Photo Prompts

This is from an abandoned project my friend set me on, sending me scans of black and white photos they'd found as prompts for writing. I wrote a short story and poem, see below for the photograph followed by the writing.

Unwillingly and Impossibly Received 

Occasionally one of us will snicker or sigh to ourselves. Me and Bheki have long since abandoned vocal conversation as we wander along the river, without a map, with few supplies and little clean water. We have drifted away from the real, instead reeling through the inventive passages of our minds, imagining conversations with those who live, those who died, and those who never existed.

            …Can’t feel from the ankle down anymore. There was a point when we enjoyed a strengthening as we walked, our bodies whipped lean and sharp, cleaving miles and miles of earth; but with dwindling supplies came the soreness, then the numbness.

            I can see particles constantly dance in the air. Rain? Spores? I know its ash, but can’t help imagine otherwise. For a moment my minds blurry eye conjures a huge luminous sun, sinking into the river, forcing away the clouds, turning the river a deep and pleasant green; the fluid imagining dissipates, and I can see the ash settle on the waters surace as we walk along the misshapen craggy bank of the river… Then it shatters me.

            Brighter, more painful, more vivid than anything in human experience, comes the overwhelming visage of the photograph. There on the shore of the river, just as misshapen and craggy, the water clear of ash and swarming with natural shades, just as I remember the rivers and lakes of my youth, stands a man, with a misshapen and craggy face, combed head of hair, white shirt tucked in, cast in black and white film, relenting into posing for a holiday picture, decades ago, before the sky-fires, long before that; I had been inescapably visited by a singular moment of a time before.

            I am sure I had been screaming, but when I look at Bheki, he has the same simple flashes of emotion as before. So I conjure my Bheki, who still has energy and health, the twin who lives in my mind, and spin out this feeling, never before felt in human memory, but he simply smiles, showing his bright teeth, before he is lost, smiling, filling the sky and settling down gently into the river, just like the sun might if it weren’t eternally obscured with cloud. I am left gaping with this singular moment, the photograph, offering no guidance as to where we should go or if mankind will survive, merely suggesting that at some point in a forgotten string of history, a man was forced to stand in front of the river for a picture, a souvenir, that I have unwillingly and impossibly received.

A Moment Seen by Kodak Plus X Film

That first foray of exploration… What do people hold in their unsure grip?

Clumps of dirt? Swathes of hair and fur?

But there is my daughter, feeling the canyons and tidal waves

Of her father’s scars, slithered across his face,

A not-abnormal face,

But close to that child’s eyes it was a plank split from an ancient tree…

Brick-brown face, skin rashed working under the sun and wind,

Before the evenings spent

Dancing on canvas, an aggressor, a defender, a winner, a loser, a loser…

Two primed grown men splot out each other’s blood for an audience of tuxedos

Snarling; his brain is ingrained with the ballet of the game,

But all fights need hate to happen. Love finds no fists with which to fight with.

Ding Ding!

Hair uncombed stained vest hand holding cracked ribs other squeezing beer bottle neck constantly growling at me gazelles and hyenas yelling squeezing that bottle squeezing and squeezing and finally it shatters across my forehead

None of the gazelles make it across the lake

Apparently the blood ballet is not enough to release tension.

Pack a bag and go! Pack a bag and go!

Stood on the street corner, a rush, a gusting wind of addictive new paths

Alas, my hand produces only a grimy penny from my pocket, a stubbed path.

Taxi driver with no time no time miss sorry miss in or out in or out.

Not long after, the morning sickness came.

Shirt and tie, furnishings in shot- all suddenly appear with each fight won, violence paying for ‘proper’ domesticity. While the dulled history of this moment cloaks me the camera bites three times eating the moments

As she feels the burred jaw, the undefended face mashed by a child’s stubby hands

As he gazes at that face. Does it eat at that necessary hatred within him? She enjoys playing with the lips, the nose- does she enjoy him, or the mish-mash of features found on a boxers head?

As she looks beyond Daddy, the man with the shield, with the cudgel, at the indistinct Mummy, dazed behind a lens, watching those sprouting fingers touch those cracked lips. She asks why why why why with her gaze how how how how

Why/how do we fight why/how do we hate why/how do we love

Whilst dancing in the dark ballet

Screaming with love with hate

Loving to fight and fighting to love

Descending unto the child

Terrified of her gaze

That knows absolutely nothing and yet consumes all.