Scene #15 "True Story"

     She sat at the end of the sofa closest to the window, the throw blanket wrapped snugly about her. The light was already fading outside as the early autumn night closed in. It felt good: the cool air out there had just begun to make its way into the apartment, so she had put the heat on for the first time, just low, to chase that chill away. The smell of it – a sort of hot-dust scent – was comforting in its announcing Fall's arrival. The candles that were the only illumination in the apartment added their warm primal light and their various scents to the whole ambiance of this evening, the kind she loved and looked forward to each year.

     Sounds from the kitchen drew her attention away from the fading light and slowly clouding sky outside. He was finishing up making some tea for them both, a final touch that made the warm autumnal coziness complete. He stopped when their eyes met, and smiled at her. He never could meet her eyes without losing whatever concentration he had. She smiled back, relaxed and sweet. That stopped him completely.

     “Is the tea ready?” she asked.

     “Hm? - oh, yeah,” he said, remembering himself, slightly embarrassed.

     “I thought maybe something had happened,” she said with a touch of kind sarcasm as he picked up the cups and made his way to her.

     “When you look at me,” he said, sitting close and handing her a cup, “the world goes someplace else. I don't even care where it goes,” he added, sipping. The flicker of a few of the smaller candles winked shadows on their faces. He set his cup on the little table in front of the sofa and pulled closer to her. She took her free hand from under the blanket and put it around his shoulders. In the soft orange candlelight he looked into her mysterious grey eyes and she looked into his searching blue eyes. She leaned her forehead against his and sighed deeply, closing her eyes for a moment. He ran his fingers gently through her hair.

     She sighed again then sipped her tea, looking at him. “Comfy?”

     “I have no idea how I could be more comfy, or feel more right.”

     “True story,” she said.

*

© 2015 Brandon W. Flatley

Song Lyric: "What The Hummingbird Said"

What The Hummingbird Said


I was listening to the sound of ancient rivers
And the whispering of the breezes through the leaves
Got mixed up in all the chatter of the sparrows
In the dark incessant humming of the bees
Stood there for forever waiting to be found
But never really understood I wasn't lost
I could see a thousand miles stretched out before me
Crystal clearly
But within reach everything was out of focus


Then swift movement caught the corner of my eye
A tiny thing of beauty came into my view
And the hummingbird said:
“All I ask is something small and sweet that will sustain me
If you can give it...can I ask it of you?”


I was wandering through the labyrinthine mazes
Of the days as once I knew familiarly
Treading hills and fields and streets that long since yielded
To the slow decay that everything must see
Looking for a sign in all I could behold
I longed to bring its deepest meaning to the light
I could see a thousand facets of the past
But not a single one convinced me
That the future would be alright


Then swift movement caught the corner of my eye
A tiny thing of beauty came into my view
And the hummingbird said:
“All I ask is someplace warm and safe that will protect me
If you can give it...can I ask it of you?”


Then swift movement caught the corner of my eye
A tiny thing of beauty came into my view
What the hummingbird said was all I needed to sustain me
And if you'll listen...I'll sing it for you.

© 2015 Flatomatic Music Publishing ASCAP

Scene #37 "Supernova"

     She stopped in the middle of the front yard and looked up, at first watching the thin ghost of her own breath jetting out in hot angry bursts, rising and vanishing into the dark. Then the stars caught her eye. Beautiful: chill and clear and so incredibly present, the ancient light of long-gone suns seemed almost within her reach. She let out a long, shuddering sigh, and the tears that had been threatening finally came. Gravity won its struggle too, and she collapsed, arms hugging shaking knees, sobs coming in bursts too powerful for her to mute completely. She didn't bother to wipe the tears away, deciding instead in some hysterical tragicomic way that they were her mask, her saltwater mask, and she was melting it off. At the thought, a humorless bark of laughter escaped her and she turned her eyes again to the heavens. A blaze of light burned an ephemeral path across the sky, first white, then blue, then yellow, then red, then gone, all in an instant. After a moment she noticed that she had stopped crying. After another moment, she realized that she was musing on the shooting star. Maybe that was it: everything is only a flash, gone before you know it. Or maybe the beautiful things are almost illusions, like the fiery brush-stroke across the night sky was really only something burning to cinders in the pull of its own gravity. Nothing left but a memory of light and the notion that there must have been something of substance there, once.

     “No,” she said to the unhearing night, the ghost of her word tracing its way up towards the silent constellations. She would not be that: not a quiet, almost unnoticed flicker. If this was the end, the breaking point, the first moment of the next Life, then she would be damned if she'd play the role of the meteor. She would not fall. She would explode.

     “Supernova,” she said, again to the senseless dark. A star that has blown up to unimaginable proportions, destroying old worlds, blasting out the beginnings of brand-new worlds, the engine of change in the Universe. It was time; it was well past time, she knew now.

     She stood, brushing herself off and wiping away the last bits of her mask. She turned towards the house, knowing – finally – what must come next.

     The stars were, indeed, beautiful tonight.

*

© 2018 B. W. Flatley

Scene #31 "A Beckoning"

   He turned off the TV and listened intently to the silence. There was something about it, this late-night quiet of the house, the single low-watt lamp in the far corner, the handful of aromatic candles here and there...it made the hour different; it made the clock a liar. Suddenly the night was more present, more immediate, more aged. The synthetic drone of electronic fiction had kept it disguised, at arm's length, unnaturally young. As the fatigue of that drone relaxed, all the subtle ambient nightsounds that go as unnoticed as the color of paint on a ceiling began to rise and meet his awareness.

