Photo Challenge #526: Cosmic Poetry

(Image credit: Sarah Whiley)

New life will come. Green things with their leaves fluttering in the light, mint-cool in the sleepy breeze. They will be as soft as an infant’s cry, and you will wonder if ghosts are speaking from deep within the earth.

Have you returned?

Is this the same poem, unspun and remade?

Your questions will linger in the aura of this new life, unanswered but there, not ignored but received into an embrace of giggling light.

No, they have not returned. Their ghosts are not speaking. This is a new creation, woven from the same mysterious love as the old.

The lost do not return. Not here, not now. This world is stillness for them, and if they move, they move in another, unseen and unknown.

No, the lost do not return. But from that which they came, will come another, and another. The universe does not stop giving. This is its poetry, written for us.

And as long as a poem is remembered, it exists.

It will always exist.

(Written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Photo Prompt #526)

Microfiction: The Next Generation

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(Image from Pixabay)

Microfiction: Remorse

Oh, remorse. I wish I could catch thee. You hide from me in trees and dark waters. In dead flowers. In the eyes of my victims. You rustle in my dreams, and I mistake you for the wind. You will never be mine.

(Image from Pixabay)

Microfiction: Mermaid

The animosity leaking from her eyes had me on edge. I buried my face in a book. When I looked up again, there she was, her blue eyes glistening with fury. She couldn’t know about the baby mermaid. So why did her anger pulse in the light like fish scales?

(Image from Pixabay)

Microfiction: Snow White

Snow White’s breath mists the window. She wonders how it looks from the outside, with her blue eyes embedded in the frost-speckled glass. Blue like teardrops, blue like abandoned ice, blue like the hues of her mind. She yearns for the warmth of growing things. Once upon a time was a long time ago.

Microfiction: Dreamer

I dream like tomorrow is a bluff waiting to be called. Dreaming and dreaming until the dream is the truth, and the stars become dust, and the moon is whatever I want it to be. There can be magic here, even in shadows. It hides, but it breathes. I close my eyes to see it.

It pools beneath dead trees and sits soundlessly in grey skies. In my hands it is the universe in bloom.

Love. Death. Misery. Excitement.

I dream until all words make the same sound.

I dream of never.

Graphic Design: The Girl With Rainbow Hair

This week I decided to create a character design for my MC’s best friend in the Witch Doctors Inc series, Addy. I wanted the art to reflect her personality. Addy is enthusiastic, kind, and loyal to a fault. She is sunshine and bubbles and rainbows. But how to say that in a picture? Below is what I came up with.

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A post shared by Isabel Caves (@isabelcaves)

For a long time, I could only see what was wrong with this design. It’s a composite made of several separate images that were edited (resized, reoriented, filtered) and combined. The rainbow hair was pieced together using 6-8 rainbow images. I wanted the end result to be seamless, but it wouldn’t cooperate, even after I blurred edges.

I reluctantly posted the design to my Instagram, all the while glaring at it like it had murdered a close family member.

Looking back on it now, I see things differently. It isn’t perfect, but I had fun creating it. And the more I designed, the more tricks I’d learn. Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all. Why should my design skills be?

Microfiction: Aliens

Everyone was astonished but me. The little green men from Mars weren’t little, green, OR from Mars. I was just relieved. They’d taken so long to respond to my transmission. I was beginning to think my people would never come back for me.

Microfiction: The Perfect Dress

She couldn’t wear any dress to the disco. She had to be the ocean. She needed to glow like molten aquamarine, embed her whispers in their hollow seashell hearts, collect them and watch them sparkle in the sand.

The perfect dress watched her. Smiled. In its black depths, something writhed.

Microfiction: Ghost

“There was once a wall here,” I say, sighing like the wind. Its memory is stencilled into a portrait of blue skies and emerald grass.
“Did you hear something?” the girl in strange clothes asks.
The boy shakes his head. “Those old men and their ghost stories. It’s just the wind.”