Jingle bells in the background,

As a coconut blanket surrounds the village,

Snowflakes fall from the sky like diamonds,

As the trees are shaking and animals are playing in the snow,

The air is cold but refreshing to the soul,

As our boots crunch across the ice,

Our breath turns into mist as we laugh,

In this winter wonderland,

Throwing balls of snow at each other,

As the sky continues to pour,

The vapour of cranberries fills our noses,

Bringing back memories of apple cider,

Our fingers are tinged with blue, just like the universe,

As the maturity of adulthood is reversed,

We build a snowman and do snow angels,

Although ours don't have a halo,

As the snow turns into ice,

The afternoon turns into the night,

We dust ourselves off as we head back,

The cabin lights are like the northern star,

We are damp and hungry,

But the joy of winter is better than anything,

Looking at the sky, it's stopped snowing,

There's a blue star and it's glowing,

It's the star of winter.

Asleep, the soul falling into memories,

Flashing images of faces that I've already seen,

Falling and tumbling past the clouds that are like whipped cream,

Through the threads of reality,

Stars shooting around like trains across the galaxy,

Cold air like whispers coming from a nordic country,

Until the journey stops,

My body is floating in the air,

Beneath me is a lake sparkling like a tapestry of blue gems,

But it's opening up, there's another universe,

Once again I'm falling,

But there's no water,

Just a collection of thoughts and realities,

In my mind, in my dreams.

I don’t know what‘s coming.

He died on a Tuesday afternoon whilst resting in his porch rocker. The occasional breeze stirred it and him like an ever so gentle hand on his back, or like a single bare toe barely touching down. The weathered slats beneath the chair bemoaned his passing, groaning with the shifting weight of it even as Nature’s warm breath ruffled the cotton sleeve of his work shirt and rocked him away to someplace different.

I cannot know what’s coming.

The bronzed skin of his face was cast in the halo of a single porch fixture, it’s mason jar globe speckled with time, flies and spiders. In the weak light he looked deceptively young with his many wrinkles relaxed, and drawn in tight. In fact, he could have been only resting. There was no reason to think that the bony fingers draped around the end of the chair’s armrest wouldn’t tighten their grasp at any second, that they wouldn’t lift him up onto those spindly, unsteady legs so that he might shuffle into the kitchen to re-fill the iced tea glass grown half-clear with melted ice water, the same glass which always waited so patiently for him on the tin table-stand beside the chair. The glass that sat amongst the rusty tattoos etched into it by forty years of condensation rings. I always thought he’d made his tea too sweet, although I drank it when it was offered, but then he wasn’t making it for me, and that was how the old folks done it, like the tea was their only candy, and they must have it close by to satisfy an intermittently raging sweet-tooth.

We don’t know what’s coming.

We cannot know.

Whatever it may be leaves a far away expression on a withered face, despite the cold chill it shivers through the bones of those left behind. For a long time I looked, brushing away the moths and gnats with my cap, far longer than I should have, wondering where he’d gone. Something turned as I stood there looking. The longer I looked the warmer those bones grew. Wherever he was, it was not here, and it might be he’s somewhere with her again, which is what he’d always wanted anyways.

He looked happier than I’d ever seen him before, and many times I’d seen him crinkle with laughter. He was at ease, so I picked up my guitar case and started away. He wouldn’t want the first responders… that whole scene. He was always so private.

No. I don’t know what’s coming, but it must be better.

It’s got to be better.

Daisy pinched her cheeks as she sat on the bench- waiting,~ and waiting. She stared at the large screen that showed the different colour markers & points of the various train routes. ‘‘Where was the train she needed to head back home?’’ She thought to herself.

Just as she got ready to close her eyes for a short nap, she heard the familiar sound of the train moving on the tracks and the sound of the powerful engine. Her heart beat fast. She did not want to miss her train!

She rose to her feet & quickly grabbed her luggage. The train came to a halt and she soon heard the conductor shout: ‘‘Get on ‘board!’’

Daisy dashed toward the train & hopped on. She slowly moved along the side of the path next to the reserved seats. Once she found a spot to seat past the reserved section, she crashed onto the leather seat. She was ready to sleep all the way to her final destination.

