Sep 10, 2015 Original Short Story
A Love Story And A Canoe-Trip
©September 10th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
Every night, Jacob cleaned his hoe, his rakes, his pitchfork and his trowel, and put them away. He’d take out his fiddle, and play a slow tune on his back porch. His Bernese Mountain Dog, Buckminster, lay at his feet. The sunset stretched into infinity. The corn-stalks were ripening. The rain had been good this year, and the lake nearby was full of fish. He felt he should be happy.
He stopped playing, went inside, put the kettle on the stove, cracked open two eggs, made an omelette with onions, fresh-picked tomatoes and green peppers, and ate it with brown bread, smeared with yellow butter. He heated up coffee, sloshed in some rum, and drank deep and fully.
Then, he washed himself noisily at the large kitchen sink, and towelled himself off, humming tonelessly all the while. Something moved at the corners of his vision — a shadow, perhaps. He turned and looked. There was nothing, nothing at all. Disappointed, he went on towelling.
He had been born mute. He was not deaf, though. Everyone but his wife had thought he was a loser. Josie had been beautiful, dark-eyed and adoring — and he had loved her deeply during the ten years they’d been married. Then, one day, after the rains failed to come for three years in a row, she had left him, quietly, without awakening him, at dawn.
He had awoken to the sound of her car hitting a tree.
They say he was never the same after that, but he thought he was. Here he was, playing his fiddle, with his dog at his feet, working the fields, eating normally, sleeping at 10:00 every night. Here he was, sowing, tending, reaping the corn, with a few hired men and women. Here he was, playing at the local coffee-houses with the local Old-Time group cobbled together from old friends and school-mates, who’d come to see him for who he was — a strong, unspeaking, gentle giant of a man, with music pouring out his being, and with love for all things that grew. With grace, he had dealt with everything that was handed to him, even this, the most devastating blow of all.
Of course, he was fine. Wasn’t he?
He went upstairs, changed into his night-clothes, and took out the photograph of Josie. He looked at it carefully for a little while, then put it away, after wiping both the photograph and his eyes with a rough face-cloth.
Then, he got into bed, flipped open Robinson Crusoe, a book that Josie had loved, and read for a few minutes. Reading was always difficult for him, but he loved it, carefully mouthing the words to himself, loving the words, as his wife had taught him to do. He came to a description of a canoe, and paused in his reading.
Somehow, this canoe brought him pleasure as no other boat had before. He loved rowing, loved going onto the glassy stretch of water on the lake near his fields, loved seeing the reflections on it, the darting fish, the languidly waving fronds below, the rocks that slipped past his vision into unfathomable depths. His eyes closed, and the book slipped from his hands, and he was asleep.
And he was rowing, rowing, rowing onto a faraway lake on a canoe that gleamed silver and black in the moonlight. And at the prow of it sat his wife, smiling, holding out her hands to him, and gleaming silver and black in the moonlight. And his dog, Buckminster, sat proudly at the stern of the canoe limned in light, his tongue hanging out gladly. And Jacob sat in the middle, resting his paddles, smiling back at Josie, his eyes shining black and silver in the moonlight. His heart was filled with song, and he reached out to hold her hands.
In the morning, when the sunlight streamed in, and illuminated the room with gold, washing out the paler gold of the reading light, it found Jacob asleep, with a smile on his face, and the dog at his feet.
Neither of them stirred, even as the sun rose high overhead.
Somewhere, a beautiful shadow detached itself from the wall, and walked towards them. Golden dust-motes danced into the room.
The air was still. Outside, a fly buzzed outside on the window-sill, and a lone loon called across the lake for its mate.
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Tags: #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, canoe, love story
Jun 14, 2015 Free Verse
Tags: #Original Poetry, #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, teacher retiring
Jun 5, 2015 Teaching and Learning
Genre: Goofy Science-Fiction
Word Count: 100 words
Slugging Through The Cosmos
©June 5th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
We are the Slug-People. No, wait! Don’t back away from us. We come in peace, we truly do.
See, we got stranded on your lovely blue-green-white planet. We wanted a piece of it.
Our planet, which was all green and blue like yours, blew up. Nobody on any planet we visited believed us. Someone blamed it on my colleagues and me. We were trying to find food for everyone. It’s what we always did. Slowly, we ate our dense, green planet. Then, it combusted spontaneously.
No, we don’t mean to harm you.
Could you spare us just one green island?
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Tags: #Friday Fictioneers, #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, 100-word original short story based on a photo prompt, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields
Oct 13, 2014 Original Short Stories
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Word Count: 100 words
The Visitor
©October 13th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
The Visitor looked around.
Cautiously, she tapped the glowing brass disc. A shimmer made her rear back.
Surveying the row of white and black teeth, arrayed like a beast without a body, she thought, “I must not fear.”
