3rd Sunday for Aug., Two Weeks and a Day Late

So it’s been a busy month, yes, or at least its beginning (see post just below). Or in any event, to round off the Labor Day weekend, and so, by tradition, the passing of summer, let’s just lay it out. With a quick note first, though, that “Third Sunday Write” (cf. June 26 , et al.) is a monthly activity of the Bloomington Writers Guild, interactive on Facebook at least for the time, with directions for joining on the 3rdsundaywrite site. In any event, each month moderator Shana Ritter offers a choice of prompts which we can can then take inspiration from, in poetry or prose, with other participants commenting via their choices of lines to quote.

And, yes, there was one for July but my offering was slight and didn’t get posted here — sorry. But here’s mine for August, with the prompt I selected appearing first:

2. Ponds, lakes, streams, creeks, rivers ….pick one and describe in detail or tell a story that takes place in that landscape (a little late, sorry. . .)

The pond of the 22nd Century is more exciting than in ages past. The surface with its acid-mist spiraling up in dawn’s first heat, the miasma of noon as it all settles in, turning the sun to a fiery red — the breeze still for an hour then, at least on the surface. But over that, where the dust whirlwinds start forming; the afternoon at surface level still seemingly clear unless you look closely, head tilted to one side to see the fuzziness of your reflection within the water. The water itself deadly quiet and unmoving.

Except — where is the surface? A blending of liquid with thickening air — you check your oxygen mask as well as the seals of both helmet and suit. The “water” itself, that is the mix that passes for H2O, never quite ends with the air’s beginning. Rather, it’s more like “thick” and “unthick,” with the unthick taking on a darkening, brownish hue, the updraft still there but pulling increasing amounts of soil into it as it spirals faster.

Then, pulling the birds in — fat, carrion birds gliding in of their own will, having just fed and far too heavy to gain by themselves the altitude needed to escape the frying-pan heat of the flat, blasted fields. To rise with the wind’s help, with dust and corrosion, mutated feathers repelling the worst of it — this phase mostly passed by about four-thirty in the afternoon.

And then the shift, sudden, as vortexes collapse: dust, acid, feather-tips, whole birds on occasion overly heavy — or just too exhausted to reach enough height even with updrafts’ help. Splashing, down into the mirrorlike surface, itself shrinking now to a semi-hard, half-solid pre-evening stillness.