Jul 2, 2014 Original Short Stories
PHOTO PROMPT, Copyright – Claire Fuller
This is in response to the above photo-prompt for this week’s “Friday Fictioneers,” which appears on Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ blog. Every week, writers from around the world write a story based on the given photo-prompt on her site –and we have to do it in 100 words or fewer. Here’s mine.
Genre: Semi-realistic, semi-historical fiction
Word Count: 100
Reigning Supreme
©July 2nd, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
“Ozzie, this won’t make a difference,” said the brave Queen to the King.
Honesty was her greatest gift. It was also her downfall.
No one questioned him and lived.
The statue he commissioned was completed. Alas, the sculptor was also repaid with death, because the King wanted no replicas. He was that sort of king.
Eventually, everything in his kingdom fell apart. He died. Only the statue remained. Then, even that crumbled.
A traveller to his land found this on the pedestal: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”*
Only dust reigned.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*With apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Tags: #Friday Fictioneers, #Original Short Story, Flash Fiction, Micro-Fiction, Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley, photo prompt, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields
Mar 30, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Character Vignettes for Possible Novels, Original Short Stories
Loneliness — A Vignette
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 30th, 2013
The old woman sat, enshrouded in sadness and loneliness.
Her spirit was young, gay, schoolgirilish. Her mind was brilliant, but old. Her heart was carunculated, folded over and over by memories of grief, loss, hatred, jealousy and despair. Her body, though old, was strong, and her face was beautiful, like a translucent paper-covered lamp.
She had always been on the outside looking in. She had never fully understood herself. She understood others, but as an alien might, through long observation, experimentation, attempts to blend in with the locals, and even achieving a measure of success in that, but always with a sense of strange isolation. Humor and a biting wit had sustained her through all that. Faith gave her some comfort, but her mind always interfered.
She was generous with her gifts, but longed for acknowledgement, which she felt she had never got, at least, not enough.
She took care of herself, never imposed on anyone, was independent, hard-working, good and moral. She gave of herself to all who came to her. She sought, and got, contradictions, arguments, verbal sparring. She loved that, but didn’t understand that it distressed others. She was often critical, very critical of others, because no one could match her standards, not even she. This left her feeling desolate and always dissatisfied.
She could never stand anyone for too long. People irked her. They felt like burrs on her clothing, clinging madly, like little irritants, feeling poky and interfering. Yet, it was she who would long for their company, and would ask for it. Now, they bothered her at every turn. She felt as if they interfered, but it was she who interfered when she had a chance to, correcting others, expecting a weird sort of subservience, and hating it at the same time, positively glowing with impish delight when she caused distress of some kind, or disturbed people’s equanimity.
She was a mass of contradictions: A pillow stuffed with confidence and anxieties, pleasures and sorrows, losses and grief, indifference, affection, detachment and attachment, delight and irritation, love and hate.
And she was the loneliest person on the planet. Always, in her mind, her own dead mother’s voice spoke, critical and caustic, seemingly unloving and cold with a Puritan coldness.
The tragedy was that the old lady didn’t love herself. And though she felt herself to be the loneliest person on the planet, she was loved. She just didn’t fully know it, and always rejected a little while after she encountered it. After all, or so it seemed to her, if others loved her, then they didn’t really have any good taste, because she was unlovable. Therefore, she could reject them with ease.
Now, in the closing darkness of the noon, she longed again to be understood. She called her son, and got her daughter-in-law.
Her daughter-in-law, inexplicably, loved her. They both loved one other, even though they each might have got on the other’s nerves from time to time. They spoke. The old lady stated her thoughts about what she had been through recently. Her daughter-in-law assured her that everything would be all right, and reassured her of the love of her children for her. After a few sweet reminiscences about other things, the old lady said goodbye and hung up.
And after that ‘phone call, the daughter-in-law knew this much: Her mother-in-law had achieved a lot in her life, but all that had faded away with the onset of years. Age is a thief, an inexorable, ruthless and hateful thief. It takes away and takes away. When the daughter-in-law was young, she thought it would be lovely to grow old. Perhaps, for some, it might be, but she saw, first-hand that this romanticising of age was just that: A romantic notion. Age was cruel. Loneliness looms large. Loss and sadness linger.
For the sad truth remains: All of one’s achievements are naught beside the huge, pervasive threat of imminent amnesia and death.
So it is with the old lady, and so it will be for all of us, except, perhaps, those who seek immortality through art and music, because, as Nabokov said about Lolita in his immortal, shocking, dark and deeply moving book: I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita.
Finally, this: Ozymandias by P.B. Shelley.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Age, #Death, #Loneliness, #Love, Amnesia, Despair, immortality through art, Long Life, Nabokov, Ozymandias
Feb 11, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes
My daughter is happily singing this song by They Might be Giants while making her bed in her room (she’s now used to doing it, and I’m mighty pleased about that). She’s a happy child, and I love the occasional up-shifts in key, so carefree, so unself-conscious! I know she revels in the strangeness of the lyrics (she knows about the Mesopotamians, because her mom, unable to let a teaching moment go waste, told her all about them a couple of years ago. To her credit, she wanted to know).
And as I hear this song about Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, Gilgamesh and Sargon, I remember “Ozymandias” by P.B. Shelley, and remember “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” and imagine how, behind the “vast and trunkless legs of stone” in that poetic desert, the “lone and level sands” stretch far away. Then, I look at my calamitous clutter of corrected and uncorrected student papers, and feel a moment’s spasm of rebellion: Why work? Nothing survives.
Of course, I know why. It’s work, silly!
I have a Snow Day today. Like a child, I rejoice, but then soberly contemplate the gritty pile of student writing that I have yet to plough through. Work!!
Still, there’s play, and raccoons in our backyard in the summer, and love, and laughter, lots of good food, great music to play, a child who gets jokes and profound ideas, who laughs and spins and reads and thinks, and loves us unconditionally, and who’s kind to everyone, and a loving husband, who’s kind and hard-working and funny and creative beyond all imagining, and students who are wonderful, hard-working and thoughtful, and friends who are kindred spirits, and my mother who is the well-spring of love and devotion and the epitome of hard-work, and a sister and bother who are good and loyal and hard-working and fearless, and I have all those unwritten stories and poems, and finally, all those dreams waiting me on the far shores of sleep.
Looking back on this run-on sentence, I see one hyphenated word that jumps out at me, like a monkey from a tree (just felt like using that simile. You don’t like it? Ah, well. Better luck next time). What word? You guessed it: Hard-working!
Work! Work! Work! says the monkey on my back.
I’d better get back to working hard. I’ve not much time to waste.
So much to be happy about in the midst of so much work in the world!
Tags: Ashurbanipal, Gilgamesh, Grading Papers, Hammurabi, Ozymandias, Sargon, Snow Days, Thankfulness, They Might Be Giants, We're the Mesopotamians, Work