Author: Caleb Jacobo
Scylla on the Sea Cliff
The horizon slowly dips; spilling the sun’s rich purples and orangish-reds over the turbulent waves; warming the morning sea. The girl stands on the edge of a cliff from which a low-hanging bridge spans eighty feet of open water to a small island of jagged rocks. A brown tendril of hair flaps against her cheeks. Her taut skin peels and shines in the mist. She bends with spread legs under the weight of her pack: an enormous military backpack which overflows with reels of fishing line, pre-baited with a variety of pastes and small fish, and three segments of fishing pole that stick up from the top at three different angles. She squeezes the pack’s straps across her chest and belly. The black plastic tunic grumbles as she wipes the sweat from her lip. “Come on Scylla,” she says, “you have to do this for father. For the village.”
June 30, 2013
Ulrik and The Mountain Woman
The gray stone steps jutted in odd angles, irregularly shaped and sized, and without clear separation from the mountain’s natural features. Were they built in, or carved out? thought Ulrik. It’s just the same to my legs, he supposed. The smell of rotting wood and sod-berries in the humid forest air made his lungs feel heavy and he thought he might rest and share water with his small companion: a Yorkshire Terrier who panted wildly, but nevertheless remained no more than three inches from the boy’s heel.
June 22, 2013
The Beast, The Boy, and The Red Shoes
Prompt: Write a scene in which a boy asks for new shoes.
June 17, 2013
Ballad of Sally O'Hare
In a land long from here at a time far before, lived Sally O’hare who thought life was a bore. Her only interest? a device in the palm of her hand. It glimmered like ice and it spoke on demand. Each night when she arrived home from her day, before she would sleep and before she would pray, she’d consult the device in the tenderest way.
June 11, 2013
Can You Observe The Calving of the Does?
Somewhere on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, six-thousand feet above sea level, on a hill shaded by giants, my father waits for death.
June 4, 2013
The Witch of Ramí
For those of you who enjoyed my last sketch, ‘Is there any work for a young not-a-witch?‘, here is a new segment I wrote for it this morning. Enjoy!
June 1, 2013
Is there any work for a young not-a-witch?
Please enjoy this sketch I wrote this morning. And for those who celebrate it: Have an observant Memorial Day.
May 27, 2013
A Game of Flap-Dragon
Hard soles clop along the sidewalk stirring up gasoline vapor and sweet oak. A pair of once-black leather bootees with no laces, their vamps deeply worn, shuffle along the cement. A pewter mug, tied through its handle by silk thread, rolls and flops against the holed sides of a gray wool coat with each sway of the hips; its contents shake like a lazy maraca.
May 20, 2013
The Summer Faire in Cobblestern Market
All the roads run parallel in the Berzin Straight and are fastened from the slick-black pebbles that bed the Salted Sea. Their dark surface vacillates under the heated nausea of a summer’s day, so from the apartments above you can imagine yourself drifting down Black’s River. Each road is separated from its neighbor’s by towering beige apartment buildings, which themselves are separated within—by thick plaster walls—from the residents of the other through-roads, so as to maintain the ‘integrity’ of each diverse culture.
May 15, 2013
About last night…
The man marches to the bedside table and tears open the drawer. “Is this what you want Jadyn?”
May 8, 2013