For this week’s prompt word, you have two weeks as I’m away teaching at Swanwick Writers’ Summer School.
Your new prompt word is
TEST
I’ve never liked tests – especially those we had at school. I remember written tests in all sorts of subjects and oral tests for German and French. And, of course, there are lots of other tests that can be undertaken – blood tests, pregnancy tests, paternity tests and eyes tests are a few examples. We also speak about tests of strength and endurance. What does this week’s prompt word mean to you?
Fact or fiction, prose or poetry, I would love to read your thoughts on this week’s prompt, but there’s no obligation to share your writing. Here is the work you shared on the last prompt FIGURE.
The heat is making me sweat. Go figure.
When Hubby and I walk the dog on our own, it is important that the other knows what route is being taken. This is in case of an emergency and being able to locate them quickly.
Many routes are named after people’s property we pass, or in the case of The Kela Route, walking through the park, up onto the prom, down past the cafe and lake, then back home. When we looked after Kela for our friend in 2021, this was the route she preferred for her walks.
My route to tie in with the prompt is The Figure of Eight. This is round the block, into an adjoining road where Maya prefers the grass therein to do her business, and then doubling back on ourselves to deposit her performance in the one and only doggy bin in our area. This one is probably the most popular as it extends the block walk and she’s given the chance to do what comes naturally where she feels most comfortable.
Figure It Out
It’s far better to never blind trust.
Thinking is hard but it’s something you must.
Always before you begin,
Figure “human nature” in,
Or you’ll be a fool when your ‘feel-good’ reasons go bust.
Figuring Stuff Out
They’ve figured out what stuff’s about
so I don’t have to think.
They figure that I should not say
that stuff does stuff some other way
and not the way they think.
I need to go figure out what I’m to eat for breakfast so I can take my pills, cause that’s what we old folks do.
My figure needs a little work, but I can’t exercise right now.
I don’t like math, so it’s been a while that I’ve worked figures, except when watching the 1% Club on TV.
While I was in the elementary school, my exam marks used to be awfully low. That was while I used to take studying for granted, causing me not to study properly. I would allocate the least of my time for my studies.
As that would affect my future endeavors, I decided to figure out the ways of improving my studying methods. So, I began allocating more time for my studies and focusing on them. Also, I decided to put studying first before everything else, as it was very important for me.
As a result, my exam marks began going up significantly due to my courage and my determination to study properly. I’m now getting high and, sometimes, full grades in different exams, and my school reports were now showing excellent results.
Go Figure
Full-figured or chunky – whatever your line,
however you phrase it, I’ve never liked mine.
I’ve been on some kind of diet since I was nine,
and still my belts struggled to span my waistline.
I think of it now and I reach for the wine.
Twiggy-like models were starvation’s trigger,
starting me off on a lifetime of rigour.
It drives me to drink these days – pass me more liquor
– when I see some celebrity backsides are bigger
than barrage balloons.
Such is fashion…
Go figure!
figure
may add
up
sum total
and bottom lines
perhaps
Some of you might think my posts are enigmatic at times and other times you might find them to be a riot. Either way thenature of this blog site is designed to offer you a range of things to contemplate. With a daily overdose of my favorite Black Bean Brew my mind gets restless, go figure.
Thoughtfully
Thoughtfully
i slowly turn the lights off…
a fading trace of joy
lingers in the silence,
while a voice echoes
from deep within.
a longing,
too powerful to ignore,
begins like a shadow figure.
i lie down in bed…
a hole appears
from somewhere
in the middle of nowhere
stealing the air
from my lungs.
i slowly close my eyes…
a vision unfolds above:
a future still distant,
a version of myself
more grounded,
more certain.
and i breathe deeply…
drawing in more of reality
until…
the voice speaks
with a different strength,
the hole opens
into uncertainty,
the vision whispers
of madness…
yet…
one day,
my voice will be heard.
the hole
will no longer be empty.
and the vision
will become reality
a beautiful sight
of the person
who has always lived
within me.
