Author Archives: esmarsha

January 16, 200

“Don’t worry, there’s nobody but us for miles.” The two had made it to camp late the night before, setting up just after dark.

“I know. I just can’t help it.  I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Comon, it’s not like I’ve never seen you naked before.”

“That was different. That was…it was dark then.”  The blush was clearly evidenced in her voice.

“I promise you, it’s the second most fun you can have with your clothes off.” Serenity of the kind only found in unspoiled wilderness encompassed them.

“Fine, I’m coming.”  The woman stepped out of the tent, a stunning archetype of rustic beauty.  Beside her stood her smiling mate.  “But I’m keeping the towel on until we get to the lake.”

“You realize you are ridiculous.  The lake isn’t more than fifty yards away.” He walked beside her in nature’s clothing.

“…and you still love me anyways.”

They reached the edge of the lake.  She neatly folded her towel and set it on a rock. A breathtaking mountain vista looked down on them from the clear sky.  Together, leaning on each other for support, they waded into the crisp alpine waters. Playfully they splashed, water droplets sparkling in the pure morning sunlight.

“You’re beautiful.”

January 15, 2008

“NOOOO!”

Impossibly strong flannel arms bound the woman’s arms to her side.  Before her a murderous looking lot crowded her fiancé.  Snick! A glint of silver…

Jula Blades awoke to find herself tangled in her sheets on the floor next to her bed.  The head of Jared, the fiancé in question poked over the edge of the bed.  A concerned look adorned his face.

“You had the dream again didn’t you?” She just panted, trying to regain control of her breath. “Jula, that’s the third night this week! We have to figure out what’s causing this.  It can’t go on.  You’re turning into a wreck.”

“It’s nothing. It’s just a dream. That’s all.”  She shivered slightly, her body drenched in sweat.

“It’s not nothing and you know it.  I don’t know if I believe in premonitions and the like, but something is happening.  I know it is.”

Jula unsteadily stood up, putting the sheets in order.  She climbed back into bed and wordlessly fell into a restless approximation of sleep.  This scene played itself out many times over the next several weeks.  Each time Jared encouraging her to do something about it, and each time herself going back to sleep without a word.

She wasn’t afraid to seek help.  She was afraid because she knew it would come to pass.  Some feeling told her that it was real.  It was only a matter of time.  Jared was everything she ever wanted in a relationship and she refused to let it be taken away from her.  Maybe, if she just stayed alert she could keep it from happening.  She couldn’t let it happen.  She wouldn’t let it happen.

“NOOOOO!”

A familiar scene played out in her nightmarescape. She was bound, helpless.  But this time something was different.  It was all too real.  She watched the thugs kick her downed mate, his body a lifeless silhouette against the greasy backdrop.  Snippets of memory came to her panicked mind.  A restaurant, they’d been on a restaurant.  He’d insisted on walking home because “it’s good for you.”  Oh why did he have to walk home! She watched them beat him and spit on him and this time she knew what was coming.

“Nooo!  You will never do it you bastards! I won’t let you!”

She fought the invisible hands, breaking free in an amazing display of primal determination. A flash of silver, a lightning quick movement, and it was all over.  She lay bleeding beside her battered mate, a knife embedded in her chest.  She had done it. she had saved him.  She could finally rest in peace.  A smile graced her lifeless face.

“Jula…Jula…”  An ethereal voice called her from within the bright light that seemed to be from everywhere and nowhere.

“Jula…you made it.  It’s morning and you didn’t wake up once.  It’s the first time I’ve seen you so peaceful in months.”  She lay against his chest, an arm draped around her own.  His speech provided a comforting rumble as she awoke truly rested for the first time in what seemed like an eternity.  She smiled and took in the moment.

“It’s over.  You’ll be safe now.”

April 9, 2008

“GODAMMIT! IS THAT THE BEST YOU’VE GOT!”

