Weekly Creative Writing #16


The quiet is intense, and there is something about this sunken lake that speaks of a silence which does not like to be broken.  Which has rarely been broken.  A silence which has taken on a nearly material presence.  The clouds make a frothy ceiling for the stone walls of the lake, which rise up to the sky, and time seems to become more or less irrelevant under the enclosure of the blanketed realm overhead.  It’s odd, how time separates us humans as much as distance.  More than distance.  The old fisherman who came out of the now sagging doorway of the fishing hut upon the lake in Germany knew as little of we who were to stand looking at his fading handiwork as he knew of his contemporaries in South America, who breathed and walked the same moments of time as he did.  And he did not need to know of them or us as he came to his little porch and baited his line in anticipation of the sharp tug of today’s breakfast.  It always came, too.  He used to joke that St. Andrew and St. Peter must love him, because the fish would always come to his line, but even the fortunate fisherman could not escape time, (who can?) and a day dawned when he did not emerge blinking into the rosy sunlight of another morning.  It wasn’t long after that that the bombers streamed in lines miles long across the once-quiet sky, and the mountains frowned upwards at their piercing drone through the valley.  Perhaps it was better that the fisherman had caught his last fish before the tranquility he had loved so dearly was split in twain.  But as all wars of men do, this too came to an end, and Lady Quiet returned to her home in the green waters and rocky clefts of the ancient lake.  Years later, she took once more a small leave of absence when the river, swelled by an early spring thaw, roared into the lake, disturbing it to its archaic green depths, disturbing the creatures that lurked therein and forcing the edge of the waters to rise above the places where the frogs used to play and the animals came to drink.  The night was wild, and the moon looked down helplessly as the waters caught the little abandoned shack and dragged it out over rocks and into the swollen torrent.  But the fisherman had not been lacking in skill, and the tiny structure held together until the waters once more receded and left her sitting on the rocks in the green waters.  But now that’s far away from us in time, as we stand on the shore and look out to the dilapidated little hut in the water.  It’s strange to think that the time other than the present was just as real as the fact that the same moments we experience are just as real on the other side of the world.  The fisherman’s little paradise was once the present just as now is to us.   It is just as real to us as it was to him.  And for a moment, just a fleeting second, we could see through the strange cloud we call time.



For the wonderful counterpart of this themed concurrent weekly creative writing project, visit http://thedancingladybug.blogspot.com/

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Rantlings! =)