She looked back down the path

surveying winding steps
sea-wind buffeting her body
aggressive as the call
of ocean birds a-wing
above.

Slate-grey pebbles
wondrously uninteresting
skittered underfoot.

So many more to go, she thought
shouldering her pack.

+++++

The monastery emerged from stone
A sentinel rising silent
Awakened by her approach.

She paused, fingers digging for papers, pen.

Drawings scrawled across pages
Pen-scribbled over parchment
and she peered;
it was everything she dreamed,
everything that haunted,
hunted her through library stacks,
everything scribal artifacts breathed,
everything,
every story, every tear,
every blood-soaked page
marauders forgot and the scent
of acrid iron on hide-bound books.

Everything.

She looked, feasted on ancient stones
crumbling under her gaze
and ached.

It belonged in a museum,
but the scope
the scale
yawned bigger and wider
than any academic could hold
in archival hands.

Author’s Note 🌿

When I saw ‘s prompt this week, I knew I had to carve out time for it. The romantic idea of the academic adventurer, the Indiana Jones-esque researcher and explorer is near and dear to my heart, so I wanted to be sure to contribute. I had fun stretching the idea of the “historical artifact” to be a place rather than a thing — sometimes our forgotten places are just as much or more of a treasure than the things we can hold in our own two hands.

Thank you for reading. 🙂

❦ Heather

Thank you for reading Pen-Scribbled Stories, a haphazard archive of experimental prose and story. Pen-Scribbled Stories is a subsidiary of the Heather in the Blue Mountains newsletter.

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Or, learn more about all this? 🌾

“It’s unlikely, these days”

As the lights descend
Over rose-kissed peaks,
Ancient stone dusted with gold.

“It’s unlikely, these days”
As the strange ones lope
Across eerie green shadows
Glassine sand sifted with blue.

“It’s unlikely, these days,”
We said once,
Before we faded.

Author’s Note 🌿

‘s prompts this last week for Flash Fic Friday were a bit of a brain-teaser for me. I didn’t feel up to trying to pen a Valentine's poem or a romantic endearment, and I just had to let things percolate for a few days. Clearly, the percolation led to something outright weird. I stepped into the ‘write about a desert’ theme when I sketched out a mesa rock formation in the sketchbook (poems are very linked to visual stimuli for me), and… Weirdness. As I leaned on the dialogue prompt, “It’s unlikely, these days,” somehow it unlocked dormant memories of 90s alien documentaries and here we are.

Weirdness. (LOL)

❦ Heather

Thank you for reading Pen-Scribbled Stories, a haphazard archive of experimental prose and story. Pen-Scribbled Stories is a subsidiary of the Heather in the Blue Mountains newsletter.

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**If you enjoyed this creative ramble, please consider checking out some of my other work. 🌿

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Heavy stormclouds curled overhead, spattering

water on dust-laden faces.

Eyes closed, faces turned
toward vortex swirling
pressure dropping like a sigh.

Rain.

It was a collective psalm
a praise long-awaited
now released like the rush of wild horses
thundering across tumultuous
nimbii rent wide.

One by one, faces turned
toward stranger waiting
arms raised all sharp
angles, a blunted staff
gleaming water-sparkle.

* * *

“Who do you think will notice?”
he muttered,
reaching in spirit
then letting go, casting out,
evaporating.

* * *

They struggled and grasped
for words that didn’t come —
as barren as the drought years —
to recount
days and lives changed
by a stranger not from here,
but from mist and shadow.

Peace came in the silence
Understanding in the sunlit riot
of green things now growing.

Author’s Note 🌿

This poetic tale was inspired by Scoot’s 2026 inaugural Flash Friday prompts. Prompts, plural, yes, because the more constraints I have to work with the more my creativity kicks into overdrive. 😂

You can find Scoot’s prompts here:

Gibberish

FFF - You Must Be New Here

New To Gibberish? Check out Navigation for Newcomers…

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2 months ago · 20 likes · 13 comments · Scoot

❦ Heather

Thank you for reading Pen-Scribbled Stories, a haphazard archive of experimental prose and story. Pen-Scribbled Stories is a subsidiary of the Heather in the Blue Mountains newsletter.

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**If you enjoyed this creative ramble, please consider checking out some of my other work. 🌿

Lyra heard it.

Breath caught, strained in the silence
Heartbeat too loud.
Twisted and drunk with sleep,
She rose
Listening:

Strange music skittered
Light-fingered across
Consciousness.

Furtive she stretched
Wincing at the creak
Of mattress and bone,
Still listening,
Still reaching
For a sound that questioned
Sanity’s grip.

Again!

Again it whispered,
Called sibilant,
A susurrus over
Thoughts like fingers
brushing her unbound hair off her cheek,
Intimate phenomena,
A life’s work.

Up and moving in time
She reached back—
Soft lights blinked
On a recording console
Beckoning—
She reached and reached to grasp the dance
As it swirled across the Sphere facility,
Gossamer and winged in the two moons’ light.

Shaking fingers touched,
and console blinked red,
primed to capture,

and the music

spun into ether

silenced.

Author’s Note 🌿

This one was a hard one to pin down and took me nearly a year.

