- RDP Friday: LURKING
Gertrude Abercrombie,
Reverie, 1947 - ” I’m just going to say it straight up. Your girlfriend isn’t very cool.” Calvin’s friend told him at the bus stop one day.
- It was the Friday before Labor Day and most of the people who waited at the stop were friends so Cal and Sam knew since the beginning of the week they’d be the only two there today. That’s why Sam had decided to bring up the Girlfriend topic.
- ” She’s just always there shooting us the stinkeye.” Sam decided to soften his position because the bus was about 10 minutes away and he didn’t want to share this with some random commuters. ” I mean why does she hang around us if she doesn’t want to hang out with us? You know what I mean?”
- Sam looked up Elm Way and when he didn’t see the bus hissing it’s way towards them he decided to answer.
- ” No. No I don’t know what you mean.”
- ” She’s like a stalker or something Cal. She’s just there checking everyone out and she never says anything. She just stares at us like we’re a bunch of bastard children who showed up at a family reunion, see what I mean? “
- ” I really don’t Sam.”
- “Well. She walks you to the bus stop everyday and she waits on the corner over there under the tree until the bus shows up. She never comes over here if I’m here or anyone else we ride with. She just looks all offended or pissed off if I even wave at her or smile.
- The bus sailed towards them and Sam turned and waved to Calvin’s girlfriend- ” See man, Nothing. She’s not very friendly is she?”
- The bus stopped in front of them and the doors opened.
- Calvin stepped back and let Sam take the stairs up first. Then he turned around to the place under the tree where Sam had waved and like always there wasn’t anyone there when Calvin turned around.
- One of these days he was going to tell Sam he didn’t have a girlfriend.
- However, Calvin did have a wife and she wasn’t standing under the tree on the corner.
- She was buried next to it.
- Calvin decided that this might not be the right time to have that conversation with Sam, but over the weekend when the street was quiet he might get around to doing a little more digging around that tree and then maybe- just maybe he would have a little talk with Sam.
#RDP
Wonder-Osity
RDP TUESDAY: WONDER
Theo J. Lammers,
HTE
LOWRD
TSODEN
SALAWY
EAMK
SESNE
TA
SIFRT
ENLGAC
Theo J. Lammers,
Flori Goodchild By The Sea Shore
RDP Wednesday: KELP
F. K. M. Rehn, Beach of Bass Rocks, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1881
That’s Flori Goodchild standing on the beach, can you see her down there by the rocks?
She is out there everyday when the tide goes out and she’s even out there when the fog rolls in or the sky turns black and it starts to rain.
I look for her before I go down to the beach myself because I liked knowing where she is.
It’s always a good idea to know where Flori is, but I wouldn’t recommend looking directly at her.
Once I was down on the beach trying to remember what it looked like when it snowed, I was struggling to recall if really felt soft when it landed on my cheek. I was mid-thought, confused, when started to turn around to find Flori Goodchild was standing right behind me and she smelled- but she didn’t smell like the Sea or suntan lotion. She smelled like a laundry room with a cement sink covered with mold and a window covered grime and spider webs.
When she stepped back I could hear her feet slide across the broken shells and bits of dead rotten kelp and the squishing and crunching coming up from under her heel almost made me turn all the way around because the sound was wrong- but not quite wrong.
It was like hearing someone singing a song just slightly off key.
I didn’t lift my eyes to Flori’s face, I didn’t say ‘excuse me’. Instead I started to walk straight ahead.
” Come to me Jenny George. ” she said to me.
I did want to go to her, so help me I needed to. But I moved away from her as fast as could
I did try to run for it, but I couldn’t. My knees were shaking and my teeth had started to rattle and it wasn’t from the cold.
I was up to my chest in salty sea water before I realized where I was, but I kept going and then I started to swim because what Flori Goodchild was back there and she knew my name.
Before long the waves hid me from her the way they did all of those years ago when I saw her on the bow of my boat in that storm when thunder and lightning tore the sky apart and I jumped into the water to escape Flori and her Sea eaten face and her outstretched fleshless hands.
I keep going back to the beach and I always keep an eye out for Flori Goodchild. But I never look right at her. It’s not a good idea.
Still.
I’d keep both eyes out for her, but the crabs took one of them on the day I first saw Flori Goodchild and if it were in my power I’d pull out the other one to save myself the grief of having to ever see her again.
Max Jensen-Stürmische See
I named the character hiding from Flori after ‘ The Jenny ‘.
Legend says The Jenny is an English Schooner that disappeared with her crew in 1823. The story says she was found in 1840 locked in an ice barrier in Cape Drake by a whaling ship. By this time the Jenny was a morgue and her crew was said to have been found frozen and preserved- in what areas of the Jenny is never really made clear.
The ‘ Jenny ‘
“The Jenny”
Shhhh…Can You Hear It Now?
RDP Thursday: BUOYANT
In the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster is a super massive black hole that is emitting sound waves. Sad to say that even if we were right there on the event horizon ( which would be AWESOME ) we couldn’t hear it because it’s below the level humans can hear, plus it’s like a zillion miles from Earth.
But why let something boundaries of time and space kill the wonder of a experiencing a singing super massive black hole?
I’ve read that to some it doesn’t sound like singing, that it sounds like lost souls crying out from the deepest darkest regions of Hell- or maybe from the attic of your local haunted and cursed house.
Either way, I figure until we get there in the flesh, we can still let our imagination run wild and I am doing exactly that because sometimes the darkest heart likes to feel jolly now and then.
Chandra’s 53-hour observation of the central region of the Perseus galaxy cluster (left) has revealed wavelike features (right) that appear to be sound waves. The features were discovered by using a special image-processing technique to bring out subtle changes in brightness. These sound waves are thought to have been generated by explosive events occurring around a supermassive black hole (bright white spot) in Perseus A, the huge galaxy at the center of the cluster. The image also shows two vast, bubble-shaped cavities filled with high-energy particles and magnetic fields. They create the sound waves by pushing the hot X-ray emitting gas aside. The pitch of the sound waves translates into the note of B flat, 57 octaves below middle-C. This frequency is over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, so the sound is much too deep to be heard.
Photographer Unknown