Picture by Arch Angel Studios via Google
NEW LIVE CEMETERY
© Kelvin M. Knight, 2019
Time hangs from our bones like chains. These chains rusting with blood and binding our wrists, our necks, our ankles. All we want is to stop bleeding and move, away from this time, this place.
Slapping sounds. Wet leather ripping open parched flesh. Flinching, we collapse to our knees, our heads bowed, our eyes pleading with the ground.
The sounds grow louder. The agony softens. Gasping, we dare to life our eyes. The gravestones around us are splashed with iridescence, and there are these beings hovering above them, their wings passing through trees and earth but not stone. Stone turns them transparent. Stone makes these silhouettes of arms reach out from these beings. Dazzling hands of all shapes and sizes touch us.
Lift us.
Feeling our chains fall away, then our bones, we laugh, then we cry. Because oceans of forgiveness melt our pain choked hearts once more forever.
(150 words)
The above story was written in response to the What Pegman Saw prompt, which this week took us to:
Selma, Alabama
You are warmly invited to the Inlinkz link party to read other globetrotting contributors’ stories inspired by this week’s prompt.
Editorial Note:
This more intimate “inclusive” viewpoint felt better for showing the release from hurt captured by this story, whereas my previous post on this story, which contained an observing and somewhat detached viewpoint, felt better for showing the wonder and bewilderment of this story.
This version of the story has a gentler, more human, almost personal feel. I enjoyed both stories. They make an excellent diptych.
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Oh Penny. How I love you comments. You always teach me something new. I looked up diptych and I’m enthralled by them and how my two stories do indeed become one. Brilliant. thank you.
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For reasons I can’t yet define, I seem to respond more to this story than to the other, though both present powerful imagery
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Thank you, crimsonprose, thank you for your honesty, and I’m glad you felt more from this story thant the other. The other was very unemotionally involved from the narrators’s point of view, deliberately I hasten to add.
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See, that’s what I couldn’t define. Maybe.
We read these micro-fictions, and we don’t always analyse the way we would will a book.
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Ah. But I do. Thanks for responding.
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Oh well, I can speak only for me. I respond with gut first, the brain follows later.
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Absolutely 😎
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Sometimes my gut is like “What?” whereupon my brain steps in saying,”
” Calmly now let’s read this together again… “
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Most times, usually, yes.
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Wow; good descriptions.
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Thanks Chelsea. Hope you are keeping fit and happy. 😊
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Welllll… I took a nap today.
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Those power naps are just the ticket.
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Excellent. I, too, like how you swiveled the POV. Are you tempted to try a third, more unsympathetic one?
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I am. And I have, Karen. Although only loosely tied to this picture. I sent it out to a Critique partner yesterday as I wasn’t sure… and there initial comment was Brutal, evocative but brutal. I find being unsympathetic hard, obviously.
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Interesting approach
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Thanks Josh. Just looking at things from a different angle as always. This time, for some reason, it found its way onto my screen.
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Like how you swiveled the point of view. Easier to follow perhaps, but i prefer the other version. Love the dazzling hands image in both.
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Thank you, Andrea, to be honest (not that I’m never not) I prefer my first version too.
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