Ezra Gardiner
Bio
I'm trying to hold onto memories and stories to make compelling tapestries
and I'm working on a series of prompts chosen to open me up to magical possibilities.
Stories (5/0)
The Promise of the Valley
There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. The ridges and hollows sat empty and unfilled, waiting for vitality to course through them. The Valley stretched halfway up the continent in length, similar in shape to today. The tallest ridges running up the east and west were bald and rocky, shoved upward during the formation of the continent, and the basin and foothills in it were covered in oak and hawthorne trees. The mountains and forests were motionless and lifeless, paused in their development, and poised for change.
By Ezra Gardiner2 years ago in Fiction
The Ocean Becomes the Sky
Supremely still waters laid out to every side in sheets, marked here and there by strokes of feathered white texture and the torpid, teal shimmers of fish. The boy lay prone on his stomach, stretched out across his circular boat, made like a drum of oak planks and canvas flipped up onto its top. He had made his way to this spot slowly, shifting his oars around the circle of the gunwale to propel and steer, spinning like a top while he tried to push against momentum to move in straighter lines. Behind him, his wake was small and rambling, stretching back to empty horizon. He watched the long, curling line drift and fade, rocking left to right with the sleepy swells far under the water’s surface, and closed his eyes until the rocking felt accentuated, like the swinging of a pendulum.
By Ezra Gardiner2 years ago in Fiction
In the Woods
Heavy rains slapped into the canopy of hardwoods, and fell from leaf tips and spilled between cracks from freeze and sun scald in the bark. The ground was too saturated to take any more water, and the trickles found every low spot and downhill stretch, across and around duff and dead leaves and live and dead animals, until they hit the creeks and built over miles into purling streams and heavy rivers.
By Ezra Gardiner2 years ago in Fiction
A Girl, Watched By Stars
At the top of the highest pine, hands stuck with pitch resin and raw from rough bark, she watched for the stars. The last of the day’s thunderclouds were passing over her and towards the east, and in the late dusk she could just barely make out their lines and undulations as they passed. Way off to her right there was a silent clammer of lightning that turned the purple, black, and grey into white and blue and then was gone again.
By Ezra Gardiner2 years ago in Fiction
A Local Gravestone Disappears
The stone was waist-high and rough, and there was a line of blackbirds flashing their red shoulders and beating their wings against the rough surface of its crest. It had been placed thirteen years before when Charlie convinced a brickmason to shape and letter it for him. The mason said there was no point, that she had died half a lifetime ago, but Charlie hadn’t had the right stone then, and now he did, and he stood picking lightly and carefully at some of the lichen on it and cried a little, quietly, until the mason shook his head.
By Ezra Gardiner2 years ago in Fiction
