Joseph Severo
Bio
I’m Old Dying Joe.
Stories (56/0)
When Time’s Pulse Ceased
The windchill whispered woeful words unto the tundra’s ear; the harshness heard discouraged the earth, whose despondent soils stowed low under the snow. The sonics of the howling breezes could not reach the band of byzantium-colored clouds above, which were brooding—brewing a somber song all of their own. Hail-fall called for encore after encore. As hailstones clapped against the ground in ovation, the storm persistently performed its show. Thunder did not blunder: It rocked the lands below. Although the region encircling the central basin was devoid of vegetation bar scarce cloudberry plants, the valley was in no way lifeless. Smaller fauna pervaded across the open wintry plane; bears and bigger beasts plodded peremptorily. The tepid nomad, clad in a bristly, insulated overcoat fashioned out of caribou, fox fur, and necessity, scuttered along on trackless snowpack in traditional woven snowshoes. The lamenting wayfarer was unencumbered by any company: Blustery blues moved him to walk alone across the circular territory surrounding the frozen pond. Underneath the miniscule pool’s iced-over surface level flitted infinite schools of fish, which could, ostensibly, sustain every half-nourished creature or hurting person yearning to feel full within miles of the chilled site. The weather-beaten survivor possessed no skill for the art of ice fishing, however. Instead, to fend, in regular order, the man would forage for enticing amber cloudberries flowering and growing wildly on scant plants, each of which begging to be picked; though, even the ripest fruits consistently failed to sate the hunger inside. His customary measures would leave him starved if he continued. Like age-old icicles who stalwartly hang from the gapes of arctic caves, whose endurance depend on unabating low temperatures, his rigidity would end at a point. Long-winded habituations would produce gale winds capable of inflicting bone-chill; obstinacy would render the nomadic man frost-bitten. Soon he would be lost to his storm.
By Joseph Severo3 years ago in Fiction
A Heartless World
Unsympathetic landscapes’ discordant correspondence to the despondent few who tenaciously clutched and clawed to continue through—beyond The Event—was conspicuously conveyed upon each extant entity’s countenance: Brief time and magnitude bitterly inscribed lines of old age on the youngest among the living; disaster’s sullen strokes left horizontal markings and daubs of distress on the matured as veritable war paints, recasting formerly tender, expressive visages into unsettled yet deadened semblances. Bodies spoke solely in doleful languages: Dead and persisting. Maimed survivors haggardly schlepped their rattled habitus across and throughout provisional, unlawful open market areas, inversely to the expedient scavengers who industriously lugged their loot for barter. It was a heartless world. Fitness amounted to affluence: The well who narrowly—fortunately—circumvented injurious ramifications of the cataclysm quickly mobilized to covetously monopolize commodities in order to ensure their continuity, as well as the endurance of uneven, unsteady agglomerations composed of other ostensibly able constituents, which deficiently filled the voids of power generated by the collapsed, organized political groups that preceded them. Extortion and thievery were frequently the means of obtaining valuables or perishables within the walls where the rats raced; outside the bounds of the shantytown, however, finders were keepers. Principally, living conditions were as poor as the paupers. The encampment comprised shabby, make-shift shacks, lacking most fundamental amenities aside from the crudest of plumbing systems. Fashioned alleys were bored through otherwise immovable debris, connecting residences and forming streets. The breezeways framed by fixed wreckage were exploited by irreproachable, loitering denizens who maintained a consistent clamor most hours of the day—which enshrouded skulkers and their intentions entirely.
By Joseph Severo3 years ago in Fiction
The Odyssey of Old Dying Joe
For the better part of the twenty-three eventful, and at times, tumultuous years I’ve spent living, I was a rover—adrift with misgivings preventing me from plumbing deeper to reach my purpose. When I was young, the unity within my family unit had faltered: The fond foundation I had been founded, reared, and raised upon abruptly fell apart beneath my feet. The sanctity of my parent’s marriage was compromised; Dad had departed; the once-happy household I’d known turned cold: Fractures and fissures ruptured up and down the steps of that old raised ranch—the remainder of us were left divided. Conversational clashes became commonplace. Bitterness billowed through the blue abode. What was shared was ambivalence. No one was equipped to handle the hardships; we all formed our own counterintuitive compensation mechanisms, which shifted the atmosphere and remolded the terrain. As an adolescent unaccompanied by a father figure, I determined I was the captain of my own ship despite my naivety in navigating troubled waters: I internalized it all—I bottled my emotions. There wasn’t much room for self-conviction with the collection of constrictions blinding and binding me from peering forward and beyond the adversity. For years, fulfillment seemed more like a fanciful figment—merely a mirage and nothing more. I felt lost at sea.
By Joseph Severo3 years ago in Motivation