Bio: Robyn King Thomas interprets life in all its magnificence through her writing.  She is currently a columnist for a newspaper in her native New Zealand and also the Haliburton County Echo in Ontario, Canada where she resides with her family.  Robyn has won awards for her short stories and essays, promotes literacy in her community via her radio show and now dabbles in poetry.

Check back July 1 when Robyn's story "Letting Go of the Fifis" will be featured on Whim's Place.

Dalliance

by Robyn King Thomas

Flames flickered red, gold, consuming pages of love-words. Warming his hands by the fire, the man mused; scorched words were once beautiful thoughts. His leather chair creaked, its springs recoiling as he shifted his weight. This was a place to ponder and rest, where back yielded against strong back and leather melded to embrace the body of the man. A whiff of burning logs had become one with the rawhide smell of sweat and hair that was the chair, and brass-tacks embedded, shone as guardians of contemplation.

Created in silence, words tumble from tattered tomes, imparting solace and wisdom. The man’s eyes narrowed as he remembered. Some his truths, had spilled as limbs entwined from his man lips enfolding the woman’s heart. He recalled his hand slipped across her knees. Intentions perceived in a tangle of words, love stolen at the foot of his chair.

Seductive secrets swelled on a breeze. Ambiguous whispers beneath a ripe, yellow moon twisted, and the woman’s heart, a stone seraph, smashed. Tears splashed like rain. She was after all, his Friday night—dalliance.

The man understood the woman’s love would lie fallow, waiting for other words and other men.

He sat in stillness surveying the city below. His eyes searched the dusk for the river, a granite thread winding its way toward the shadow streets half-hidden beneath a pall of purple wood smoke. The man enjoyed the permanence of this vista and allowed his gaze to drift with the river toward its mouth where the sun blazed molten then melted into the sea.

Glowing in the firelight, discarded words sparked as shooting stars, freed from constraints of tongues and letters . . .and his heart protected. A movement beside the leather chair distracted the man. With a smile, he murmured to his wife, to take a seat.
 

©Robyn King Thomas