The Intruder
Slowly and silently,
it entered the room;
the room where he sat
contemplating his doom.
The darkness was heavy
within and without
as daylight cast shadows
of worry and doubt.
Closer and closer,
he felt it draw near;
tears falling, heart racing
so full of fear.
Then all of a sudden
With eyesight now blurred,
he watched as the shadows
around him were stirred.
Darkness and daylight
comingled and hung
like words left unspoken
on the tip of his tongue.
The stirring continued
all through his night
till darkness was lifted,
revealing the light.
Then fully awake
eyes open, heart sound,
he searched the room over;
no one to be found.
The figure that entered
his place of despair,
was gone with no trace
it ever was there.
Except for the knowing
placed deep in his soul
that life is worth living
no matter the toll.
Rall:
as a child
i could never figure out
how the moon followed me
up and down the street
even when i tried to trick it
by changing direction suddenly
i still can’t
Jen Pens Some Gems:
Figuratively Speaking?
With just a tad more planning
Two ships would not have just passed
In the bright daylight.
Go figure, plan a lunch out –
Go without contact information,
Go without a charged cell phone,
Go without making sure both parties
Leave the same message with the greeter
At the front entrance who also erred
By not asking for a name of the person
Who arrived first…
Two people waited for about fortyfive minutes
Without seeing each other, both thinking
The other forgot the correct time to meet.
Who is laughing up there in the heavens?
Alas a disappointing non-encounter
That one can only laugh at,
As each is just thankful the other is OK
And …after exchanging correct cell numbers –
Reschedule to meet later on in the week
At a different restaurant!
The Afterlove Voice:
Figure is one of those words with many meanings.
A figure can be a number. A person standing in the distance. A figure in history. Or the shape we see when we look in the mirror.
When I saw this week’s prompt, my thoughts went straight to the last meaning.
For most of my life, I have had a complicated relationship with my figure.
I developed early, with a large chest that drew attention long before I wanted it to. As a teenager, I often wished I could disappear into oversized jumpers, hoping people would notice me instead of my body.
Years later, when I was around twenty-five, I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS).
Suddenly, so many things made sense.
The struggles with my body. The changes that never seemed to follow the rules. The feeling that no matter what I did, my figure didn’t always feel like it belonged to me.
It took time to realise that my worth was never measured by my shape.
Bodies change.
They tell the stories of our lives. They carry illness, healing, motherhood, laughter, grief, and every year we are fortunate enough to live.
Today, I try to look at my reflection with more kindness than criticism.
Because my figure is only one small part of who I am.
It is not my creativity. It is not my compassion. It is not my resilience.
Those are the things that truly define me.
Perhaps we spend too much time trying to fit the world’s idea of the perfect figure…
when the most beautiful thing we can become is simply ourselves.
Fandango:
Marsha launched into the latest neighborhood scandal while stirring her coffee, hoping for something resembling engagement from her husband. “So Linda finally confronted the HOA president about the missing funds,” she said, eyebrows raised for dramatic effect.
“It figures,” Dennis murmured, not looking up from his tablet.
She blinked. “No, listen. She accused him in front of everyone. Full meltdown. People gasped.”
“Go figure.”
She set her mug down harder than necessary. “Then Diana jumped in and said she knew something was off because he suddenly bought that ridiculous lawn fountain shaped in the figure of a dolphin.”
“Yeah, that figures.”
She stared at him. “Are you even hearing me?”
He nodded, still scrolling. “Go figure.”
Marsha inhaled slowly, the way her therapist taught her. “I’m telling you actual human drama. Real intrigue. Betrayal. Dolphin fountains. And all you can say is ‘go figure’”?
He finally looked up, puzzled. “Huh?”
She groaned. “I need responses with texture. With emotion. With at least one verb that isn’t ‘figure.’”
He considered this, then offered a thoughtful, earnest nod. “Go figure.”