   A breath of late summer night wind whispered in his ear from the half-open window behind him. A call, a beckoning: he understood its ancient and untranslatable language; he closed his eyes and sighed deeply, smiling softly.

   The grass wore a sheen of moisture as the heat of the day, vanishing hastily up into the silent constellations, had left it holding a cloak spun from the very air that surrounded it. He shut the door as silently as he could: the soft clamor of such human machinery seemed unwelcome, even anachronistic, in the pale blue moonlit midnight. The stars arced with the inexorable grace of the cosmos as the Earth swung with slow certainty on its constant hinge. Crickets trilled their songs among the bushes; katydids sang their passions through the trees. The breeze itself was an invisible dance of a billion years of Life's ebbing and flowing tides.

   Some time later – whether minutes or hours, he couldn't have said, and the clock had at any rate proven untrustworthy – he lowered his gaze from the heavens and passed it over the nearby houses. A single dimly lighted window here and there attested not only to the smallness of the hour, but to something warm and safe and common to the human experience. Not a thing of overt dramatic gravity, but of quiet sameness: an agreement; an arrangement; a tacit defense against the profundity of Eternity.

   Later still he lay in his bed, sleeping peacefully, dreamlessly, kept company by the slow soft whisper of the summer night wind.

*

©️ 2018 B. W. Flatley

Scene #30 "Babbling"

   “So what's it supposed to be?”

   She knew he didn't really mean to interrupt, and she didn't mind him watching her paint. Some artists do: they want solitude, aloneness, quiet, no questions. He was lucky, however. “I don't know yet,” she replied. “Something...beautiful.”

   “Ah.” The single syllable carried quite a load of dissatisfaction. A few moments of unquiet silence passed. “Brought you a glass of Merlot. I know you like that when you're...creating.” He offered it to her.

   “Thank you, sweetie,” she smiled, hopping off the tall padded barstool she used for painting. She took the glass, kissed him on the cheek, and had a sip. “Bored?”

   “No,” he said with a shrug, “I uh, was just...yeah. Bored.” A shy smile crept across his face. “Sorry. I got to thinking -”

   “Dangerous.”

   “- yeah, always. Anyway, It's not like I haven't seen you paint, draw, sketch, whatever. I guess I just got wondering. How do you know what you're making? I mean, obviously I've seen the finished product.”

   “Well, as finished as it gets, yeah.” She sat again on her painting seat.

   “Wait, you mean the done ones aren't done?”

   She slouched a bit, a quizzical look on her face. “Yes. No. I mean, yes, they're not done. Not to me. There's always something I feel like I left out, or missed, or could've done differently,” she concluded, straightening up confidently.

   He crossed his arms, raised his eyebrows, and grunted “Hm.” After allowing the weight of this profound reply settle on the room for a minute or so, he added an echo of himself: “So, what's this one supposed to be?”

   She turned towards the canvas, sipped the wine, crossed her ankles, leaned back a little, pondering, studying the embryonic scene. “I didn't give it a hell of a lot of thought. I just started to paint – I do that sometimes, just kinda babble with a brush. See if anything coherent happens. Haven't you ever done that, maybe writing a note or an email or some kind of more creative thing? I mean, I know you've written some poems and a story or two, even if you still won't show them to me after all these many months,” she smirked, giving him the side-eye, “so I guess I kinda assumed you do this sort of thing too. This?” She pointed the brush at the work in progress, “this is babble. Hopefully it turns into beautiful babble. But I don't have any grand design, nothing profound.”

   He had moved close to her, and now put an arm around her shoulder. “I thought art was about being profound. Explicate the meaning of existence, and all that.”

   “Is that even legal?” A wry smile.

   “Only in four states. This isn't one of them.”

   “Hence the wine.” She raised the glass in a mock toast and sipped. “Seriously though. Is every artistic creation you've experienced profound?”

   “There's a lot of thoroughly unprofound crap on the radio and TV.”

   “Right. We create because we create. We're wired for it, I think, in a pile of different ways. Sometimes we make something that stands as a testament to a deep understanding of the Human Condition.” She took another sip, dabbed her brush in a bit of purplish paint, and drew a few strokes across the canvas.

   “And sometimes we're just babbling.”

*

©️ 2018 B. W. Flatley

Scene #33 "Heat Lightning"

     She leaned against the rail, looking out over the river valley below, listening to the soft shushing sound of the wind in the locust trees and the diffuse whir of traffic from across the river. The lights over there and all across the hills were strangely comforting, perhaps because they transformed a run-down hull of urban decay into something almost beautiful. Either way, it was the kind of midsummer night she adored: soft, and barely below the threshold of being too warm; unoppressively humid; breezy, cloudy. There was always a presence to this kind of night, a loud quiet that was like a stereo turned way up without any music being on. It was an inscrutable prelude to an unknowable event.

     A sustained rush of warm air, a deep breath full of the scent of night, eyes closed, senses tuned, a world of possibility lightly brushing its fingertips along the blank canvas of desire, of dreams, of hopes...she listened, she felt, she tasted the very air, sensing in it something unstoppable and welcome, a long-sought moment, a break from the arrow-straight vector of life she had unwittingly followed up to this moment, this indescribable Now with its infinite depth and singular vibration.

     She opened her eyes and saw on the distant horizon dim amber flashes in the sky. People called it heat lightning, and though she never really understood why, she did know the feeling: that first distant rush of some kind of electric flux, a storm that clears the air, the torrent that brings calm.

*

©️ 2018 B. W. Flatley