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Drabble Corner

Michelle Swisz

Our Drabble for this month is called Connected, written by Sheena Cotton.

Connected

by Sheena Cotton

I collapse beside some tattered hippies, too shattered to appreciate the view.

"You are completely mad, you know," you puff as you arrive. "We're too old for this.

I look at you: in your late fifties, balding, paunchy...

"Yes, I know. But Glastonbury Tor— with this full moon, and on Good Friday too—it is a very special place and time."

You take another indigestion pill.

I pull my jacket tight against the bitter wind. A faerie sea of mist drifts below King Arthur's Avalon, etched monochrome with moonglow. Midnight passes.

You came with me.

You wonderful, beloved, precious man.

It's been an interesting week, again. Someone I recently met committed suicide a few days ago. I found out since that she had been a musician and a poet and author, and now if I ever come to know her better through her poetry or prose, or through any recording that may have been made of her music, I cannot in the conventional sense ask her about it, or tell her my feelings about it. I have only read, or had read to me actually, her suicide note.

Whatever one may think or feel about a person taking his or her own life, there is still a deep sense of loss when someone we expected to get to know better dies. She was a member of a fairly small and close volunteer group I belong to but am quite new in, so I would have gotten to know her better, as I have many of the other members, in some cases slowly and in others more intensely. But there is a sense for me in her death and the manner of it, a sweeping away of what seemed to be what was supposed to happen. Our group today had a memorial of our own for her, and others there said much the same.

If I were to write a piece about this experience, I think the aspect of it that I'd like most to convey would be the sense of a connection, a deep truth, here in the physical world suddenly revealed to have been taken for granted. It's in a way like one feels in an earthquake here in earthquake land, California, or anywhere else they are felt, where the very earth itself moves, and there is consequently nowhere at all to stand. It's not so much just that "this wasn't supposed to happen," but it's a difficulty in saying just what it was that did happen, since it feels so unnatural, yet it did in fact take place.

The theme then for next time, to be our June Drabble, is "questionable truth." What fundamental truth in your life have you come to question or see differently? Send in your 100-word, excluding title, Drabble to drabble@wvu.org. And first, read the Guidelines here. Submissions are due by the 10th of May, for the June issue.

See you again next time.

About the Author
Hello, and welcome to Drabbles. I'm Michelle, your Drabbles editor. I live south of San Francisco, with four spoiled cats, near the sea where I love to walk every day. I've tutored English in workshops, classrooms, and individually at San Jose State University, and have worked on the Fiction Panel here at Writers' Village. Comments and questions are always welcome!