gossamer

Word Prompts, ,

This week’s word prompt: gossamer.

Please post your 200 words (no more!) by clicking the comments link at the bottom of this post, keeping in mind The Rules.  Next Sunday evening 6/30/13, last week’s winner RubeRad will read the entries and select a winner.

[Click the comments link below to read entries and discussion.]

12 thoughts on “gossamer”

  1. This tingling at the tips of my fingers, as Google slips through time, lends a hint of certainty that blinks and flickers tiny glimpses of identity. I seek and linger, riding gossamer lines that lead to virtual identity. Trails that lead to guesswork and haphazard calculations.
    This tingling is those threads of pursuit that I’ve had so long, long before Google was a blip on the ethereal radar of the internet. Before Gibson thought of where my identity was going, I was already finding where I am.
    I hadn’t any idea then, and still the signal breaks amid static veins of uncertain pulse. Weakness of conviction rides tides of intense desire, both of which ebb and crash with guess after frustrating guess.
    All I’m certain of is what is not, and where I’ve stopped. I still haven’t found what Bono is looking for, and he hasn’t found me, either. Nothing lurks long enough to frame, consume, impress or even emulate.
    So I guess I am at least a shadow of what I am. Some tendril of tentative personality hinted in a collection of cards with my face on, a blurb at the top of my blog and on my profile.

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  2. Containment

    So then one day I decided I would tell my neighbor what I thought of all the noise coming from his house day and night. Not music, not yelling, just noise. Like large objects moving back and forth, and getting broken sometimes. I knocked and knocked. The door opened, and I guess that gray man was my neighbor; I had probably never met him. Not necessarily an old kind of gray, but he hadn’t any other color.
    Well, I made my complaint and asked what he would do about it. No answer. I repeated myself, and no response. Sure I was mad. I poked him in the chest. He was made of some sort of gossamer strands, he looked like a person but he definitely wasn’t. My hand was stuck to him. I tried using my foot to push him away, but that was a bad idea. It was starting to look like I had fallen for the oldest trick in the book.
    Something was rapidly approaching from overhead.

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  3. Unclean

    We sit together; sit, and do not talk. I cannot trust myself to speak, my mouth still burning from the vitriolic stream that broke the fragile dam I built but yesterday in my shame and resolution.

    I will do better tomorrow. I swear it.

    I stroke the strands of your still-baby-fine hair, and bottle up the caustic solution. It effervesces, an inward fountain of crtical analysis and self-loathing.

    [Stroke, stroke, stroke.]

    I reflect on the course of the day biting my tongue, wishing I’d bit back the words that stung. It’s not true what they say about sticks and stones…

    [Stroke, stroke, stroke.]

    Each fractious fricative and pettish phrase pronounced ricochet loudly in my mind’s ear, in sharp contrast to the silence. I dare not break the holy silence. Where is a coal hot enough to purge the trespass from unclean lips?

    [Stroke, stroke….]

    My fingers shrink suddenly away, as though burned. I look at my curled hand in an agony of tears, wishing to cast it from me; my flesh, defiled as my words.

    Oh, and there was also that…

    I am not fit to touch this gossamer.

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  4. The metal bands chimed,
    she fingered through and
    found one to hold
    thousands of sea-wrinkled miles
    from pole to pole till death.

    Folding back tangles of hard
    nylon mesh,
    the bird released
    into the softer net
    of her hands,
    whose reverent touch is
    gossamer.

    She clasped the
    warm, hard wings
    firmly to its sides,
    carefully curled her fingers over
    the bird’s quivering keelbone.
    Belly-up, helpless in her palm,
    one yellow eye glared
    as she pried the scaly claw forward,
    cinched the band,
    then turned the creature over
    and watched it thrash
    and cup the air in its wings.

    It thrust her hand downward
    as it carried her ring,
    surging
    fiercely into the
    bone-white sun.

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  5. Well here I am finally; although it’s Monday morning for some of you, it’s still Sunday evening here on the Left Coast.

    What a great variety of entries we have this week!

    I enjoyed Pooka’s gossamer web of words about finding self-identity in the gossamer web of, well, the Web.

    John H Dutterer tantalized us with a fantastic opening of a science fiction story about a mysterious neighbor made of gossamer — or maybe that is the whole story…?

    Did you guess that everybody would write something light and etheral? Well Guestagain — we have an innovative darker development of the concept. “broke the fragile dam I built but yesterday in my shame and resolution” — what a fantastic metaphor for how we daily struggle with our fallenness!

    All the above, I enjoyed and appreciated.

    But my favorite was from Joe Cool, who found a gossamer moment in what might otherwise be seen as a clinicial, scientific exercise of tagging and releasing. I especially enjoyed the image of the bird escaping from a hard nylon mesh to a softer, gossamer net of caring hands — certainly better than escaping from the frying pan to the fire, which is what you’ve done Joe Cool, as you now have to give us a word for next week, and judge what we come up with!

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  8. 到了陈思身边，转头看刚刚那个体修强者。男子看到陈力的目光，挑衅似的一笑，转身一拳打在旁边的男子身上。男子头颅少了半边，向旁边偏去，而且速度变得极慢，到了现在的程度，杀个人如果只杀肉体，就必须将肢体分开，还得过很长时间，他才会彻底死去。所以男子没有死，不过旁边也有人，他挡人路了，于是伤者被杀了。
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  9. 陈力知道后，自然不会去抢他们的东西。踏进角斗场，陈力发现有人若有若无的看着自己。
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  10. “法宝？不错啊，我活了这么久，看到最厉害的飞剑都只是巅峰灵器。不过我有我的破天，不要剑。”说着慢慢的拉开海鸥：“去拿吧。”
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