 Noah’s scream barely penetrated the pounding rain.  In response, a large thunderclap smashed against the evergreens over-head.  “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. This was supposed to be the easy way out.” He cursed angrily at himself.  He’d been stupid.  He’d gotten away with shit before and got off with nothing but a handslap.  This time his rap caught up with him.  The judge gave him an option: prison, or he could enroll in this “alternative program.”  The choice seemed obvious at the time.

 He had been dropped off on the tiny remote lake.  It didn’t even have a name on the map, like so many others they had flown over.  The plan was to meet with “some crazy medicine man,” who was to act as his counselor.  “Fucking summer camp!”  It had been three days.  His food was gone.  He was soaked to the core.  And there was no fucking medicine man to be found.  For the first time in as long as he could remember, Noah fealt truely helpless.  There was noone there to take out his anger on, no scapegoat for his weakness.  He was freezing, starving, bloody fucking alone.

 Warmth.  The crackle of a fire.  It was all Noah could do to lay surrounded by the thick canvas bedroll, as his senses returned.  He suddenly realized what all this meant.  “Where the hell have you been!” he yelled to the wilderness.

 A voice behind him made him jump, to see a grey-haired balding man leaning against the trunk of a Red Cedar. “The flowers are particularly livid this year.  I hope you don’t mine that I stopped to listen.  It’s only rarely that their choir is so well rehearsed.  Breakfast?” The man said, offering a half-eaten bowl of what appeared to be oatmeal in Noah’s direction.

 “Umm…did you eat out of that?”  The stranger gave a quick nod.  “Thanks, I’ll pass.”  “Suit yourself.  It’ll be one of your last hot meals for awhile.”  The woodsman took another scoop of the mush.”  In answer to your earlier question, you said thanks.”

 “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”  Noah was convinced by this point that he’d been suckered into being flown out to the middle of fucking nowhere, to be stuck with a complete wackjob.”

 “You said thanks.  When I asked you if you wanted food, you said thanks.  Would you have even feigned polite conversation when you arrived?  I’ll be blunt.  You have the upper hand.  There is absolutely no way that I could break through the walls you have put up to protect yourself.  I needed you broken before I ever met you.”

 “So you would have just sat back and let me die!” Noah was standing by this point, falling back into his practiced threatening act.  A chill morning breeze made the hair on his boxer-clad body stand on end, slightly lessening his desired effect.

 “Of course not, it’d be somewhat difficult to train you if you went and died on me.  No, I was watching you.  It’s not as hard as you might think with all that interference you have.  Interference, it’s what I call the kind of constant gnawing anger that only humans experience.  We truly are a strange being, to hold rage inside us for no reason other than because we can.  No other creature does that you know.”

Noah just stood there frozen in his suddenly useless pose.  There was some feral aire about the guy that made him uneasy. “And what is that gibberish supposed to mean?”

 “That, is what you’re here to find out.  Now get dressed! It’s time for lesson one.  By the way, the name is Mat, Mat Windchaser.”

 “Weird fucking medicine man, I knew it.”  For some reason Noah found an inane level of amusement from this as he pulled on his pants.

June 24, 2010

Prompter: Gibbs

Shuffle-clank. Shuffle-creak.  Shuffle-clank.  Today was one of her better days.  Gert was up out of the wheelchair and walking.  The Company supplied leg braces were supposed to give her the mobility of any native terran, but damned if they weren’t noisy, and uncomfortable.  Even with the noise they fell far short of the physical aptitude regulations for full citizenship.

Painfully she crossed the short distance from her apartment to the pathetic, dirty excuse of a closet office. Her official title was “Extra-planetary advisory chair,” but really she was a glorified paperweight.  Just another one of the moon-rocks that had been so popular during the middle of the 21st century. The company ’employed’ her in an attempt to make amends for taking her from her home, for crippling her, for making her an outcast.

Many called the extra-planetary mining operation a folly, doomed from the start.  The cost of supplying a lunar outpost would be tremendous, not to mention returning the raw materials.  Still, there was no water to poison on the moon, no atmosphere to pollute.  The advantages were enough to sway several wealthy investors, and for a time it seemed there gamble had paid off.

