This morning, the blog muse is strangely silent. She has nothing to say about writing, reading or anything else factual, as she usually does on Mondays, and so nor do I. (Although just typing that makes me wonder if I should muse on the concept of the muse!) Anyway, I’m hoping that it’s because she’s feeling fictional and creative, so here’s a picture of some of Rory’s Story cubes and an off-the-cuff response which I hope will be amusing, entertaining or at the very least, coherent.
It’ll be a rough draft,so please be gentle, but let me know what you think!
“Meet me at the fountain – You know? The one with the fish in it? – at 4 o’clock,” he said. But it’s ten past and there’s no sign of him. I should have known he wouldn’t show. My Dad has never been late for anything in his life, but the number of times he hasn’t shown up at all, well that’s legendary.
I walked around the edge a third time, trying not to look for him, trying to pretend that I was here to study the fountain’s engravings. It was an old installation – been there since Capability Brown did the gardens probably, although in those days the fish would have been something a bit less exotic than the karp which now nibbled on pond weed in the setting sun.
I got to the North-East compass point when something made me look up and out, as if a sound had caught my attention, though I’d heard nothing consciously. I read this poem once, it said “The sun sets in the West, so if you see a light in the East it will be the fire of my love, burning to return to you, borne on a magic wind to be with you wherever you are.”
There was a light in the East that night, but in the age of modern electric light, I knew it was just the gift shop, where I’d finished working a little early today to make it over here by four. But the poem came to mind and I like the idea of a lost lover, and I guess I wanted some magic in my day to make up for the disappointment. I closed my eyes and saw a rainbow, with my lover (not just his love’s fire, but himself in person) transported along it from some great distance to be by my side. He took my hand and led me into the orchard grove out past the rose garden. We sat under a tree. He said that we would be married in a secret ceremony, that nobody needed to give me away, because I belonged to noone but him. He promised he would never be parted from me again, that we would be together forever. He told me I was the one.
But when I opened my eyes, there was only a fountain, and fish, and a clock which no longer made any pretence that my father would be coming to meet me.
elmowrites 