a rock that looks like the perfect stepping stone is where danger lies
Step Stone Senryū
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Rounding through the pass, I crossed from the cold to the sunny side. But while I transited from the damp & mossy to the dry grass side of the mountain, I carried the cold with me. The ubiquitous sun would not warm me, but rather I seemed to suck the warmth out of the world -- as if I were a portal, and the light landing upon my skin was shunted to some parallel universe. I was the world's window left open with the heater on, and the temperature differential pulled a steady breeze in my direction, to who knows where?
We watch the naked emperor like nothing is amiss, and recoil upon sight of frogs wise of what lies in a kiss. We trust the familiar too much, and the odd too little. We love a beauty even when she's selfish or she's brittle. There is a Jack for each giant, and many clever cats, and, sometimes, we cheat the man who takes out all our rats. The other foot will always fall, even when blinded by hope. Sometimes it pays to play dimwit, but not be an outright dope. Each tale tells us of ways to be a better, kinder soul in a world filled with all manner of monster, fiend, and troll.

I glimpsed the red hourglass, vibrating in a stone wall -- a Black Widow spider, bouncing on a thin web spun within the void of an absent rock -- that gap forming the spider's recessed hide. And instead of being happy that the spider had found a fine shelter, I worried that a child would stick a careless mitt deep into that wall hole, and be bitten on the hand. In retrospect, this seems so unfair to the spider.
The last lamp out dips the room into darkness [sudden darkness] and in the nothingness, before vague shapes form, a clunking sound triggers the stab of an adrenaline spike into ones chest -- mainlined frisson, or fright: the heart thumps, the chest cinches, the stomach lurches, breath is sipped spastically, and an involuntary noise escapes from some unnamed place within. The power of strange and startling thuds and whumps has fueled many a storybook, but though the mystery is rarely solved, we get over it soon enough.
The lonely lighthouse keeper, peering through a deep-set but narrow window at waves smashing onto the rocky shore, spouting upwards in a fanned geyser. So much depends upon his maintenance of momentum, but the better things go, the more dreadfully boring is life, and when things go poorly, there are russian roulette odds of tragedy. Like life on a mountain, but when someone crashes into the mountainside, the mountain-man is an unlikely participant in the tragedy.