I had developed the accompanying illustration last year (2025) around various reference images of unusual rock formations, one of which were the Trovants or “living rocks” of Romania. One of my favorite artist pastimes is to study photographs and real-world geology, botany, etc., and then try to imagine those shapes in context of science-fiction civilizations. Star Trek episodes like “Encounter at Farpoint” (Season 1, episodes 1 and 2, known as “the space jellyfish” episodes) and Farscape with Moya further cemented this fascination.

So then, what sort of facility would these be? I pondered and kept returning to the artwork, month after month, brainstorming and considering different angles.

A science facility is an obvious (and admittedly easy) answer, but then we get to play with the juxtaposition of logic/emotion, data/mystery, and control/freedom, concepts supported by both narrative and artistic design (circular construction is unusual and more challenging to work with, compared to square/brutalist design that automatically gives a nod to control). Lyra became a character who has spent her life documenting and recording, likes things just so, and gave room to explore an encounter with something not so easily quantified, recorded, and explained.

I’ll let you decide for yourself how she responds!

❦ Heather

Thank you for reading Pen-Scribbled Stories, a haphazard archive of experimental prose and story. Pen-Scribbled Stories is a subsidiary of the Heather in the Blue Mountains newsletter.

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**If you enjoyed this creative ramble, please consider checking out some of my other work. 🌿

They drifted above her,

casting great, ink-dark shadows,
blotting out the stones.

Even the stones would cry out,
she could hear them,
as in the old stories,
the tremor
the sound
the fury rumbling–

Then: silence.

Even the birds dare not peep.

They drifted above,
Searching,
Searching,
lights blinking curious, almost,
sentient, almost,
And Seela held her breath.

The metallic pinging set hair on end,
Resolve strengthened,
Fingernails gripping in the dirt.
The dragging cable whinged and snapped bright
pulverized lavender crags;
Seela ran, lungs heaving,
Breathing, the only sound in the eerie,
with the sinuous
in her sights.

She leapt,
Wingless and yet flying.
Moment stretched thin,
wrapping and twisting below,
and she sank.
Defeat, defeat, defeat, heart crying,

But,

Then,

Fingers closed around smooth spun wire.
And triumphant Seela
climbed.

Hand over hand,
Fist over fist,
Pallid earth swooping
away,
Behemoths cutting sky
above.

They drifted now together,
casting great, ink-dark shadows
Blotting out below.

Author’s Note 🌿

I’ll be candid: I really don’t know what’s going on with this poetry-as-story thing I’ve got right now, but I really am enjoying it. I can dip my toe in different worlds, scratch the geekier itch, play with fun words and language, and I’m not stretched thin by the demands of the form like I would be with a novel or longer work (I wrote several when I was fresh out of my undergrad studies, it’s a big big undertaking, much bigger than I have bandwidth for, currently).

Today it’s sci-fi, who knows where we’ll be next week?

❦ Heather

Thank you for reading Pen-Scribbled Stories, a haphazard archive of experimental prose and story. Pen-Scribbled Stories is a subsidiary of the Heather in the Blue Mountains newsletter.

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**If you enjoyed this creative ramble, please consider checking out some of my other work. 🌿

No one knew where the swords came from.

They’d always stood there, looming
giant sentinels over the village.

Dex squinted against harsh sunlight,
peering at colossal blades towering.
Pigeons swooped
Wheeling between giant quillions,
pale wings catching light otherworldly.
Wind sighed around the edges,
lone grasses twitching and rustling against iron.

Words failed him in that moment,
light shifting and bending,
enormous steel plunging
deep into stone earth.
The hair on Dex’s arms prickled.

No inscriptions, no runes, no words or plaques, and yet:

Knees and tears coursed down to dry earth.
He knew without knowing,
the depth
the breadth
the height of care of the Shaper–
these blades could belong to none other–
who would claim with this sacred stillness.
Reaching a trembling hand,

and then:

a low rumble,
an ancient forgotten song to meet him:
kinship, steel, and covenant.

Protection.

Home.

Author’s Note 🌿

Some of you may recognize the artwork from last year; I’ve been tinkering with this story about Dex and the mysterious swords for longer than that, with not much luck. It didn’t want to be a full-blown novella, it didn’t want to be standard short story, and even the typical flash fiction format just seemed… meh. Even the artwork struggled; I knew what I wanted to see, but getting it there took multiple revisions.

And then, as I began developing course materials for a middle school creative writing class, I ran across prose poetry. Sudden fiction. It all came to the forefront, back from the mental archives of college circa 2006. A tighter word count and a more —ahem— creative sort of layout…. Yes. It seemed like it might work with my recent return to poetry and poetic forms.

And, it did. After more than a year of tinkering, I finally felt reasonably satisfied with this first completed piece of flash fiction in… let’s just say a very long time.

For that alone, I can let this one fly free.

❦ Heather

Thank you for reading the inaugural edition of Pen-Scribbled Stories, a haphazard archive of experimental prose and story. Pen-Scribbled Stories is a subsidiary of the Heather in the Blue Mountains newsletter.

Subscribe now

**If you enjoyed this creative ramble, please consider checking out some of my other work. 🌿