nixsight

Heard this on Radio 1 today. Almost everything else they played made me want to stab my ears with… whatever was handy!. But this…?

Oooh, me likey.

It’s a bit of a Don’t Falter for the end of this summer, far as I’m concerned…

sin-thi-siz by Mel Cook

Rol gave himself a kick in the nuts this week: They Were Robots All Along
I hopefully dodged the bullet that he was readying for himself with some Rock ‘N’ Roll romanticism: Each Night I Ask The Stars Up Above

Course, now I’d like to take a pass at it, now that I realise that they aren’t robots at all…

Really not sure about this week’s piece… It wasn’t meant to use idiom, but then it just kind of happened. I was very drunk.

The picture:

Untitled by Cyn Hechinger.

The writing:
http://elephantwords.co.uk/2007/09/13/and-i-feel-fine/

Another week begins at Elephant Words, with the following image, submitted by Andrew Cheverton -

Preso by Nany Mata

Josh draws the 24 hour shift this week, but as he was the first of us to do it, and the last time he came up with the wonderfully evocative “Blame the Wharf, Bless the Bacon“, it should be a doozy.

I’ve got ages, till Friday, but I already have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing. So far, though, whenever I’ve thought that, I’ve ended up changing my mind at the last minute, so I can’t be relied on…

Please go on over and enjoy! www.elephantwords.co.uk

My father was the greatest of us, and when life finally brought him low, as it does us all, it was my sacred task, as his youngest son, to lay him to rest.

With two wives and goodness knows how many women, the hard work of several lifetimes, many children and more grandchildren…
With more than a few dozen battles, in more than a couple of wars…

It was still no surprise that it was his heart that did for him… It was just too big.

Too full of those women, those children, and all of those fallen comrades, and other comrades still taking a swig at the bar.

So I carried his meat and his bones, over one of my too weak shoulders as is tradition, to the chosen place, the place chosen out for his best fitted memorial.

And I rested his carcass down on the soft earth before the bare, flat, rock sheet that stretched on as far as the eye took you.

And I set to work, at first slowly, but gaining speed with every exertion.

This is how I did it.

I chose my spot in the rock. And I flexed my slender craftsman’s fingers, and tested my tapered, craftsman’s hands. I touched the spot in the rock that I had chosen. I drew back my hand into a fist. And uncoiled it at the rock, as a scorpion’s tail.

The first cut ached in my mind, as it always does, as my mind always did, recoiling at the impact of extended fingers on rock, before remembering that this caused me no pain; that my hands glide through rock, as steel through sinew, or a storyteller’s breath through a lie.

Because father was born a Warrior, and a Man, and a Father, but I was only born a Builder… Simply a Stone Shifter. And this is what I do.

So I scooped out giant boulders of rock, one a hand, and tossed them to one side, shoulders strengthening with each throw, until I had hollowed out a place in the permanence of stone for my father. I lifted him into it. I said the words. I tried to remember him as best I could in that single moment, as clearly as my simple, Stone Shifter’s heart would let me.

And I buried him. Returning the stone, with him beneath. Rock on boulder on bone. Until all the stones were returned, and his heart underneath pushed them into a mound.

And then I kept on, tearing up fresh rock, gouging pools and then valleys in the steady, ancient face that nothing had previously marked, not allowing the tears in my eyes out onto my face, building and building, making a hill of my father, always so steady, always so sure. Making a mountain of him, his shadow always reaching out, his silhouette never far from the horizon.

For days, I tore at the world, building fitting tribute to my father; weeks, until I had nothing left to give. And then I fell, and slept for a year, hands reaching out, a weakness in our world, hands reaching out to the mountain now where my father stood before.

When I woke, the grass had grown around me. A year of inertia and entropy and the natural world on my skin. The mountain stood.

There are others that I have built, now. Other mountains, other hills. For every thing that I have built with intention, I have devastated lives and torn canyons out of the world through lack of care, but in my father’s memory, I try to build more often than I break as I move through this world.

And every year, I return to that place, and I add a few more rocks, so that now my father, the mountain, stands still taller than before; so that now, as ever, I stand before you, ever in his shadow.