In Transit

The continuation of the Vocabulary Notebook is now in http://vocabbook.lux-lucis.net/. Please point your bookmarks/links to the new host and get your feed readers accquainted with the feeds.

Oh, and Vocabulary Notebook will have a more exciting change beyond a new host. An explanation is on the new blog.

Moki

The Maoris called it a moki. It’s construction was exceedingly simple: collect bulrushes and bind them in a bundle, the simplest of conveyances. It’s purpose of intimate importance: to carry a single person over a body of water; a lake, a river, a stream. Tears.

Michelle held her plane ticket close to her heart, fist clutching those one-way paper wings. It was her moki, her way out. She would leave on a craft of her own making, built on one sad memory a time. Over oceans it would carry her, past the stream of tears and onto the land of dead empires where her knight stood on his pedestal, armor gleaming in the failing day.

The final call for flight to paradise.

She stood among the throng of passengers, ticket on one hand, earthly posessions in the other. She would board that plane with 400 other souls yes, but it would still be her moki. It would carry only her and her alone.

For my "granma", Michelle "Bunnzy" McClellan.

Ken

Under extreme duress, the mattress springs squealed. Bare feet riding the sine wave. Bodies in up-down motion, in peals of rapture. Urgent collision of man and woman and then a separation. Beddings tugged from corners pool around their feet, covers thrown overboard without a care. Sweat.

Exhausted, Michelle fell face down on the softness of the springs. Her eyes fell on the label, an incongruity in the sea spray blue of the mattress, half exposed hiding like a tease behind the sheets. She pulls away the pink floral print and traces the border of the label. Rigid stitches embossing a hide-and-seek pattern.

She reads the black and white. "Not to be Removed Under Penalty of Law."

“Isn’t it strange”, Michelle remarks wistfully while making snipping motions at the label, “That even on woman and mans lovebed, the government seeks to place impositions?”

“Irunno”, the syllables roll off Marik’s tongue as a singularity. Sweat beads crown his forehead as he stood above Michelle.

“I figure there are things that are beyond our ken and anyway, its more fun to just keep jumping on the bed rather than worry about useless questions”. He leaps up and hits the mattress with his feet on full force.

The springs squeak again.

Redoubt

The sky was golden. A maudlin red tinges the periphery. On the plains below Timothy stood, surveying the charred ruins of his heart. Stone strewn about haphazardly give testament to the total utter destruction.

“You tried to hold it off as best as you could”, the satyr croons, playing at sympathy convincingly.

“It’s all right”, Timothy murmurs with a sad happy smile. “Hopeless romantics could never hope to build a redoubt against it. Glass light and crystal can never weather, nor do books words and music make for unshakable foundations”

Timothy stalked through the wreckage, working his way to the polestar of his heart. He pauses once to pick through shattered glass and stone, exhuming a tome from its grave. Hands cut and bleeding, he opens the book. On its pages, handwritten, a thousand words for love. In all languages, in all forms. To the last page he turns and writes the thousand oneth.

In the center, he finds her.

Malapropos

Joesef stared at his plate of cheese.

“This cheese”, Joesef pontificates with his accented stutter, “is very very holey”

Serenity is distracted, she’s watching the last rites of the robo-pope on the black and white television over the bar. Through the static and snow of the aged television she soldiers on, hanging on to every utterance of the toaster-cardinal.

“Holey, yes”, Joesef continues unperturbed that Serenity isn’t listening to him. He clears his throat, a sonorous sound.

“This cheese”, Joesef declares, “Is so holey it should be the next pope”

His face splits into a wide grin, exposing rotten teeth leaning against golden caps.

Swiveling her neck in an impossibly graceful motion, Serenity faces Joesef.

“Has it ever occurred to you”, says she, “that that was a most malapropos pun”?

With her lips she points out a figure clad in a monk’s orange robes sitting on a barstool. He is weeping, weeping over a beer, chanting a solemn somber ditty for the robo-pope.