“You can just go figure yourself, Dennis,” Marsha said, storming off.
poetisinta:
the aching
blue woman
both lake
and language -
a figure
naked
as first rain
kneeling
beneath
the water
stillness wears
the dark smile
of hunger
and a tongue of honey
if mist
could sleep
the way petals remember falling
might man
heave a symphony
from the aching
iMartist:
A Dialogue Based In Truth
A conversation on the phone in 1999.
M: Sup Dee been a number of years ?
D: Yeah, remember when we were 14 and your Mom took us and Cabbage Head to see Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter ?
M: My Mom is a huge horror film fanatic. I was scared of those films as a kid, but when I turned 13 I really started to get into them.
D: Those were the days man. Whatchu up to right now ?
M: Eating lunch watching some tv. I work 2nd shift so I leave the house by 2pm.
D: Watching anything creepy ?
M: I’m watching The Waltons.
D: Really ?!? 🤔 The Waltons 😲 !
M. Yeah I love that show…
D: Yo what happened to you bro, I never figured you were THAT kind of dude being all into horror and gore and shit ?!
M: What kind ?
D: Wholesome, Religious…
M: Naw man I who I am. I just really like this show. I definitely aint that Wholesome nor Religious.
Susan Batten:
When I read the prompt “Figures”, I was back, at a stroke, in a small, darkened room in a monastery dating from 1787. There I stood in the quiet, the only visitor just then, hemmed in by tall, dark effigies of townspeople in their period dress. Each of them was “going about their business” in carefully constructed scenes of everyday life: women sewing, a child playing, the butcher working, the hairdresser chatting …
Shadows played on the silent crowd, the low lighting giving an illusion of movement as these merchants and shopkeepers, maids and gentlemen, took on a spooky life all their own. I walked amongst them, watchful, a ghost from another age. This museum of Burgundian Life in Dijon, France, also features beautifully reconstructed shops from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each item perfected to the last detail. The power of these scenes is such that the real town fades away, quite forgotten; the atmosphere among the figures is rivalled only by the footfalls of the long-gone nuns who pace the abandoned cloister outside.
The Elephant's Trunk:
Icons
Senryu
black turtleneck gleams ….
her figure holds still the room
one earring catches light
Haiku
curls frame a figure
carved from summer afternoon ….
eyes hold their own heat
Boomcha:
What I Never saw in Her Face
There was a woman I could never read. Her face stayed still, and every other detail stayed controlled. Nothing in the sound of her voice ever shifted. Even the way she carried herself stayed steady. I spent years thinking she was mad at me, or disappointed, or quietly judging from some place I couldn’t see. She became a figure I kept trying to solve, but her math never added up. Not because she was complicated. Because she didn’t show her work.
I tried to understand her the way I understood everyone else. Most people reveal something without meaning to. She didn’t. That steadiness stayed intact, and I filled the quiet with my own assumptions. Her stillness felt like a verdict. The silence made me think I’d done something wrong. Even the calm in her voice seemed like distance.
Later, I learned she wasn’t distant at all. Pride had been there the whole time. Love had been there too. A private weather moved through her days, and none of it had anything to do with me. All those years I spent trying to interpret her face, she was holding a softness I never saw. A whole story I didn’t know how to read.
Blind Wilderness:
Seth was fascinated by the story of the airman who suddenly appeared out of the blue at the start of the mountain track. Many had seen him. He was said to have crashed his plane and was now wandering all around the area looking lost. Seth simply had to visit the place to see if anything happened. He didn’t really believe in ghosts, but something drew him to this one.
It was a bit of a murky day the day he went to Dale Head. He parked his car in the car park. As he waslked to the pub, he shivered slightly. He only had one drink in the pub, and then he made his way to the start of the mountain track. He started walking up it. It wasn’t heavy going in the beginning but it got steeper. There was no one else on the path that day. Then, suddenly, he could hardly believe his eyes. There it was. A figure walking towards him out of the blue. Astonished, he shuddered. Then it was true. As he watched the figure coming towards him, it suddenly disappeared into thin air. By this time he really was unnerved. He began walking back to the pub, and upon entering he made straight for the bar, and orderd a double whisky.