For twenty-three years the operation thrived. The investors were fat and happy. The exotic location attracted some of the brightest to man the mostly mechanized outpost. Among them were Gert’s parents to be, although they didn’t know it yet.  For twenty-three years it looked as if life on the moon was a sure thing. Gert was seventeen when the mining company decided to pull out.  The damage had been done before she was even born, before her parents even knew she was going to be born.  The effects of low gravity on a fetus are irreversible.

Up there it hadn’t mattered. She was perfectly suited for the environment.  She was the only child of twenty doting parents.  She could hold the whole world in the palm of her hand, and did on more than one occasion in the panoramic observation platform.

The gravity of the closure of luna’s only permanent residence did not fully sink in until the last tender landed at the Space Port of Seattle.  She couldn’t see the streaks of rain on the outside of the inches thick viewport, tears of frustration streaked down her own face clouding her vision.  She couldn’t move.  Her body conspired with the cruel, cruel earth to trap her in her seat.

“No.” She shook the memory from her head, stopping just outside the entrance to the mine administration building.  She gazed upward at the fading orb in the morning sky.  Her former home called to her, or perhaps some part of her that had never left.  With only the heavens as her witness, she made a solemn vow. “No matter the odds, I will see the moon again.” With that, she shuffled inside.

May 30, 2010

Prompted by: Dami

Sam sighed to herself.  She had come here expecting to save the world, or have a mystical revelation or something.  She had been saving for this trip for three years.  Every month a small part of the meager paycheck from her part time job during college went to the Tibet fund.  Two weeks after graduation, a political science degree fresh in her possession, she boarded the plane with all the pent up ambition of her school years.

It was not to see the region as a tourist.  She wanted to see the country as a scientist.  She wanted to see it as a local might.  It was everything she could hope for.  There was a modern day resistance going on.  A silent refusal of the rule of the Big Red Government by the pacifistic local peoples.  The events of the coming years could determine the future of the world.  “Surely, a small part of southwest China couldn’t affect us,” said her friends.  She believed there was a deeper, psychological connection with Tibet than most people would realize, and certainly more than they would admit.  The people of Tibet offered a last bastion of hope.  They refused to give in, and yet they refused to resort to the violence favored by so much of the civilized world.  A victory of the people here could return hope to those in the western world, an unstoppable wave.  Somewhere in Tibet was hidden Pandora’s fragile butterfly.  She just had to find it.

She started at the university, meeting with a fellow American student who had been attending school in Lhasa.  After a week of acclimatizing to the local culture, she began her formal interviews.  First an overview of their place in the community, socio-economic position, traditions, and religious beliefs.  Then gradually she introduced a few more pointed questions regarding Chinese occupation, and the exile of the Dalai Lama.  The work was made slow due to the necessity of a translator.  The results were often too vague to be immediately useful.

At the end of her month long tenure she had interviewed dozens of people.  She had notebooks full of her field scribbles.  A pouch bulging with full audio tapes was tucked in her luggage. Despite this she had not found the secret she had been looking for.  The people were not hesitant to talk about their desire for the Chinese government to leave them to their own devices.  Yet, none of them seemed particularly distraught by this actuality.  None of them seemed frustrated by the lack of progress on the liberation front.  Couldn’t they see the situation they were in!  She was angry for them.

Stolidly, she gazed out the window of the tired taxi she sat in.  The lights of the approaching Lhasa Gonggar Airport made neon waves through the cracked, rain-streaked window of the cab.  She pulled to a stop next to a large sign written in English, Tibeten, and Chinese.  “Namaste.” She bowed to the driver and payed her fare.  A monstrous red flag fluttered at the top of a towering flag pole.  She couldn’t help but smile.  Hidden from view of the road, a small string of colorful prayer flags tied together the sign and pole.  Even here, the resistance was on.