My elbow hit Alberto in the jaw as his hands flew up fast and practiced to my throat. Heat pumped through me like liquid mana, I was sleek death faster than this prey. My hand flew to his belt, automatic, as it grabbed the semi-automatic pistol and pushed it up under his chin. Those lizard eyes flashed mirth at me, mocking, unbelieving. The tiger responded, as the pain of a knee to my balls lit up the night in bright flashes of pain and the muzzle flash sprayed a bloody fountain of claret across the face of the moon.
He went up and over the balcony, landing in the lap of the oceans shallow waves. He lay under shimmering stars, haloed in bioluminescence from the tickle of the tide. Kissed by phytoplankton, silhouetted by the breath of El Nino.
A lone gull wheeled through the shimmering night, banking over the glow of the lapping waves to alight on the rail of the balcony. At that moment I faded into the dream of life that had taken hold of me. Felt the wind whistle through trailing feathers, ascending in flights of singing thermals of the night's warm eddies.
I felt the clamp of maw on yielding flesh, sweet blood thumping in my head, sexual in its immediacy. The crunch of bones, the power of sinew and fur enfolding me.
I felt the warmth of Isabella's hand in mine as we slipped off the road beneath a tree, her lithe limbs enticing me with their dance. The smell of tropical earth, moist and cloying, Gaia's sweat in lush fecundity.
Each moment painted on a canvas in waves of building pressure. I burst free of myself, tearing into the sky like a meteor returned to the heavens, living all these experiences in the same moment. Pure perception, in a multi-faceted mirror reflecting the stars. I stared down at Gaia's glowing face, haloed by her atmospheric skin and I wept at her beauty. Suspended outside of time memories mingled like paint on an easel, changing the composition of everything before transcending into something new.
The end.
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Animation By @zord189
Great imagery in your story. You paint beautiful pictures with your words. Thanks for sharing in ListNerds.
You're most welcome @rcaine
Thanks for being a regular reader. It really means a lot as I am a writer as a trade (outside hive as well), and one thing that always upset me about steem/hive was that basically you had 7 days to get your work read and then boom... everyone moved on and it was pretty much dead.
Listnerds has provided a way to get new eyes on work that I'm quite proud of, and that is the best thing about it IMO :)
Wow! You paint such a vivid word picture. This is wonderful!
Thanks @byn :-) I will be sorry to see the back of Ash but I think it's time to move on to another challenge with the freewrites. Cheers for reading, I'm glad you enjoyed this final transcendence.
New challenges are always good!
Thursdays are my day to help @mariannewest deliver the prompts, so on that note… here I am with my crazy scattered thoughts to deliver Today’s Daily Prompt: Red Wine for the freewrite. Feel free to join us if you have the time and thank you for joining us today! It is such an awesome community to be a part of and now we have a new page with contests, new challenges and even more community:
Truly beautiful and vivid imagery. This flows like a tall drink on a hot summer night. Keep it going!
Hmmnnn, I may redact my statement that this is the concluding part, maybe. Not sure where I would go with it after this. I wanted to leave it kind of open ended, where you don't know what has really happened in the way that someone who had ingested far too much mescaline might view time in a non-linear way. My idea was to move on to another ongoing freewrite, in a specific genre I haven't touched on steemit yet. I will think long and hard about it as I have had amazing feeback from people on this story with Ash in it. Honestly @wandrnrose7, do you feel like it is not quite complete? I value your feedback and there was a small part of me that worried that I hadn't tied things up well enough.
Wonderus finale. I'm looking forward to going through it all in one go.
You are in our favorite edition :)
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What an ending ... wow... beautiful and sad and final and shocking and inevitable ... maybe... wow ...
Yes, I just re-read it for the first time in years and felt again the unfettered nature of this fiction. It was a really magical series to write because the main character is on a powerful hallucinogen it gave me 'poetic license' (pun intended 😂) to embrace trying what I've always wanted to attempt, to merge fiction with poetry in a kind of seamless way.
I think other authors have beat me to this aim before, to be honest, and most editors will chastize this type of 'purple prose' as they call it. They'll tell you to go away and read Hemmingway 🤣 And maybe they're right, who am I to say.
But all I know is when I read this whole series back to back just now it was beautiful and profound, confusing at times, but just like a true shamen's journey, it came together in the end to a continuity. Ash was all of those creatures at once, the tiger in part one, the seagull in part 6, and even the Sinatra singing crab in part 5 who filled Ash with the energy to take flight into the next chapter.
But yes, this ending is shocking, sad, and strangely final in its description. I feel like it is describing both sex and death in an unsettling mingling until the final paragraph where Ash breaks free of his body and sees the ultimate beauty of Gaia's luminous face.
To be honest, words fail me at this point, I don't really know where most of this series came from. It was almost like it was being written through me, which is not normal for me with fiction as I'm usually a planner, not a pantser.
Thanks for reading @deeanndmathews
I'm glad you enjoyed the strange adventures of Ash, Isabella and I suppose even Alberto's bit part 🤣