This week's prompt is a photo by Jaime Sanchez Cuenca titled “Gran Baba el Palmar.” We found it on the Instagram feed @photographizemag. The photographer’s Instagram is @jaimecuen. Check them both out, they’re terrific!
Each Imaginative Storm writer offered one line from the ten-minute pieces they wrote during our Saturday Morning Imaginative Storm Writing Group. It's always free; if you'd like to join, email nave@imaginativestorm.com for your invitation. The title “The Frothing Waves in the Sky” comes from the first line spoken by Catherine Cullinane
The frothing waves in the sky and bubbles
were creating exuberant memories of a lifetime.
My land conforms to the creases of your face.
Faceless birth, orphaned legacy. Survival depends
upon it depends upon descending a ladder so
that I can fly aloft, if only for a moment, before
descending into the silent splash. He lacks
the life skills to thrive. Do it again, she squealed,
and he did, over and over, higher and higher, until
she touched the salmon sky. Lost hope dwindles
from the rutted driveway-soul-crushing life. Wash,
wash. Whee. Here you go. Flee. We packed our dream
satchels with libraries of stories. Painted salmon skin
in utero. How do I write a haiku with a thrall and thrill
of a zebra sky with salmon skin? Mother and child morph
into his sibling launch at high noon and towels. He cooks,
listens, and adds sky and bubbles to her father's legacy
molecules. Squeezed between this and that, now and then,
us and them. Yesterday, on the walk around Lake Balboa,
a tarot reader named White Feather told me I'd lost my faith.
Oblivious of the incoming storms. Splash face gasp lifted higher
for a moment as legs find their motion in that rhythmic toss
of kick and flex. Fly, my child; I hear those words, and they take me
for the rest of my life. Smiling, she pulled him into the churning
water and for the first time he laughed. The way things are
and not how they could be. Ride it like a wild horse. Add water
to keep the flow across flesh. But today, overcoming the raft
of nature, they broke the unwritten rule. Into a future beyond comprehension. The silent splash of eternity fingers
that have silhouetted the pages. We breathe, we emerge,
we ascend and are happier because of this journey down under,
into the waters of the numinous. Oh no, Mommy, he squealed,
bracing against nothing, leaving her embrace in the watery nest
launched too soon in exuberance, not quite a willing letting go
nor airborne joy. The freedom of a child splashed in joy, released
to the sea. Water and light, in the beginning and at the end.
Embrace what's left in between. Overcoming the wrath of nature
is definitely not fun; s imply looking at this picture, I found myself
fighting for breath. She thought it was far better to jump and die
than to live a life no longer her own..
ORDER OF SPEAKERS
Catherine Cullinane
James Navé
Susie Shipman
Terry Varner
Ann Campbell
Maria Wasson
Geneva Hendry
Marianne Furedi
Jocelyn Wasson
Cyndi Miller
Linda Smith
Marguerite Kearns
Zenith Thalden
Stewart Mintzer
Jensie Sloan
Katerina Tana
Wendy Swenson
June Kinoshita
Lei Wang
Allegra Huston
Ann Cole
Elaine Heveron
Lou Faber
Anna-Louise Reysenbach
Jane Goldberg
Arlene Shapiro
Barbara Benedict
Kelsey Walters
Lyn Rothman
Kathleen Wilson