“You seen him then?” inquired the barman. “You’ve got that look about you. I seen many like that.”
Seth nodded, heardly able to speak. He went to a table and sat down as he could hardly hold himnself up and downed the whisky and then went and asked for another. By the end of the evening he was dead drunk and too drunk to drive home, so he had to take a room in the pub. He hardly slept all night. He was troubled by the constant sound of an aeroplane overhead.
In the morning he beat a hasty retreat from the place, a changed man.
The Pigeon Conspiracy
I guess I have mentioned this somewhere in my earlier post(s) but in the wake of fresh assaults a retelling assumes relevance.
We live in a locality infested by rodents, squirrels and pigeons. The rodents have displayed an unexplained enmity towards my plants. They appear to be immune to sprays and disinfectants. They also love chewing wires and pipes of unused vehicles parked for long.
Squirrels have shown a special fondness for air conditioners. They home inside and cause unimaginable damage to the machine skyrocketing the cost of maintenance.
The pigeons have a fetish for nesting in the weirdest of locations – under the window AC, inside the exhaust fans and at the mouth of the drain pipes.
Past a few seasons, harassed by a monstrous pigeon, B-I-L put up a net around the AC causing great consternation to the nesting family. However, the next day the head of the family brought along his adviser for site inspection, who according to B-I-L, appeared to be some kind of an engineering expert.
What followed next was further more disturbing. Every morning one of the engineering team would stick its neck inside the net and perform a “hara-kiri”. After a few such suicidal protests, considering it to be an abshagun (bad sign) for the household, a finer mesh (with lesser gaps in between) replacing the earlier one was put up.
The disheartened but undaunted protesters reviewed their strategy and shifted base to my front gate dirtying it non-stop by every possible means. This went on for sometime till the tactics got revised to make it more effective. They have now relocated to the exhaust fan in the bathroom. As a result, it has conked off.
But the miscreants have not stopped at that. Whenever I am inside the pugnacious lot embark on loud, verbal sloganeering which flusters me the most. Guess what would be their next move?
Not exactly figure-out-able…!!!!
Nature is not only trees, plants, fruits and flowers. It’s also bees, bugs, beasts and birds who do not always care to see eye to eye with “hoomans”. When peaceful coexistence comes under attack both prove deadlier than the other. Currently, they are on the offensive and I am on the defensive. Hope I do not have to take recourse to the alternate.
Till then the pigeon peril continues unabated…
The Coat
The storm had come in the night and taken the low crossing. Rain had swollen the creek and pushed brush and limb and debris against the culvert grate until the water backed up and spread slow and brown across the county road. He walked down at first light to clear it. He’d walked this crossing every wet spring for eleven years and the creek had never shown him anything but garbage and busted fence wire and the ordinary wreckage of high water.
He saw the coat before he understood the coat. Black wool, heavy and dark, one sleeve caught on the grate where the current had pushed it through. The sleeve was not empty.
He waded in. The water was cold and took his breath and rose to his thighs and the creek bottom was mud and slick rock and his boots found their purchase and he worked the sleeve free from the grate. The body came with it. It came loose with a wet, sucking sound.
It had been in the water some hours. The face had gone puffy and pale and the tissue was swollen and turgid with the soak and the eyes were open and milky and the jaw was slack and the tongue sat between the teeth like something that had crawled there to die. He made himself look. Looking seemed owed to the thing. The left temporal region was depressed, the bone driven inward above and posterior to the ear, and the scalp over the fracture was macerated and separating from the skull in dark, waterlogged flaps. No creek did that. That was a blunt instrument. That was a thing swung hard and swung more than once. Somebody had put this man in the water already dead, or close enough to it.
