Showing posts with label loss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label loss. Show all posts

Wednesday 31 August 2016

Immortal Beloved

This month's Love Wins story is about a specific Jellyfish and the reality of this being's immortality...


Monday 8 August 2016

Dog Days of Summer

I have not posted in Beautiful Creatures in a little while, having concentrated on my Love Wins series. However, I thought this fitting in that it reveals my own childhood experiences with my brother and family that have shaped who I am and I was inspired by the familiarity of sounds that can trigger such powerful memories. 



In memory of Richard Boissonneault 1945-2016
(July 24th, 2016)

The air resonated with the familiar whirr of static, like the sound of a breath as it escapes the threshold of one’s lips and snakes through a blade of grass held between one’s thumbs. That constant low pierce saturated the summer air but never revealed its source other than in the memorial shell of a previous corporeality. The preserved memory of alien husks are the only signs of these cyclical transient guests that remain bonded to the bark of the maples whose branches swayed in the summer breeze to filter the sunlight where she sat on that park bench watching it dapple through the leaves. 

It’s all about the framing… She lay there listening to the constant drone of the cicadas in the wee morning hours of that still August night. She had always thought of the sound as a source of comfort and a reminder of her childhood until he’d revealed his own loathing of their uninterrupted mating whirr that seemed to have no end. They had sat around that evening talking about different insects; a strange topic but one bug led to another and the conversation continued in ebbs and flows with imitations of the maddening perpetual familiar mating call of this cyclical insect. Now, as she lay there in bed she could hear nothing but that piercing buzz that disturbed the fluidity of her intervallic thoughts of the reminiscences of the weeks gone by that brought her to this point. 

The 17 year awakening of the cicadas seemed a fitting metaphor for the summer’s loss of her uncle that had brought her family together. With the exception of a few of her relatives, it had been about that long since she’d seen the greater part of her family on her father’s side. The family that she’d grown up with as a child, and for whom she’d had fond memories of in those foundational years of her childhood. She closed her eyes thinking back to that day of remembrance that had brought them together, focussing on the small wooden box at the front of the room that was once her uncle and she fell into sugar-coated recollections of moments on the farm with her cousins. She remembered the pig that wowed her in disbelief by her sheer size, for she had only really known the idea of a pig to be like the piglets that were suckling this giant sow. Each time her brother and her were let loose with their cousins it revealed a new curiosity, from feeding the goats, the softness of touching the ethereally downy fur of the angora rabbits she remembered eagerly waiting to brush, to the mischief and contrary nature that simmered beneath her shy and sweet demeanour. 

She smirked as she recalled riding a horse for the first time with her cousin’s at the neighbouring farmstead. As she got on this huge splendid animal she could barely contain the smouldering anticipation behind her soft manner to feel that moment of connection as she and this horse would begin to race through the open field. She was warned not to touch the backside of the horse behind the saddle and that cautionary advice inevitably sparked her contrary nature. As they began to trot her crooked smile revealed her intentions and her hand slowly reach behind the saddle to gently tap the horse on its right haunch sending the animal into a wild gallop as the two shot forward in a breathless moment that she can still feel over thirty years later. It is like those last moments of giggles of freedom before leaving when they’d find themselves up in the rafters of the barn flinging their bodies into the void of that weightless moment before landing in the hay beneath. 

These irregular visits to her uncle’s farm were always filled with moments of wonder, mischief, connection and childhood whimsy. They are moments that will always remain with her, they are memories that she still cherishes all these years later. She can recall the tenor of her uncle's voice and those family gatherings. In loss she has been given those memories once again that were not forgotten but simply squirrelled away for days like these to revisit when she needed a smile.  

Monday 6 April 2015

Stardust


Like flashes of lighting on a stormy night the brief illumination revealed moments past. Memories hidden in time came rushing to the surface. The first moment they had shared a breath, the feeling of calm as they traveled side by side across the dry landscape and the deep blue of the sky in the early morning light. She nickered softly stomping her hoof upon the ground of her stall. Her head nodding in longing as though to affirm the reality of her mind’ eye…

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
~ Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Wednesday 23 July 2014

Infrasonic

Halfway into her journey Myani was feeling the weight of her emotions as the severed ties between her and Kingsley were becoming more apparent. They had been together at one time during the musth when tenderness and playful interchanges culminated in a bond that she had felt prior to their encounter and which carried on thereafter. Now although bulls may socialise with non-natal family units they were often solitary beings and had few social bonds. In Myani's case, it was an unusual circumstance that had put her in solitary existence, enhancing her deep yearning to be with Kingsley. She was at once the matriarch but the drought years had broken her family apart.

As most herds had a dynamic social system that was fluid relative to social and environmental changes Myani was able to connect with several kin-groups over the years. She had sought new habitats over the seasons but with the years of drought those kin-groups also broke apart maintaining the difficulty to bond deeply. Some of the bonds within a herd would last longer than others and these connections would shift for many different reasons. One of the most recent kin-groups that Myani had merged with had been abruptly separated by human threat.

It was a still night when she heard the low rumble of one of the older females in her kin-group and shortly thereafter the piercing trumpet-blast from young Kanja. It was a scream that she matched with her own powerful trumpet-blast as she tried to rally the herd into mobbing the imminent threat. But it was too late. She was paralyzed in the moment as the memories of her loss of Kivuli came flooding back.

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