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Today’s walk gave me the inspiration I needed, while I hummed away to May Day songs. I’d like you to write a story with a May (Day) theme.
It could be goings-on at a festival or fair while Maypole and Morris Dancers dance in the May. Or a nod to the Green Man (Jack-in-the-Green) defeating the Holly King of winter. Perhaps be inspired by the lines of a May song, or tell me of some other May folklore, real or created. Or simply observe the magical appearance of flora or fauna at this special time of year.
For this I am going to extend the word limit to 500.
Lyrical determination (thin on legend)
2001, around eleven, on the first day of May, lying on a sun-striped bed in an attic studio, John Martyn exhorting, ‘May you never’, in a voice fluffy and worn as the sheet beneath them and a saxophone further ramping up lust, Fran Lloyd satisfactorily surrendered her virginity to Ivo Kinnersley. Ivo, at eighteen, had a reputation for both skill and sensitivity (he known to be well-practised) and Fran congratulated herself for having risen before dawn to bathe her face in May Day dew so as to ensure her irresistibility.
Not that it was the first time she’d been naked on this bed: ever since discovering she was officially Francesca, Ivo had called her ‘Chess, ’ embarking on painting a series of ’Chess Pieces’ for which she, sometimes part-clothed, had been posing for some weeks, John Martyn on eternal repeat. She’d whiled away conversation-lacking hours, substituting lyrics and mentally listing other things she feared she might’ve already missed – not yet sixteen the list seemed daunting, but at least she could tick off skin to skin sex with a naked Ivo.
Seven years later, the ‘May never’ of the song became nigh on permanent soundtrack to the seemingly doomed relationship between herself and the man she’d wanted at first sight. His fluctuating uncertainty, his occasional sabotage undermined her confidence, distorted her behaviour. Until, spotting by chance in a charity shop, John Martyn’s ‘Anthology’ CD, she purchased it. Allowed it to infiltrate her mind and to initiate a determined – and ultimately future-proofing weekend of rapprochement, ‘May you never’ becoming unthinkable while the final track – ‘I don’t wanna know – ’convinced her to opt for love rather than the evil of separation. Sitting up, she said, ‘Yes, I do want to marry you. Sooner the better.’
During the hasty, still sometimes aggressive weeks that followed, she once again resumed sitting naked for Ivo, in secret, in a Glasgow flat. The years spent training her future husband to trust her proved their worth as well as unexpectedly equipping her to pass with flying colours the test he’d inadvertently set her.
[343 words excluding title]
Princes Street, Edinburgh, in early May. The morning is bright, the sky opaque with a promise of blue, and there’s enough chill in the air to warrant the cardigan I left on the back of the chair in the kitchen. I’m walking on the sunny side of the street – the side across from the gardens – with measured, purposeful steps as I head to a training course in the council building next to Waverley Station.
It’s Thursday, barely eight o’clock, and the shops aren’t open yet. The street is fairly quiet. The flower sellers are setting up on the edge of the pedestrianized area, the window cleaner outside the phone shop is whistling discordantly, and the joggers who dart out from the Premier Inn, engrossed in setting their watches, weave to avoid me. There’s a homeless man wrapped like a burrito in the doorway of Ann Summers.
And yet… there is still only me.
I cross Hanover Street, angling left over the pedestrian crossing towards the National Gallery, and into the gardens.
Where my progress is abruptly halted by a small, white feather, hovering two feet off the ground, directly in front of me.
I scan my surroundings to see who might be responsible for this wayward item, but there is nobody either close enough to me or looking remotely interested in my astonishment. I move left to go round the obstruction.
Annoyingly, the feather moves too.
More annoyingly, a bee with an erratic flight path lands on top of the feather, like a red carder paddle boarder becalmed on a current of air.
I release an impatient sigh. My mind has wriggled free from its restraints again.
Fingertips brush my elbow. ‘Excuse me, miss,’ a male voice says, ‘do you need any help? You seem…lost.’
I am lost, I want to say, but don’t. ‘It’s this feather,’ I admit, without looking round. ‘It won’t let me past.’
‘Ah,’ the voice says, heavy with misunderstanding. I don’t need to hear him move away, I feel the hollow beside me as his presence disperses.
Or could it be that the hollow is inside of me?
I hunker down beside the feather and sense the energy involved in keeping it static. I feel the bee’s wingbeats displace the air by my cheek.
Perhaps it’s not just my mind that has wriggled free from its restraints. Perhaps it’s me, too.
Decision made. I slide the bag with my laptop and packed lunch from my shoulder and onto the path at my feet, and begin to think myself small.
‘Budge up a little, please,’ I say to the bee. ‘There’s room for one more on that feather.’
