Oliver Ashford
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X-80 Oppenheimer
1 Alsoomse was already tired of the day’s work, and the mist hadn’t yet lifted from the cool, quiet waters of Aquia Creek. As all the Patawomeck women and young boys did each morning, she had risen early and prepared for another day of tending the tribe’s nets. It wasn’t the most arduous task that the elders and the Dictates had laid down but neither was it the least. After a winding trudge through the Silver Maple trees that grew so thick on the banks of the Potomac river, she had shucked out of her patchwork of skins and salvaged old-world cloth and slid down into the icy waters of the creek. Since then she had spent her time half-wading, half-swimming between the tall catch-poles, checking their nets. They stood like thin, boughless, aquatic trees, marking where each net was set and anchoring its possible contents. Now, shivering and with numb fingers, she rested, lay back on the relative dry of the bank, and looked up as the sun began to flicker through the lighter patches of mist. She watched as a samara, disturbed by a squirrel or a gust of wind floated down spinning a drunken jig towards the creek.
By Oliver Ashford5 years ago in Futurism
The Poetry of Loss
Even lying there in a hospital bed, wheezing breath rattling from his sunken chest, he fills me with stomach-churning fear. His eyes that used to blaze at me in anger, now somewhat milky, their gaze still sends cold hands of inadequacy to crush the air from my lungs. I know it’s not like this for all sons; I know he isn’t like all fathers. Every time I failed to master what he considered an essential ‘man’ skill, his eyes would close and his hands would ball into fists and shake with rage. Now he reaches for the plastic cup of water at his bedside and those same strong hard hands, now like discarded bones wrapped in crêpe paper, shake and his eyes squeeze shut for a different reason. I sense a fraction of a moment of glee or enjoyment in myself, and repulsed, I force it back down deep. I need to be here for him - my mother would have wanted me to be here for him. I wish she was here. There it is, a hitch in my breath, genuine sadness; my long-suffering, long-dead mother. She was always the mediator, the interface between my father and I.
By Oliver Ashford5 years ago in Humans
