I love the images used as prompts for Flash Friday, but I find today’s especially poignant. It depicts a culture that is foreign to me, yet rings more true than my own.
A million suns shine on the grass. Many suns illuminate a stick, a rock that flies with the speed of a stallion. In the nighttime, people do not sleep. They laugh, they shout, they hiss, all to what purpose? This is no god that they worship, but a pastime that is given the weight of religion.
The beasts herd like buffalo, colorful in their skins. They stampede away, all charging at the exit at once. Like buffalo, they would follow another off a cliff. Unlike buffalo, these beasts have armor that cannot be pierced with a bow and arrow. They yield no meat, no leather for clothing. Their hides make poor shelter. Despite their failings, they are given care worthy of horses.
People are strangers. They do not know one another by name, have not watched their children grow. Their circles have no center; distance, travelled so swiftly, separates each from his neighbor.
Give me the land as it was, with rivers running clear, space for beasts to graze. A symbiotic relationship, not the parasites people have become. Taking everything for themselves, giving nothing back, discarding waste like dandelion seeds. Here, even the dogs cannot run free.
Fiction As Life 
That’s a powerful piece of fiction, Sarah! Today the Hub and I drove up Pend Oreille River following it to the Canada border. We drove through seasonal resorts, several historic ranches, a mining town and past a dam that provides electricity all the way to Seattle. Yet in the midst of all this human settlement is the Kalispel reservation. They have modern homes and ranches (with buffalo) but there is something yet wild about their places. They don’t mow or landscape and homes have a different, almost temporary feel. You captured that essence in this short.
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Thanks, Charli! That sounds like a beautiful drive. We have some land here that is now a wildlife sanctuary; I love to go there and imagine that’s what Missouri looked like before it was settled. Living in the city, I don’t get to see land in it’s natural state very often! Nature that pure touches something primal that city-dwellers have to bury to live in their created lives.
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I love your description of a baseball game and how you use imagery that makes us think of a life that is much earlier and possibly lost forever. Great flash Sarah.
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Thank you.
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