The sudden break on the tracks startled Daisy. She looked around wondering how long she’d been in dreamland.

Without even trying to ask where she was, Daisy decided to grab her luggage from the bottom of her seat— ready to disembark the train.

She managed to carefully use the steps & hop onto the sandy ground. Daisy heard the crunch of something below her feet. She looked down and spotted fragments of something brighly glowing in the sand.

Daisy bent down to examine the materials in the sand a bit closer. With her free hand, she picked up a tiny piece of the material to take an even much closer look.

She gasped. Was this the precious stone that she had heard stories about from her parents when she was a kid? She shook her head. That was not right. Her home town was not known to have such resources.

Daisy dropped the precious stone & wiped her hand on her ankle length pleated skirt. She stopped to really take a better look around her. The moment she did, she dropped to her knees and she shook her head: ‘‘What town is this?’’

She began to panic and turned around to see if the train was not too far away. But the train was gone. Well, actually there were no train tracks anywhere she tried to peer.

Daisy squinted her eyes and waved her free hand in the air. She couldn’t see a thing. This place wherever she was had such thick fog.

The only thing that she could spot from where she was were some lights. She scurried toward them.

When she was near the lights, the fog started to clear. Her eyes came to view a town with creatures that were all seemed to be busy. She spotted a toad wearing a giant yellow coat by a stand. The toad croaked & bellowed: ‘‘Why are all the oranges gone? Who bought the last ones?’’

Was this some kind of open market? She stood and blinked her eyes in awe. This was probably not real. She closed her eyes & counted backwards from 34 to 1. (That was how far she could manage to count backwards, for now).

She was about to finish counting backwards when she heard another croak & bellow: ‘‘You whatever you are~ don’t just stand there with your eyes closed! Did you buy the last oranges?’’

Daisy opened her eyes and blinked again. She pointed to herself, & looked to her left and right. The toad hopped toward her. She wanted to run, but it seemed as if her legs were not ready to do that.

The toad stared at Daisy as soon as he was right in front of her. She cleared her throat ready to speak..the toad interrupted her- ‘‘Oh my...You’re a human. What are you doing in our town? Go back to your own realm!’’

Daisy could not understand what that meant. Had she traveled here by some kind of magic? Then it came back to her in a flash, she had not paid attention when she boarded the train.

She reached into her bag & found what her train ticket. Daisy’s hand trembled. On her ticket the route number was: 13. The train she needed to take was route 31. How did make such a silly mistake of purchasing the wrong ticket route?

The toad watched Daisy. She looked as if she had heard news that someone was sick. Daisy stared at the toad & quietly asked: ‘‘How do I get back home?’’

#13 (C) 15.08.2021

Lovely Friendships 49

Two years have passed and a group of friends along with her daughter Alexa have come together to plan Agatha Terzi’s ninety second birthday. Alexa had just turned eighteen and she took to calling Agatha Mummy. Her brother and sister also loved Agatha as their adopted Mother but Alexa was happiest to call her Mummy. She and Agatha often spoke French when alone. Agatha had a glow about her and a new spark in life when

Basil, Maia and Alexa came into their lives.

During the past two years Arthur’s granddaughter Hilda permanently moved to Ikara immersing herself into a small tailor business. She also had a new male interest in her life. Nikos Stamatis was a quiet man but could start a dull crowd laughing until they cried real tears.

Kosmos and Letos twins, Cate and Oliver, were quite the active pair. They discovered they could climb zig zag hill quickly to see Grandpa Moraitis and Grandma Jocasta quickly but were not able to scramble down as fast. They took to rolling down n their sides laughing all the way.

Adelpha La Scola and Aristotle Mitzakopoulo opened a small artist shop for the locals. They worked with students to create colorful roadside shrines with small glass doors adorned with a photo of a saint and a candle. The top might be crowned with a cross or Greek letters. Often the shrine is  to provide the traveler with a moment of rest and prayerful reflection or to represent a place where a loved one had perished in an accident. If the candle was out the visitor will light the candle again after prayer for another to stop and reflect.