She let her extremities travel over the teeth. The beast did not stir.
When she bumped against something, a red light glowed. She leaned against the teeth, smooth and white, and a strangely beautiful, discordant noise blasted out of something behind her. She hissed.
Dust from some explosion lay in stillness about her.
She sniffed delicately. “Human,” she thought, turning to go.
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Thanks to Rochelle Wisoff-Fields for hosting Friday Fictioneers, and for the photo-prompt! Friday Fictioneers is an online writing community, and we respond to photo-prompts with 100-word short stories. Check out the link below for other stories on this prompt! You will be amply rewarded.
Tags: #Friday Fictioneers, #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, 100-word short story based on photo prompt, Science Fiction post-apocalyptic short story
Oct 1, 2014 Original Short Stories
Copyright-Kent Bonham
Genre: Dark Mystery
Word Count: 100 words
I Remembered the Sun
©October 1st, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
“Let’s visit that haunted cabin in the woods,” said Ry.
We were playing near the creek bordering our trailer-park. We never crossed it. Once, we had. We’d raced home when we glimpsed a man who aimed a gun straight at us. We’d been five. My mother had slapped me saying, “NEVER go beyond that creek!” I’d stumbled over to Ry’s trailer, crying.
Now, we were big boys, eight years old.
“Okay,” I said, surprising myself.
“Wanna lollipop?” he asked.
“Thanks!” I said, taking it.
We crossed the creek, and entered the woods. The sun was beautiful. I remembered that later.
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Thanks, Rochelle, for hosting Friday Fictioneers! For those who are curious, this is an online community which responds with 100-word stories to a weekly story challenge based on a photo-prompt.
Thanks, also, to Kent Bonham, for the strange, creepy photograph which inspired my story.
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Tags: #Friday Fictioneers, #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, Missing, mystery, suspense
Sep 17, 2014 Original Short Stories
Genre: Magic Realist Fiction
Word Count: 100 words
Wax-Blood
©September 17th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
Farewell, my friends.
Those I’ve loved have melted away, and all those whom I hated have made moulds out of them. They sit, grinning, like skull-candles upon a mantelpiece in the home of the enemy, wherein visitors enter, and say, “Oh, how … unusual!”
All whom I loved do not exist, except as pieces in someone’s dream, atop a mantel-mountain with trophies littered around, like sleeping cats who may, at any time, unprovoked, unsheathe their claws.
Yesterday, I took my hoe, and went to my little terrace-garden on the top of the mountain.
I met a jaguar.
Sunlight spilled on blood.
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Tags: #Friday Fictioneers, #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, 100-word short story based on photo prompt, Flash Fiction
Sep 11, 2014 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, Original Short Stories, the surreal and the unreal
Genre: Fantasy/Supernatural Fiction
Word Count: 100 words
You Won’t See Me*
©September 11th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
I lived alone in the world behind the mirror. Those whom I saw, looked back at me, but didn’t see me – just themselves, endlessly repeated. They didn’t look, you see.
They didn’t see me, mouth open, beseeching… See me! Free me!
No, they smiled or pirouetted, smiled, frowned at fat, examined bruises, glared, and spoke to unseen enemies, stroked their hair, but missed me entirely.
Then, a child saw me, reaching out her hand. I stepped through.
Everyone vanished behind my mirror. I couldn’t see them, just a lonely, lace-curtained window reflected in the mirror.
And I didn’t see me.
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Thanks, as always, to our Fairy Blog-Mother, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields, for hosting, and to Janet Webb for the lovely photo-prompt!
*With a nod to The Beatles for the title!
Tags: #Friday Fictioneers, #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, 100-word short story based on photo prompt, Flash Fiction
Jul 23, 2014 Original Short Stories
Here’s another one I wrote, and it’s 74 words long! I cannot believe it! This was done entirely for my daughter, who sat beside me and wondered whether I could write a shorter (than 100 words) story based on a prompt. So, to her wide-eyed astonishment, I unfolded this one from start to finish, with only one phrase and two words edited! (I know it’s weird, or even weirder than the last one, but please be kind, since I wrote this under duress!)
Another One Bites the Dust
©July 23rd, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
I held up my chopsticks and surveyed them calmly.
“More hot sauce,” I snapped.
The waiter came forward in an obsequious manner.
I leaned forward and caught his nose between my chopsticks.
“Get rid of your nose! I don’t like people with big schnozzes serving me,” I said through gritted, razor-sharp teeth, which I bared menacingly, as if to help him with the project.
He turned pale and fled.
Another one bites the dust!
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Tags: #Friday Fictioneers, #Original Short Story by Vijaya Sundaram, Flash Fiction, Micro-Fiction, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields, seventy-four word short story