Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, hence why I've been so quiet lately. Ah well, for a change, here's a new story of mine.
It was morning, the sky was clearing up, but the wind
was blowing hard and strong and cold, even for early summer. John watched the
mourning doves at his birdfeeder with a familiar, simmering irritation – why did
he invest into this contraption anyhow? He did not want to remember right now,
as the doves cooed and pecked at the scattered birdseed with an almost
offensive leisure, their plump bodies almost an affront to his own taut nerves
as they stored birdseed in their crops.
As a particularly corpulent bird hopped closer to
the window, John turned away. Bloated, self-satisfied creatures, he thought,
projecting all his irrational irritation onto their feathery forms. Where’s a hawk
when you needed one? He got onto his feet and walked outside. Maybe elsewhere something
better was going on?
“Honestly,
Rebecca, those tattoos are just… a lot,” Donna said, her voice dripping with an
elegant disapproval that always grated. Rebecca, her arm a canvas of vibrant,
swirling blues and greens, merely arched an eyebrow. Donna, emboldened,
continued, “I mean, there’s subtle art, and then there’s… that.” She gestured
vaguely at Rebecca’s forearm. Rebecca just smiled a slow, knowing curve of her lips.
Then, with a theatrical flourish, Rebecca pushed up the sleeve of Donna’s own
silk blouse. Beneath, a magnificent, intricate serpent-dragon, its scales
shimmering with metallic thread, snaked from her shoulder to her wrist, each
detail a testament to hours of meticulous, painful artistry, was connected to
other tattoos, still hidden beneath Donna’s blouse. Rebecca’s earlier ink looked
like a child’s crayon drawing next to Donna’s masterpiece. Donna’s face,
usually so composed, went slack with panic. “Where, where did they come from?”
she twitched as she turned to Rebecca, because the latter was the closest. “Rebecca,
this isn’t me, this isn’t me, and you know it!” Rebecca, who carefully covered
her own arm with her own sleeve, said nothing. To be honest, she felt rather
jealous of the older woman’s tattoos, now that she saw them.
Across the room, Anna, a friend of Donna’ began her own
verbal assault, thinly disguised as a concerned speech. The bohemian lifestyle
of Jenna, (Donna’s daughter), her endless backpacking trips, her
"spiritual journeys" – it was all just so pointless, according to
Anna. Jenna was not a child or even a teen anymore; she had to settle down; whether
here, in her hometown, or elsewhere was another story. Clearly, Jenna seemed
happier abroad, so perhaps it was time to move on and stop giving her mother more
grey hairs?
However, as she began to speak, Jenna carefully
inserted herself into the rant, recounting a story of how Anna helped people in
the past, and what a shame that people started to ignore Anna now that the
latter has aged a bit and no longer looked as flamboyant as before. Looking
into Jenna’s eyes shining with a genuine compassion, Anna’s planned words
crumbled. Jenna’s empathy was a force, a warmth that Anna, with her cold
judgments, was missing lately. Anna found herself not criticizing, but asking
questions, truly listening for the first time, as the two women sat down and
talked. They had their differences, mental and physical, yes, but there were
similarities too – both women shared a lean body plan of those who exercise a
lot and do plenty of physical activities, and their faces showed the same tan –
of those who spent a lot of time outdoors; honestly, Anna looked quite good for
her age, as Jenna pointed out…
Anna ended up hiring Jenna as her receptionist, and
never regretted it. Donna never really realized it – her own friendship with
Anna rather faded, but her own hairdo now sparkled to match her tattoos.
It helped, in a small way, with her identity crisis.
The heat was a living thing in the Balkan Mountains,
baking the dry earth to a cracking crisp. An extra-large and powerful Vipera
ammodytes, its horn-like snout twitching, slithered across a sun-baked rock,
its patterns a perfect camouflage against the speckled stone. Down, down,
towards the shade of a fig tree, it moved its intentions purely predatory, and
its existence utterly indifferent to human concerns. There, a couple of little
owls made their nest in a tree hollow – it was dark and comfortable, but also
too close to the ground. The owlets and their parents did not realize this, but
the world did not care.
A trio of owlets were in the hollow, warming each
other, waiting for their parents to come with their regularly scheduled meal.
The noise outside could have told them that that would never happen, but the
owlets were too little, and too sleepy to realize this.
…Few hours later, when their calls for food became
truly desperate – they were that young anyhow – a couple of park rangers found
them and got them out of the hollow into an appropriate holding container. They
were given a small mouse each, and immediately relaxed and huddled together, as
they did not know much about the world.
The snake was long gone, digesting its own meal in
peace.
Miles away, off the coast of Turkey, a sleek, grey
shadow cut through the turquoise water. A shortfin mako shark, a ghost of the
deep, patrolled the ancient currents, its primeval instincts honed over
millions of years. A tourist boat, oblivious, chugged towards a picturesque
cove, its passengers laughing, their world a million miles from the silent,
powerful hunter beneath the waves.
The mako’s nose twitched as some of the tourists
made all the right, or wrong, splashes and other noises to attract it. Slowly,
circling, it began to surface. Another mako, a younger one, zoomed by, almost
hitting the first shark, who began to chase it. Things could have gone in any
direction, when a bait ball of sardines or similar fish appeared from the blue.
The sharks stopped their confrontation and began to hunt instead, keeping a
distance between themselves, but getting along well enough, even though one of
them was visibly bigger and older than the other one…
John found himself sitting on his couch in the
living room, an unfinished bottle of beer in his hand and a bunch of forgotten
and faded memories and dreams in his head. He vaguely remembered Jenna, now
handling a mid-life crisis by shedding her metaphorical skin, as well as Anna
and Donna, who found their home in each other; he remembered the Balkans and
the Turkish coast, but could not make heads or tails of those memories.
He looked outside. The doves were gone, the
birdfeeder was mostly empty. He will try different birdfeed next time.