Adelpha and Aristotle were so proud of their young men and women of Ikaria to carry on the tradition of their elders. Many of these students would leave Ikaria going to the large cities for work.

The older local business men and women of Ikaria encouraged the younger adults to stay in Ikaria. They even taught them their trades hoping the younger adults would stay.

Many did leave but in a few years returned to the home of their birthplace as the big cities with the fast pace and their paychecks were used for larger expenses occurred in the big cities. The ones that did stay became shop workers and beginning small business owners themselves. They actually liked the slow pace of their town.

Demetrius and Endora Mitzakopoulo were one of those younger couples that had planned on staying in Ikaria. Three years ago they were married and both had worked hard saving their money to purchase a house on a plot of land. Demetrius indeed was successful in the construction business with a very large crew of men. He was tough on them but fair. You had better show up for work, well fed, not drunk and ready to work hard all day or you were fired. He paid them well so rarely was there a shirker.

Endora worked for Saalima Amaratha for years. She was the right hand of Saalima and could be trusted to handle any problem at the Fabric shop. Endora was the one who hired the workers even tho Saalima had final say.

Saalima had met Tomaso Ambrosia a few years before and they were living together in her little Polish house. They were both workaholics and suited for each other.

Tomaso started out running a small Cafe in the other half of the Fabric shop. He finally started teaching a few of the local young men how to make the hand held foods they sold at the Cafe. One young man had gone to a bigger city with his parents and said to Tomaso they called the foods there fast foods!

“Well there will be no fast foods here! Do realize all the nasty old grease they fry the hell out of the food. The next day that grease kills your gut and you splat it out as fast as you can get to a toilet if you’re not used to eating that garbage. I NEVER want to hear about fast foods in this Cafe again!” he boomed.

The shop was pin dropping silent for an hour and the subject was never brought up again.

Melina and Cicero Ambrosia, Tomaso’s parents lived outside of town in their vineyard. It would soon be producing more wine. They had come from America and never would go back except for business.

They hoped that Tomaso and Saalima would get married but chose to stay out of their sons business. They loved Saalima as a daughter-in-law and that was all that mattered.

Finally Leto came in with Kosmas. “We had to wait for the sitter for a short time and while waiting Kosmas wrote another poem.”

Kosmas stood up and recited:

The World

The world is so beautiful

enjoy every minute of the world

the black and white

all the colors of the rainbow

the smell of flowers

and evergreen trees

ring memories in the forests

seashells on the beach

sand between bare feet toes

sounds of sea gulls

the world is so beautiful

for each living being

love you and all

for happiness

©Julia A Knaake

Words too oft escape

the velcro of my mind

that I've tried to cultivate

its loops and barbs awfully flawed

as if by design gapped and ajar

#HereComesAthought

#ThereGoesAthought

#Challenge

A woman’s scream rises over a cluster of tin-sheet shacks and into the thick night air. She’s just watched her son punch her drunken boyfriend in the mouth, blood and spit flecking on white knuckles.

“Bowie!” the woman screams at her son, but she goes ignored.

“Stay down, you lowlife!” Bowie lurches at the older man now curled up on the floor, but he’s choked back when his mother yanks him by the collar. He swings his body violently around to break free of her hold, and — out of anger towards everyone and no one in particular — he shoves her down onto the sunken couch behind. He instantly feels sick when he looks down and realizes what he’s done, dark locks sprawled across his mother’s frightened expression. She’s so frail in her blue summer dress, all thin neck and jutting collarbones that Bowie has inherited. For a split-second, he thinks about pulling up the strap that’s fallen off her shoulder, but instead he snatches his hoodie off the couch and steps over the drunkard now passed out cold. He shoves the door open, ignoring the sobbing behind him as he steps into the moonlight.

Acid Town’s usual crowd is crawling. A barter is going down in front of Bowie’s home just as he emerges. Across the street, two women, dressed modestly and still posted at a sure-fire corner, coo something at a man as he passes by. Somewhere in the distance, there’s a pained howl that Bowie knows better than to mistake for a dog. He feels for the folding knife in his back pocket.

