Skip to main content

Duck tracks

By
The wind lifts strands of hair from my face. Sharp light has me closing my eyes again. What's that sound? A quiet humming, hushing, soothing. Images flicker across my mind. 
Small island off the coast. Tall beach grass. Sun setting into the ocean. Sifting sand between my fingers. Crying, crying, crying. 
I turn onto my side, my sleeping bag making a crinkling sound in protest. The rising sun is behind me. The beach stretching out in front of me. A lone seagull circles the beach, dips towards the sand, rises with the morning breeze. 
Stumbling over a wet beach. Finding my way between mounds of shifting sand. To the highest point of the island. A small circle of grass, hiding me from view. 
I eat my breakfast with my sleeping bag wrapped as a blanket around my shoulders. Morning light colours the water a pale blueish grey. There's a sandy crunch to my sandwiches. I don't mind. The seagull is watching me, willing me to share. 
The old fisherman had shared his coffee with me. The tin cup dented. He didn't say much, but his eyes were filled with sympathy. I managed not to cry in front of him. 
Sleep has been sound. The fresh air has put colour back into my face. All these grains of sand have rubbed the memory of your touch from my skin. I'm nothing but me again. 
The old man smiled and nodded at the large thermos of freshly brewed coffee. I sat with my back to the mainland, watching the island becoming smaller and smaller as my heart grew bigger. 


Photographer: https://twitter.com/BetheneZ 


Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Room of One’s Own

By
It was Virginia Woolf who said that women need a room of their own, a room where we will be able to write (fiction more specifically). I was lucky in that respect when I began to read and then later on when I started to write poetry and prose as a teenager. I was always encouraged to both read and write, and my father would take me to the library and introduce me to the wonderful world that is Science Fiction. Growing up I was sort of an only child, I never had to share my space with anyone. Okay, the “sort of an only child”-thing might need some explaining. My older sister, by 6 years, was severely handicapped ( Retts Syndrome ), so we could never have any kind of sisterly bond or do anything together. When she was 17 she died from heart failure, leaving my parents and I to continue life without her. Yes, it was an easier life because she needed so much help and we could never take any long trips; or if we did my parents had their hands full with her and sometimes I was l...
4 comments
Read more

I should have known better …

By
Last week was my husbands last week of summer holiday and I had thought that with him wanting to be as much as possible with the kids I could get some writing done. Yeah right! Who was I kidding! Tuesday morning I woke with a sore throat and a few hours after that my voice was gone So instead of sitting down at my laptop, I lay flat out on the sofa drinking tea and feeling sorry for myself. The day after Pumpkin started to sneeze, and we had some fun nights with a very fussy baby resulting in me feeling even more poorly. All the writing and editing I had planned didn’t happen, but I did get to write some poetry.
4 comments
Read more

I Killed Him!

By
I’ve started writing my novel again; maybe it’s being back at school that’s given me all these ideas. What I have so far is almost half a book, it needs more detail and some fleshing out and maybe some more drama before I can say it’s finished. A friend has been reading what I have so far and has been asking me questions about why and who and where, making me see that some things weren’t as clear as I thought they were. She also pointed out that one of my characters does nothing for the story. He just tags along, saying hardly anything and I realized that I put him in only because I wanted the boys and girls to be an equal number. So now, when I’m rewriting and adding he’s been cut out. I killed him. Well, maybe not anything as drastic as that, but he’s gone from the story. This changed the story some (duh), and it’s now better. There’s more focus on my main character and those closest to her. After dragging myself to the gym today I now really feel the need to get started with...
3 comments
Read more