It's Still Life

Vanished

She’s learning about sound barriers at school. Sound. Speed. Aeroplanes. Red lights on the left. Green lights on the right. Like Christmas lanterns flashing on steel wings.

“Flash. Flash. Flash,” she calls out to the hundreds of faces up there. People flying through rain coloured clouds, over roads and Tobermory-colour houses.

She watches the sky – aeroplanes sliding between stars, in holding patterns, all that traffic holding its breath – sky, a tense diaphragm, flights waiting to land …

and then every red and green light blinks once and disappears … and then one by one so does every star, leaving the night sky a vast hollowed out darkness.

“Hello? Where did you go,” she calls out, where’d you go?”

(Note: 2nd draft – clipped and trimmed.) Prose: 116-words. Written for dVerse Poets Prosery, to include the phrase ‘Traffic holding its breath, sky a tense diaphragm’  from “Twice Shy Poem” by Seamus Heaney. Max 144-words, sans title. Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Imagery and poems ©Misky 2023.