Prompt: photograph

***

Dreamers have come and gone,

silence fills this empty piazza.

Cold and run down

life no longer fills the streets with joy.

The statue that sat centred and glorified,

long fled our streets in favor of better company.

She left her fountain of youth behind,

the waters that kept our skin vibrant and wrinkle free,

open for all to drink.

Those waters evaporated away, little by little;

and became a pool of sorrow at the bottom.

Full of coins, she holds tightly the evidence

of the wishes of those desiring

the ignorance of youth.

An occasional visitor stops by,

throws a coin in, whispers a few words,

only to hear the laughing echo

of the metal as it ricochets its way down.

Capped in silence, we turned our backs

as the well dried up,

no longer interested in the wishes

given to her in secret,

since she no longer supplied our youth.

Little did we know,

the well used up the last of its powers,

to grant the one wish it could,

and set the statue free.

*****

A few years ago l joined a startup writing group called ThinkingTen. The concept is simple: there’s a daily prompt and you have 10 minutes to write whatever comes to mind. l deleted my blog posts from the site when I received an email saying the founder was shutting down the site. I hadn’t written anything in a while anyway. It’s still going, but I’ve decided to repost my original works here for Fiction friday.

*****

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