Renewal Dance
Below a patchy canopy of leaves, sunlight falls in dusted shafts of light, highlighting small tufts of fluffy-winged seeds, spiralling and soaring in the breeze and somewhere, within the cool, dark, caverns of under-earth, the chime of rock, root and soil begins its soft, ceaseless, song of renewal.
Stirred from slumber beneath the ivy-curled bank of fallen oak, he hears the call of Beltane’s melody, shakes himself awake and waits.
As daylight shadows lengthen into dusky shades she comes to him, walking barefoot and silvery, along the hidden, mossy, pathways to his door.
Of course his soul leaps at the sight of her for she is the heart of him and, threaded with all the coloured ribbons of springtime, she is woven into each un-ending dance of loves flame.
He bows his head and the maiden reaches up, plucks an acorn from his leafy brow, plants it carefully in the hollow of his large, furrowed, footprint and waters it with her tears.
Together they waited for moonshine to fall, in silver shards, upon the watered spot then, with the wheel of time falling away behind them, they join the rhythmic dance in the circle of Bel’s flame.
Soft and slow the tread of their feet echoes and, as it always does, gathers up the aging memory of past dances. Then, soundlessly, with the twirling and shifting of the years, comes the added weight of all those dancing on the wheel of time.
Bel’s blaze soars and curls in anticipation as, two by two, the dancers leap over the flame until only he and the maiden remain, locked together in the brief embrace of their un-ending fate.
Together, entwined, savouring every moment spent together, they stand within the flickered heat. Steadily it scorches his woody veins and the green sap of his life bursts from his core to nourish the earth.
Mouth on mouth they pledge their love as she melts into the water that will sustain new growth. Gently, and together, they curl into the soft shell of memory, falling onto the starry cradle of earth’s renewal, and vanish into the flame-stained earth.
Quietly, below the ivy-curled bank of fallen oak, the eternal and blessed seed sprouts anew.
(369)
May
The cactus on the table, out there on the decking, it’s gone mad. Look there are four new paddle things growing off it. Mr Hoskins from next door says they’re called “cladodes”. He should know, seeing as he’s a botanist or something at the college. It’s a modified stem, apparently, which serves the function of a leaf. He came over for a cup of tea and a chat this morning. It’s the May Day Bank Holiday and he doesn’t have to work.
‘Jacqueline,’ he said, ‘what a wonderful cactus. Did you know that if you carefully separate the cladodes, you can start new cacti growing?’
Of course, I let him chatter on. I’ve been growing that particular cactus for nearly two hundred years now, but he didn’t know that.
‘Isn’t it really the same cactus, just growing in different places?’ I asked, casually.
‘I suppose, in a sense, it is. The parts are genetically identical, and they came from the same plant. That one is native to Mexico. It’s a curious thought that there may be parts of your cactus still growing there.’
‘What a thought! It’s a good job we don’t propagate like that—who’d claim the pension?’
He looked at me, sort of sideways, and I saw his eyes wander over me, pausing here and there, as men’s eyes have a habit of doing.
‘My goodness, Jacqueline, surely you’re far too young to be worrying about pensions.’
I pulled my sleeves a little further down in the warm May sunshine. There was no reason to upset the poor man. In a way I supposed his attention was quite flattering. He wasn’t unattractive after all. But I didn’t want him to catch sight of my arms at this time of year.
‘Well, somebody has to worry about them,’ I said, hoping that this would be a sufficiently meaningless and confusing answer that he would leave the topic. In fact, he did look suitably confused. And after that we talked about his work, and holidays, and the state of the roads, and—it was time for him to go.
Later, I let down the blinds and pulled up my sleeves. One on each wrist which is unusual, but it had been a rainy April and now the sun was beginning to shine. On the left, the thumb and fingers had almost emerged and on the right the fingernails were just breaking the surface. They both looked vigorous enough to make it. My present hands were quite new, so I’d probably pop these two in the shed until their bodies were big enough to make their way in the world. I’d grown a new head about ten years ago, and as my hair was very grey and my face getting wrinkled, I decided to keep it. I still remember waking up and looking through the new eyes at my old head lying on the pillow.
It’s a curious thought that there are parts of me all over the world.
(497)
Somewhere to Bloom
The cottage on the lane had a garden of pink, blue and mauve flowers on plants she couldn’t name. They faced her in clumps and drifts. On the lane she considered the pretty cottages, each one wearing its garden like a skirt, patterned, pastel – standardised, or something. And, even more annoying, they coped with the early May sun, rain and breezes: changeable conditions.
She and her partner had agreed to marry. Unexpectedly – to her – that meant moving home. They’d come down from London to look around and he was standing with her, silent.
