Life’s thread fraying: written in 10 minutes

June Kinoshita wrote this marvelous piece in 10 minutes in our Saturday online gathering, when the prompt was a recording of Chinggis Khaan, the king of Mongolian throat singing. She’s working on a family saga, and each week finds that our random prompt gives her a new entry into a scene or a character.

He knew he was dying. With each breath, he could feel his life’s thread fraying, like the net cast by a spider across the maple leaves in the garden during the night. When he opened his eyes that morning, he marveled at the fine beads of dew that clung to the spider’s silk, each one catching the sunlight, quivering like tiny jewels. By noon, the drops had evaporated. A small, white butterfly was struggling in the web, fighting for its life, tearing the delicate threads as the spider closed in. 

Unseen on the other side of the garden wall, a priest had begun chanting in the temple next door, a resonant vibration rising from deep within the man’s body. It was a sound he had heard a lifetime ago. He must have been eighteen. He had gone to pray at the great Sadai-ji temple in his hometown, craving a sign, an answer to the question that consumed him. To stay and keep to the safe path, or to leave and cast his fate upon that of a reborn land. He had followed his nomad heart and given everything to the pursuit. He had sailed into rough seas, sailed beyond the curve of the earth to alien shores, only to return to home a stranger even to himself. An animal sorrow swallowed him up as he felt himself crossing over into the mist eating the horizon, taking him back to where it had all started.