Ysbryd Y Mwynwyr – Five Sentence Fiction

It’s time for my latest offering to Lillie McFerrin’s Five Sentence Fiction, a weekly prompt where there is no word limit, just a limit on the number of sentences. Plus, although she provides a word prompt, it is just for direction only – you don’t have to include the word itself in your contribution.

This week, the prompt is  – THUNDER.

Do let me know what you think of my offering below – and whilst you’re at it, why not take a look at everyone else’s offerings (I’m sure they’ll be fabulous), and even give it a go yourself…

*****

– Ysbryd y Mwynwyr –

If you lay your hands flat against the earth, you can feel the souls of the lost and the forgotten reaching out to you for recognition.

I feel that here, even on a cheerful day in August; the scars incised on the landscape, the tumbledown mine-workings, the iron ore spilling its livid orange hue over smooth stones ensconced in the glass-clear streams – these are the obvious markers of times past.

Pause for a moment, tune your ears to the undertow that pulls your heart, your thoughts, your very breath past the calm sounds of nature; beyond the brook burbling at your feet, beyond the birds soaring in the azure above your head.

This serene valley was once filled with the roar of vast waterwheels, smoke, steam, pounding hammers and picks, chipping and hacking and the shouting of men.

The thunder of industry echoed around these mountains; the clamour of humanity, the spirit of the miners, reverberates within us now, never to be lost.

Copyright - Freya

Copyright – Freya

Lillie McFerrin Writes

*** Ysbryd Y Mwynwyr is Welsh and means Spirit of the Miners. It is a community regeneration project that set out to create an identity for northern Ceredigion using the legacy of metal mining as a theme for regeneration. The project mainly focused on the human, social and community aspects of mining culture. In short, the very reason why many of the upland villages exist. Please see the Ysbryd Y Mwnwyr website for further information, and if you ever visit Wales, I can highly recommend the area as a region to visit. It is stunning.

Undercurrents – Five Sentence Fiction

It’s time for my latest offering to Lillie McFerrin’s Five Sentence Fiction, a weekly prompt where there is no word limit, just a limit on the number of sentences. Plus, although she provides a word prompt, it is just for direction only – you don’t have to include the word itself in your contribution.

This week, the prompt is very apt for me, as I will be off on a week’s holiday tomorrow (hurrah!) – TRAVEL.

Do let me know what you think of my offering below – and whilst you’re at it, why not take a look at everyone else’s offerings (I’m sure they’ll be fabulous), and even give it a go yourself…

*****

– Undercurrents –

He had spent most of the past year planning the journey; it had been on his mind every day.

How to conserve his energy, what route to take, how to survive the most desolate of places – it had been a relief to stop thinking and finally set off.

Now at last his destination was just visible on the horizon, and the relief at knowing that he was almost there, that he had survived insurmountable odds, was indescribable.

He scanned the land below; the cities, the deserts, the forests and the seemingly endless oceans were now a distant memory in his mind, to be savoured when he came to rest.

The air whistled past as he adjusted, turned and prepared to land; migration was over, for another year.

Copyright - Freya

Copyright – Freya

 

Lillie McFerrin Writes

Holiday Flash Fiction

I’m on holiday, so have penned three short pieces inspired by my countryside idyll. I hope you enjoy them all!

 

This perfect patch of blue, framed by curtains flung wide. The big city, frenetic with self-importance, lingers only as a distant fragment on the edge of my thoughts.

This perfect patch of blue, punctured by a bird of prey, intent, suspended, focused on the earth below. I too am suspended, in splendid isolation.

———–

We are mesmerised by her sudden twist of friendliness. Her tail twitches imperiously.

Follow me.

We take the cat’s eye tour – the cow barn, the hens, the sheep scattered over the mountain fields. Finally, we reach her boundary, a nodding dandelion not quite at the end of the meandering lane. A final writhe of fur around legs, and she is gone, trotting back to her fireside sanctuary.

Goodbye for now, puss.

————

A tractor, bouncing on man-tall tyres – the driver waves us past.

A ewe and her twin lambs, scampering to the steep verge, eyes wide, stopping to chew on grass, just in case.

A mud-splattered van, straining to chug to the top of the hill, clouds of fumes belching from a rusting exhaust.

This is rush hour in the countryside.