He should have gone for the phone. He knew this. He crouched instead. The creek pushed at his legs and the dead man’s coat billowed and settled and billowed again and his fingers went numb in the cold and he worked the buttons loose. He told himself he was looking for a wallet. A name. Some document that would let this man leave the creek as more than a number and a description on a form.
The wallet was in the inside breast pocket, soaked through and ruined. The license inside had gone to pulp and the photograph was a gray smear and the name was unreadable.
In the other pocket. Dry.
He noticed that before he noticed what the pocket held. His boots were full of creek. His pants were wet to the thigh. The dead man’s clothes were saturated, the wool heavy and dark and dripping, the body itself swollen with the water it had taken in. And this pocket was dry. The fabric around it was dry. The thing inside sat in that pocket the way a stone sits in a streambed, untouched, as though the water had known to go around it.
He drew it out. A figure. Four inches, maybe less. Dark material, wood or stone or something between, carved with a fineness that did not belong to a creek or a coat or a dead man’s pocket. The head was too large for the body and sat forward, heavy, as though the neck could not bear it. The face was horrific. From the lower jaw hung a cluster of tapered forms, bundled close, overlapping, the way tendrils bundle where the water is deep and still. Something carved to look as though it might move if you looked away. The eyes were narrow slits, set wide, and they were not empty. Along the back, ridged shapes spread from the shoulders and lay folded flat, the way wings lie against something that was never meant for the ground. Beneath these the body was squat and thick-limbed, crouched in the posture of something that did not stand but waited, low and close to whatever it rested on.
There were worn places. Places worn smooth by friction, by handling, by the repeated passage of a thumb across the same surfaces, the same grooves, over years or decades or longer. Things that have been carried that long and that often have a history, and the history sits in the worn places like the ghost of every hand that has ever held it.
His hand had closed around it. He noticed this after. His fingers had wrapped the figure and his thumb had found the deepest worn place, at the center of the crowded face, and the fit was exact. He had not decided to close his hand. The hand had decided. He caught up to it after and told himself he was holding it for evidence. He told himself he would hand it over when someone came.
He did not hand it over.
He put it in his own coat and the figure was warm against his ribs, an unnatural warmth and he put it there anyway. He walked back to the truck and called it in. He told them about the coat and the skull and the grate. He described the fracture and the position of the body and the state of decomposition and the water level and the debris field. He used the words he knew to use. He did not mention the figure.
They told him to stay. He stayed. He sat in the truck with the engine running and the heater on and the figure pressed against his ribs and its warmth it moved through the lining and into his skin, steady and slow and patient and it did not feel like stone and it did not feel like wood.
The deputies came. They photographed the body and the grate and the crossing and the creek bed in both directions. They asked him what he’d touched. He told them the coat, the sleeve, the grate. They did not ask about pockets. He did not volunteer. They bagged the body, loaded the gurney, and drove away. The creek went on. The water dropped through the day and by evening the crossing was passable and the brush was cleared and the road was open.
He went home. He hung the coat by the door. This was the habit of eleven years. He ate. He sat in the chair. He watched the dark come in through the windows and fill the rooms the way water fills a low place, slow and even and without opinion.
He put his hand in the coat pocket. Out of habit. Out of something. The figure was there and it was damp. Not warm now. Damp. Damp the way it should have been in the dead man’s pocket, as though it had never left the water, the way a wound carries what made it.
He stood in the dark hallway with his hand in the pocket and the damp moving through his fingers and his pulse had risen, a tick up from its resting rate, and his breathing had changed, and the muscles of his jaw and his forearms had tightened. The body was listening. The body had turned its attention to the thing in the pocket the way a dog turns its attention to a sound outside the walls, a sound below the register of human hearing, and the hair on his forearms stood and the skin prickled and his pupils widened in the dark.
He did not take it out.
He went to bed. He did not sleep. He lay in the dark and listened to the house and the house was quiet and the house felt off and somewhere the creek was running and the figure was damp in the pocket by the door and the damp was spreading, slow and patient, the way water moves through wool, the way water moves through everything, given time.
***
Esther Chilton 
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