The prophecy demanded…
Tim had been staring at those words on the page, certain that they were his gateway into a tale of adventure and mystery. He had written them without knowing where they would take him, and it seems, they took him nowhere. The cat on his lap purred with contentment, unaware of the treasures and romances possible in a world beyond its own humming. But the insistence of the story remained.
The narrative demanded a large oak tree, planted with humour nearly eighty years ago. The branches of which were reaching from its core to the horizon in each direction. It was a magnificent specimen and it stood powerfully in the middle of the raven’s field. Each leaf it dropped held the secrets of the universe, the veins which delicately ran through each started with exuberance, before crumbling into dust. The oak’s bark was rough from age and weariness; its smoothness lost to a time before the cat ever knew. Beneath its canopy two lovers met, the boy and the boy, whose tenderness would make even the old tree blush – which is indeed how the oak believed its autumn leaves were made.
The purring continued, the prophecy still unknown and unfulfilled. Yet the tyre swing which hung from the boughs of that great oak tree was not empty. She, with the dandelion, allowed herself to drift in the breeze. She held the delicate weed in front of her face and blew. It was a simple act of power; the girl with none became master of that flower’s fate. Its spores were carried about the field – she was not aware that the seeds would grow. They would flower and drop their seed, and then they would flower and drop their seed. The filtered sunlight hit her shoes; she dropped from the swing and walked melancholic through the long grass which bent under her feet, before springing back to its eternal dance.
The cat turned in Tim’s lap, a constant companion in the story that was not its own, unless… the simple conjunction passed through the writer’s mind. It tumbled once, and then twice and then he wondered how a simple, conditional ‘if’, might take the cat from the lap to the land… The cat stalked through the field; he did not know it belonged to the raven. He kept low and he was deliberate in his mission. He sought the sun; he did not seek adventure. As he purred towards the side of the field closest to the wheat crop, the two staves, crossed over and wearing an old flannel shirt, became his clear intention. The scarecrow’s hat flopped over its face, and it resided over a warm pile of dirt. The cat moved without hesitation to the base of the cross, curled about it once and went to sleep.
Tim could only imagine the simplicity of the cat’s life, and knew he needed his own simple joy. He moved from his screen to the kitchen, taking the time to stretch his legs and fill up his oversized coffee cup. As the jug boiled, and the cat weaved between his feet, he was struck with the overwhelming question: where was the raven?
With a sense of urgency, he returned to the screen, cup poised between his lips and the keyboard. He looked to the sky; not wanting to find cotton wool clouds or a bright blue abyss. Instead, he saw twilight stretching out and casting the oak tree in a golden hue. Its leaves shimmered in the last of the day’s light and there it was. The raven sat upon its nest, not too far from the ground; giving time to its pale blue speckled eggs. Its plumage was dark, and the only part of it which moved was its eye. The warmth of Tim’s coffee allowing him to imagine the warmth of that dark bird’s heart.
As the cat returned to Tim’s lap, the picture of the field felt complete, and the prophecy that demanded was lost to fiction, much like the trunk of gold sovereigns which was buried beneath that old oak tree.
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Not sure this was my best piece, but I did enjoy the play between the real and the imagined, and perhaps blurring the lines as the cat entered the setting. If you'd like to get onto this week's #theinkwell prompt, you can grab the prompt post here: @theinkwell/the-ink-well-prompt-74-plus-weekly-challenge-and-prize-announcement