“We can’t afford it,” he said, eventually, as if he’d been testing his patience for at least a minute.
“I wouldn’t want it.”
“We have to leave the flat.”
Without looking at him she knew his shoulders were tight.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Yes, yet. Now.”
She’d thought him good looking and sexy and it was odd seeing him another way. They’d been together two years and the second anniversary, a celebration meal which he’d cooked, had become a discussion. Or rather, a blunt talk. He’d announced they must move, they’d need more space.
On the lane he said, “There are cheaper places than this one. We must move while we can.”
“We could buy a larger flat.”
“You know we can’t.”
She did know. Too expensive. Since the anniversary they’d spent evenings looking online and doing sums.
They turned from the cottage and walked a few hundred metres to a row of terraced houses, each house little wider than the arrangement of its front door and ground-floor window. The gardens were the size of a large double bed; some had a clipped shrub or two, others grew straggly grass.
“They have potential,” she said, thinking at least they were better than those cottages. They had the suggestion of real life in their city-like density.
“There’ll be bigger gardens at the back,” he said.
This was it, the nutshell: children. She’d agreed to the pull of life that had them creating children, who didn’t yet exist, who’d play in a garden, and it wouldn’t just be the young ones growing up. Parenthood itself would be a time of blooming.
In London she always noticed the trees greening, especially the tallest and widest, under which she walked with an earthy sense that everyone else enjoyed them too. But these terraced houses with a back garden, children running over tatty grass, a private space for them, no park or busy street in sight: they’d have safety in a small area, cramped but, all around, the countryside that was hardly open to the public.
In the car going back to London she saw unfolding leaves on the country trees and hedges, the newness that was a repeat of oldness, nature’s determination, its project. Her fiancé – for the first time she gave him this old-fashioned title – he had a project that suited himself.
She dreaded their next discussion. She hoped for what may lie beyond it.
Five great stories this month, making my decision oh-so difficult and changeable.
Sandra – Lyrical Determination (thin on legend)
Smartly-penned descriptives throughout, giving vivid imagery of Fran lying prose on the attic bed, having decided to give her virginity to Ivo (having been inspired by the words of John Martyn). Love that she bathes in the magical May dew to ensure irresistibility, also how her mind must have wandered while posing. Great hooky ending.Sea –
Great visualization of urban life going on and yet she with a sense of solace. Loved the homeless man being wrapped like a burrito, and then the slip into a surreal world when the feather moves with her and her mind wriggles free from its restraints (beautifully put). Oh, and that bee, like a red carder paddle boarder – delicious. I would have loved to have hopped aboard that feather.Terrie – Renewal Dance
Loved the strong feel of May here, and the green man/May queen flavour of it all. Loved the imagery of the threads and ribbons of the colours of springtime, and how she waters his acorn with her tears; how she melts into the water which will sustain new growth, not to mention the descriptive of the wheel of time and how it eternally plays out.Athelstone – May
Such a strong voice takes us through this story of the cactus. Never knew they called the paddle things ‘Cladodes’. Chuckled at the thought of cacti claiming pensions, also of Jacqueline covering her arms ‘at this time of year’ so as not to entice him. Get the real feel of Mr Hoskins overstaying his welcome – and then came the twist: Jacqueline being a plant he had come to admire. Loved the thought of her clones being spread around the world.Libby – Somewhere to Bloom
Some wonderful undertones put real depth into this story. Loved the cottages wearing their gardens like a skirt; also ‘the newness that was a repeat of oldness’. Underneath this, the rising feel of all not being well in this relationship, her feeling his plans were to suit him (alone). Interesting how she preferred the ‘real life’ feel of the terraces. She dreaded their next discussion – I’m wagering it might be one of their last – great hook.Any one of these stories deserved to be a winner, and I hope they are considered for other competitions. But decide I must, so for voice and twist, I pass the baton to Athelstone.
Congratulations Athelstone, and thanks to Terrie, Sea and Libby for their responses to Janette’s May challenge – all so entertaining – and for the summing up.
Congratulations, Ath. I love your story. Very well deserved win.
Thank you Janette for setting the competition and for everyone’s entries. They are a very enjoyable selection of stories.
Ps, yes, thank you all for your brilliant entries, I meant to say- sorry if this didn’t come across in my summary.
When I say that I seriously didn’t think I’d win – I mean it. There was a fistful of really great entries. Thanks to Janette for the prompt and to my co-entrants for some great entertainment.
Congratulations, Ath, for your interpretation with a twist and well done Sandra, Sea and Libby as well.
I enjoyed everyone’s entries.
Its always interesting to see others take on a challenge prompt.
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