THE VILLAGE SMITHY ~ "Time Travel Is A Healer, Right?" - Epic*sode 3 ~ By Absolutely*Kate ... #fridayflash

THE VILLAGE SMITHY

 

~ By Absolutely*Kate  

 

Epic*sode 3 ~ "Time Travel Is A Healer, Right?"

Click here for The Beginning Epic*sode

Click here for Epic*sode 2 ~ "Need A Hoof Nipper?"

It hurt. Hitting the end always does. Not the brittle hard-tack stuff -- but the inside going dredged out empty, soft-squished, a million miles away from where empathy can repaint affection over pain stains on deck.

 

The Saturday night that should've been their Saturday night, celebrating of all things, out of all times, her first Grammy as a songwriter lauded and applauded for how words rivered hearts to supple soothin' . . . that night, that night of all nights out of all times, Liza lunged into the back of the tall skinny closet for the black leather duffel to hurriedly shove in what could carry wasted trust to wherever away was going to be. That Saturday night of stomped out hoopla was a night no longer made for clear-thinkings or sweet remembrances. 
 
Used to be, with team-them, when one cried, the other tasted salt. Used to be leaning back, spooning into one the other's curvature in the kitchen between choppin' up and stirrin' sizzle at the old woodstove --  discovering the whole rest of the world plus a few extra planets there . . . and wanting to linger the orbit, to stay, to feel, to sense, to know -- way past how chronos had its time trials. When sensations crash and coil though, and no one tells the music not to play Fly Me to the Moon or Come Rain or Come Shine anymore, things jolt way past discombobulated. Liza didn't stop to turn the music off though. One can never really turn the music off. Eva Cassidy drifted her signature rift of Autumn Leaves as June was becoming summer and serenaded departure with "When I miss you most of all . . . "
 
Liza hated ignominious irony even more than how hurt could rot and defile something fine, noble, true and dignified. Well it was. And it had its blue skies, nuttin' but blue skies run. Then, out of the unexpected azure, it was just done. You can only give without measure so long. So Liza, and the jaggedy scrape leaving the unbecoming marks on her soul, shut soft as regrets the front door, letting the squeaky screen swing tight as eyes yet pressed 'gainst tears which burned. And she said, into the night, into the lush gardens tended on sun-dappled days to dig her perennial love, into overcoming what bleakness snaked up to be . . . Liza said, "So long".
 
It was a raspy, her whisper, 
but it shuddered the night.
 
Her left shoulder hefted the black duffel, leanin' to the heavy side with all that fit that could take her to where away would be. She'd return in the morn when he'd gone where routines roused him to claim what lingered, what mattered most of all, all the way back behind silk scarves and linen dresses in the tall skinny closet. It was all there, tucked in her funny mother's weathered tan valise. It traveled well too. It had to. Under maroon silk lining, secrets were pressed into security. 
 

~ ~ ~

This time she'd traveled the Essex steam train one hundred years.  To where the village smithy pondered her now. To a town not without pity . . . but laden with plenty of conjecture.
 
The bodacious blacksmith glistened his brawny firmaments, leaned his planishing hammer on his pummeled anvil and conjectured now, "Miss? You asked for a hoof nipper. Have you a steed in need?" 

"Gotta lotta need Smithy. Higher than the sky, deeper than the ocean."
 
"Higher than the sky?"

Liza rallied senses to sensibilities, sizing up massive male flesh towering testosterone under the spreading chestnut tree. This one appeared to be not all that adversarial despite the unseen. Insights intact, Liza left the leaving of her last night in Virginia for more private moments mulling. Quick on the uptake, her response raced his open retendre, "Why certainly kind sir. Higher Than The Sky, in the 8th at Belmont, this coming Saturday. Surely you can aid a lady in distress?" Liza's eyes whooped up the Virginia reel. Old habits travel still.
 
The village smithy saw past batting eyelashes and fine filly form. The village smithy gazed through brazen bravado. The village smithy gleaned the skirt holding stubborn her stance had more than a stallion's win-place-show muddling her mind. 
 
Across the street, ambling along the west side of the village green, angling a better gander at the newcomer on the scene, the butcher and the baker's effusive musings were joined by the cocky candlestick maker. Oddly, one of them swore they spotted an old flame.

The town band practicing in the gazebo under Jim Casey's steady conductor's wand? Well, they turned a flat sharp and missed a stanza or two, what with clarinets and oboes and tubas and saxophones craning over black metal wobbly music stands . . . but all in all, Casey's band still played on.


And the village smithy's eyes danced . . . 
with those of the strawberry blonde.

© 2011 ~ Author Absolutely*Kate

 in a small-town large state of mind 

Village Smithy photo ala Wolfrage

"Street Cries Prohibited" ala Andy Rob
Essex Steam Train ridden by Absolutely*Kate

TO RACE AHEAD

NEXT WEEKEND

OFF TRACK THE VILLAGE GREEN

WHERE THE STARTING GATE

TAKES ON NEW SPEED