Words of inspiration re-echo to me, whispered from the tomb of a brilliantly silly man.

“Grapple with the ineffable,” is what he says, and I shall embrace the challenge.

Beside my writing desk is a stack of antique shipping crates stenciled with proper nouns.

I scribble down these names to use as characters, places.

At my elbow, a tarnished old compass pendant lies in the jumble of its thick chain, announcing true north to no one.

For no one reads the compass, just as no one reads my writings, yet the compass and I go on doing what we do.

And the chain of the pendant, and the old wood of the crates, put me in mind of barn-doors padlocked to keep at bay a dangerous beast within.

So I’m off! My pen, dancing shoeless, leaves its pattern of bare footprints upon page after page.

And thinking this, I think of socks, so now there sits a grandmother darning, her spools of thread in a neat row.

Grandma Hamburg, you’re a butterfly who has landed on a hand-rung bell, and when the bell rings, it will scare you to death.

A glance at the window shows me evening painting the sky behind criss-crossed powerlines. The day has flown.

“You’ll like this one,” I say to the bust of my dear, dead wife – there where it sits beside her silent sewing machine.

 

 

Written to the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Sunday Writing Prompt collage: