prompt poetry & prose

1. A stain on the wasteland;

guess you'd call him a
jock, if you were that sort.
a stereotype.
All I know is he was a damned good sportsman,
you name it. He'd give it a shot.

Charlie. Charlie MacPherson.
He was my brother, you know. I wrote that
on the card amongst the flowers left at the park side.
Desolate just like his last snatch of sight around him.

I thought he was popular. He was. I knew
it. But then he was gone. Nineteen years and then,
the end. Ceased to exist one day.

They
killed him.

What kills me is that no one knows who
the hell took him away. Not even me. All they left
was just a stain on the wasteland.


---

4. There was something wrong with the colours;

It was all she'd ever known. She realised she was like the Emilia Fox's of this world... just one of many in the family known for a certain sort of profession. No, she thought with a sigh and a smile, there was nothing for it; Alexa Johnson was to be an artist.

It was all she could remember. Her seventh birthday – the year simply all the little girls were inseparable from their Polly Pockets and other such delights. Alexa had opened her presents - “careful, darling!” - bit by bit, slowly peeling the tape away. Her first grown up artist's set. An easel. Canvas. Alexa's heart leapt – her daddy would be so proud of her when she used it.

Now she had been on this earth nineteen years – and four months and thirteen days, if you were the precise sort, and she was indeed, as she'd always known she would be, at an esteemed arts college.

She turned her attention back to her subject and her easel. Alexa didn't think there was much greater joy than being able to capture a person, their personality and the circumstance in which the subject was being drawn. She sighed. Something was wrong this time. She couldn't put her finger on the exact pinpointed aspect that needed to be worked on.

Personality. Check, plenty of that. Perspective. Seemed fine to Alexa.

She brushed a stray piece of hair from her eyes, leaving a light smattering of paint in her finger's wake. She glanced up at the subject once more, biting her lip and then back to her easel again. The colour didn't look... realistic? No, she didn't think that was the word. More... dull and dark. The colours didn't do what they were meant to do in a painting; bring out the subject and provoke imagination.

She knew what she needed to do now, the finish was in sight.

“There was something wrong with the colours,” Alexa thought to herself as she, once again, put her brush to the canvas.


---

5. A Boy Wearing Red and Green;

I have a vague recollection, flashes of memory. My mother told me I once had a friend by the name of Timothy. I've seen the photographs but I don't really remember.

I know he moved away. Far away, or so I thought anyway. I was so convinced he had moved to America or Australia or some other place across the world from my garden patio and my blue sandpit. As it turned out, he had only moved to Devon. Still, I guess a child's mind works that way. Exaggerated sizes and distances, you know.

All I do remember, distantly in a flash of colours and pictures, is a boy wearing red and green.