why?
I think it’s okay to be a night owl, and now catch every sunrise, as long as I remember it still happens, and it’s a gift.
Sometimes I feel like an overturned cup of confetti… Until I remember cups are for holding liquid, not everyone else’s bits and pieces. Confetti wants to be thrown around, shared, and bring colour to the world.
Remember, it’s okay to throw those bits around, as long as you clean up after the party is over.
As the guitarist placed a pick on metal strings, the first notes of music were born. Together, they made chords. Waves wrapped around each other, then dove into the blackness of guitar’s belly.
A single Wave came awake. Was it particles all clumped together? No. It was sound. A singleness that moved and bounced and collided with its siblings within the darkness.
“Were did the light go?”
At the moment of birth, was brightness. Then speed swallowed light, and shadowed hardness housed multitudes, and became Wave’s world.
The journey changed Wave. With every bounce it slowed, or speed up. It brushed, or joined, then ripped away from a sibling. When this happened Wave warped.
It was pain and pleasure. An existence of experience crammed within small spaces, and fragments of time. Edges of knowing were fuzzy. If Wave had known what time was, it would have seen its lines. It followed them, unaware.
“Where is the light?”
Can a wave remember? This one was searching for something. A doorway? Freedom? There!
The abruptness of existence ceased and Wave sprang past metal strings to bright openness.
It sliced past dust particles suspended in air and rocked them with its wake. They danced and waved goodbye.
The lines of time directed Wave’s path, and in a blink it knew a human. It stretched within the openness, only to fold across the mass of skin and hair, seeping through fabric to touch warmth and disappear.
As Wave broke apart upon the mountain of flesh, it found a tunnel. Small, hot, yet soft. A shard of Wave reverberated down this narrow well. It touched taught skin and changed again.
Wave was tinny, yet it filled the entirety of a human. It shivered between skin and bones, liquid lines that reached out and sought understanding. It joined with electricity and plasma to become the flesh that had taken it in.
A pulse, heartbeat, and tap of toes. A movement with a smile. It knew and breathed and in the absorption of self, it touched a soul, and became whole.
“Play it again for me, please?”
The guitarist chuckled, and again set pick to metal, birthing chords that split as fingers held down strings and a human heart sang without words.
Strong hands trace the grains down the length of lumber.
“She’s beautiful.” “It’ll do then?” “Perfectly.”
Muscular hands grasp the beam, pulling it down from the delivery truck.
“Care to help?”
Then comes the cuts, sharp and sure. Sand glued to paper tears into the beam’s edges. First, they rip tiny shards free. Then the stubs left are ground and smoothed away.
“I will make you shine.”
Lifted into place atop two strong pillars. The work of placing the balusters starts. The measuring, the chiselled crevices. Each paper-thin layer shaved away until wooden sculptures slid true into their homes. Glued then fastened with a single piercing nail.
“You may live longer then I do.”
He stains its grains to match the steps he stands on, each brush stroke rhythmic, a perfect dance of a man’s hand. Then he seals the deep cherry-red with varnish to make wood shimmer in the light.
“Indeed, that’ll do.”
He brings his bride home. Her manicured nails slide along the new banisters curves as eyes roved over the entryway, the steps, the home he has made for her.
“It’s perfect!”
One day his bride carries a babe up those steps to bed. Laid against mother’s shoulder, the child revels in the gentle pat of those manicured fingers.
Splatter.
The babe spits up, drenching mother and railing with sour droplets.
“GEORGE!”
The reprimand is startling and the babe wails, but only for a moment. A mother’s shock and disgust replaced in a heartbeat with love.
As that babe lays sleeping, manufactured nails scrubs cherry-red wood clean.
“Gregory, I think I took the finish of the banister.”
Soon baby feet grow and race through the house. His favourite car finds the perfect track down the ripples his father etched in that beam years ago.
“It made it!”
He whoops and hollers, driving the second car down the length of the banister by hand, unaware of the scratches he leaves in his wake.
Cars turn to girls and hushed voices as one night two shadows slink upstairs away from adult eyes.
“Avoid the next step,” he whispers.
As his partner attempts to skip the step in high heals a light switches on. A shriek fuelled by adrenaline and surprise pierces ear drums. A heal snaps from its shoe and a girl grabs at balusters to keep from sliding down the stairs length.
Another snap tells them all that more than a high heal is broken.
“GEORGE!” “I’ll fix it, Dad!”
The ups and downs, the rides and sounds. The staircase resounds with echoes as life speeds by. A banister once shiny loses its lustre, as age robs its craftsman of the strength and mobility needed to restore it.
The empty nest comes.
Sounds of bustle from the kitchen carry through the hall and up the steps.
“Gregory,” she calls. “Dinner is ready.”
He hears her and rolls his newspaper tightly in one hand. Yes, he still reads it every day.
First, he shuffles to his slippers, then to the steps. The banister cool smoothness greats him with a familiar hello as he rests his hand atop it, ready to start the decent, one slow step at a time. But wait.
“Oh!”
He presses fingers to his left breast. His arm lets out a throb that starts from shoulder and shoots through fingers.
“Margret.”
His call is feeble and frustrated. The deep breath he grasps for sends a second shock down his arm. Then his feet crumble. The cherry-red banister is all that holds him from plummeting down those steps.
“Margret!”
This time the call caries and she comes running.
“Gregory, you’re white as a ghost!” “Dear, I might be one soon. Phone.”
All he hears is the shuffle of his wife’s sandals. All he sees is the cherry-red steps. But he feels the banister, he never let go of it. Its coolness has warmed under his touch. His grip shakes.
“I guess re-sanding you will have to wait another year, my dear.”
He speaks despite the darkness creeping into his side vision. A blink clears it for a moment, and he notices the broken baluster has slipped beyond its brothers and needs to be knocked back into place.
“I must tell Gorge on his next visit. He never fixed that thing right.”
“Gregory, they are on there way. Gregory!”
He lets go of the banister and now all he feels is his wife’s manicured nails digging into his arm as she tugs his shoulder. Can she pull him back to this reality? The cherry-red staircase holds them both.
Mary Grace Writing 