Raven Fact

An Opus for Ants

Ron Koppelberger

An Opus for Ants

“Turn away…….Turn away!” the commander said to the soldier. The soldier ant said,
“But I have this burden to deliver to the queens guard, a burden of nourishment and blood for the secret birth of our children and the nest.” The commander waved his antenna and spun in circles around the soldier and his burden.
“Danger lays in wait by the rivers edge, for the enemy has the deluge and the destruction of our construct!” the soldier ignored the commander and moved on to the place where his burden would be multiplied by the limits of a possible berth. When the soldier ant had found his cache of bidden sustenance he paused and rested for the return home; in a seconds breath the shadow of the enemy approaching filled the sky and the vision of the ants fear. The shadow passed and the ant counted himself lucky in fate.
Later he returned to the nest only to find it awash in an ocean of water and drown comrades. What of the queen he thought. Realizing he was alone his hunger overcame him and he ate the burden intended for the guard and the queen.
“Confessions of mystery, a war fought at odds with the impossible,” he spoke, “But at least I have a belly full of food and my back to build a road unto the next horizon.”

Within an Ace of It

Ron Koppelberger

Within an Ace of It

Adjacent to the luscious bougainvillea scrub and marigold bushes lay a splintered wooden guide, a separation of daydream barbecues and backyard millenniums. The wooden fence was the defining line between fate and mythical commons of secret hell.
Sly’s neatly tended yard, patio and lawn furniture were centered around a large brick pit. Pig roasts and turkey barbecues for the holidays, a cool brew and a dose of sunshine. The sweet smell of flowers in bloom was subdued by the odor of fresh dirt and wounded earth, his neighbors yard was an amalgamate of backhoes and bulldozers, men in plastic overalls and all surrounded by yellow police tape.
Sundays child, he was Sundays child in fortune and happenstance. His neighbor had knocked on the front door on Sunday, “Hey, can ya help me partner, my wife, she’s bleeding.” In reality she had stopped bleeding and breathing weeks earlier. “Can ya help me brother?” his neighbor had called with a feigned urgency through the front door. Sly had considered it for a moment when the phone rang. A gentle whisper across static filled lines, “Snares of homespun hell, homespun hell!” then the line went dead. A call from the other side covered in graveyard dirt, a warning in simple measures of spirit. The call had distracted him long enough, he’d live to breath, he’d survive the monsters call.
“Sure thing!” he said out loud intending to give his neighbor a hand, a good Samaritan, he was or at least he hoped he was; he‘d help his neighbor. The swath laid bare, a rush of forward speed, a drama ensnared……by what….homespun hell? The neighbor had left before he had gotten to the door, returning to his house. The front door was open, unimpeded by the man’s presence. “Can ya help me brother?” he had said. Sly shut the door and a rain of delicate gypsy moths flittering near the sliding glass door caught his eye. Flittering, evanescent scarcely there yet ever trifling with the currents of moted sunshine and summer warmth. He watched the tiny tempest of moths flutter near the wooden fence. A separation between paradise and hell. It was a dark secret, darker than the light at nights deepest dream and worse for the closeness of its chance.
He had tried chance and the forty or so bodies buried on his neighbors property were now in the care of the F.B.I.; he sighed, he had been within an inch of it, an ace and a hair.
　

The Neighborhood

Ron Koppelberger

The Neighborhood

The disposition of slavery frustrated him and he screamed for release, “YYYYYiiiiieeeeeeeeee!” Rain was falling in exasperating waves of teardrop blessing. The neighborhood was unaware, entranced by the ethereal drama, the presence that defined their true transport, their mode of life, their actual status in the universe, in a prevailing evil smoke of duel reality.
The televisions were dressed in a myriad of programs, they saw game shows, but underneath, they saw soap operas, but underneath, they saw movies, but underneath, they saw Sunday football, but underneath lay the truth, the secret reality of a thousand nightmares in scarlet neon.
Juke Sober was watching a movie about Viet Nam, yet beneath his wife was being eviscerated; the action pushed ahead occluding the truth……..and the strange thing was that she was in the next room making a decision between hamburgers and hotdogs. Juke saw up top.
Pepper Holly was watching a western, yet what lay beneath her subconscious and the enchanting dance of a car slamming into a brick wall, a young couple catapulting through the windshield like crimson angels. Flashes of light lit the cotton dander of a cloudy twilight sky. The sound of a woman sobbing drifted across the neighborhood in quiet desperation.
Juke prayed asking god if he was in heaven or hell. The sobbing continued and the mass continued to watch, to act in reverence of what appeared to be their lives, their existence, oblivious to the shadows that surrounded them.
Somewhere distantly a wolf howled in the midst of saffron fields and wheat, in a flash of insight the wolf thought, “ A gilded plane for innocent dreams and waking endeavors unto the promise of what wont pretends.” For a moment they all saw the great garden of wheat bloom.
The wolf rested, waiting for them.

Books Featuring Stories by Ron Koppelberger (Available to buy at Amazon.com, Barnes and Nobel, Books a Million)

Rare Sunrise

Ron Koppelberger

Rare Sunrise

The rhythm of enchanted illusions and blooms of wheat in cadence with the early dawn, the yielded flow of indigo cloaks that ethereal rays of sunshine assure in spirit of distant hopes and blessed depths of possession, he wondered and mused about those things as he shadowed the wisdom of haunting haze with the heart of a heaven in transit. Just a whisper as he awoke to the day and the future of golden sprigs and sprays, clever bond with the dream that was an eternal sea of amber grain and unimpeded worshiping saffron halos, in preparation for the talent of legend and angels in watch.
It was a managed eloquence in the holy yield of adventure surmised by the passage of tide and the transport of soul for sure savannahs of grain. They found the lineage of custody as they found the rare sunrise. He was bound by waves of fresh sunglow as the breath of calm seas filled the edge of the treasure, the accessory that bidden souls were drawn to in tempers of harvest paradise, berths of Eden and the lay of god

A Breed of Rain

Ron Koppelberger

A Breed of Rain

The eclipse of mystery in omens was a deluge in the life of Prey Claw. He found the crème in his coffee was curdled yet sweet and allayed to the harmony of sunshine dawns and wont. A wonder of ascending taste and a mildly amused rhythm of tender embrace. Prey sanctified the contents of his cup and swallowed the bidden blood, “Ahhhhhhhhaaaaaahhhhhh.” he whispered in satisfaction and passage.
The springtide fray he thought in simmering reserve, the course of maelstroms and the way of weeping rain, he considered the beholden day and birth in trade with the gentle assay of what is and what has been a tear in the depth of miracles and myths of coffee care, a sweet and a bitter barter. He sipped and found respite, reprieve in rages of fortune.
Pray strapped the leather harness across his waist and shoulders in easy movements of bond. Bond between the gods of chance and the fates that tell muzzy dreams where to sleep, where to amend the night and the calm in secret repast. Prey secured his harness to the edge of the cliff and around the trunk of an enormous weeping willow. The sun whirled immigrant beams of warmth and stray moted substance of soul. Prey took a final sip of coffee and in betrothal to the arrangement of wind and sun, teasing mountain balance and rapt crowns of revelation, secured the poise of his task and he sang as he absorbed the present.

“Foretell the blessings

Of daisies and dandelions

In tempers of rare wine

And wild adventure, A

Consonance with salvation.”

The will of god saved Prey that morning and he endured in courage and sighs, wonder and sensation.

　
* The rope snapped and a child would amend the faith in Prey, she would make him whole and in sunshine and rain, she would show him the paths of harvest saffron.