In Acid Town, leaving home without a weapon might as well be suicide. On an island where the poor and criminal are hoarded together for the government to contain and forget, it’s dog-eat-dog. Bowie learned this at five-years old, when he witnessed his father fight and stabbed over a coveted stash of antibiotics from the mainland. As he watched a pair of strangers chase off the knife-wielder and attempt to seal his father’s wound with their bare hands, Bowie learned also this: that when it comes to order, compassion is Acid Town’s only military.

Coincidentally and almost comically, Bowie makes a living off homemade blood-stop powder, or magic powder, the townspeople call it (the result of a kid who played in dirt and who figured out that hey — the funny-looking clay in the backyard stops bleeding). With a government that provides hardly more than running water and electricity, and where violence measures the days, medical supplies are among the most valuable barters in Acid Town. Bowie feels lucky to have gotten this far without having his fingers chopped off one-by-one until he was willing to give up his recipe. He knows at least two or three lives have been saved by his magic powder, and people are willing to give him a lot for it.

Bowie’s a good couple miles away from his home by now, still livid. He swears he’ll implode or at the very least slap the town loon that’s been noisily following him for five minutes now, but just the sight of the cemetery in the distance soothes him. He’s able to shrug off his unsolicited companion by offering him a pinch of magic powder in the crumbled paper he finds in the pocket of his hoodie. Then he veers left into the cemetery; it’s a sprawling patch of land behind the hub of the town, scattered with rocks, wooden crosses, mangled dolls — remembrances. His father’s body is buried somewhere in the grounds, but the marking was scrambled and lost years ago. Besides, it’s the area past the cemetery that really matters to Bowie.

Most consider the cemetery and its surrounding area condemned and haunted — not even crime dare trickle into such an eerie block of the town. But past the graves and over a small knoll, Bowie has found the perfect mix of concrete and vegetation: an Olympic-sized pool, once part of the government’s long-forgotten plan to build a grand sports arena. At the threshold stands a towering brick wall, “I” missing and “M” hanging by a wire where “COLISEUM” intended to arch over the entrance.

Once Bowie’s through the entrance, something in his chest loosens just a little, and a deep sigh escapes him. He makes his way to the empty pool, down the creaky ladder and onto curved, smooth surface. He walks over his own litter of graffiti, bubbled letters and strange abstract creatures, until he reaches a star the size of his body in the center of the pool. He lowers himself onto this spot, back against the cement, eyes to a sky where there isn’t much to see. But it’s enough for Bowie. It lets him dream of a world beyond Acid Town.

He closes his eyes.

He can do more for his mother. He can make more than magic powder. He can cure people.

A passenger plane from a luckier land roars across the sky; it stifles the steps of the town loon as he hobbles his way towards the dreaming boy, brandishing the folding knife that had fallen out of the latter’s pocket.

Bowie dreams deeper. A slice of metal swings through the air.

Because in a world that is all over the place, the best way to move forward is to understand yourself, and the best way to understand me is to get my thoughts out of my head without giving others the opportunity to judge them.

I am complex, I am hard to understand, I don't understand myself most of the time, I have so many thoughts and emotions that I need to express and to write it is the simplest form to do so.

The old a problem shared is a problem halved. My mind is a highway of different random thoughts, I stopped writing for years and the thoughts continued to build and ultimately self destruct. It allows me to access my own feelings and reactions, debate them in my mind, justify my responses, see others perspectives, it takes out the emotions of the situation and allows you to look at things from a more centred perspective.

I am not a chatter, I have no interest in burdenning others with my own thoughts and issues. That is a flaw of mine that I recongnise. I do have alot to say, most of which is just a load of random thoughts, random feelings and random emotions. Writing gets them out of my head and allows me to free up some space for every day living!

Writing is a personal thing, you can say what you like, what you feel and although I have just started posting on here, up until now it was for no one but myself. I can express myself better through written word. And sometimes I don't need advise, or discussion, I just need to unload my over active mind, to allow others things in.

Writing gets the weight off your shoulders, its a release, it allows you to access your own thought, second guess them and come to conclusions. Sometimes I'll start writing angry and by the end have realised..... hmmm..... maybe I am over reacting.

Simply...... it is cheaper than therapy.