Some people choose to do the 30-day poetry challenge of NaPoWriMo (like NaNoWriMo, only less work ). http://www.napowrimo.net/ This event is not run by the Office of Letters and Lights—OLL is busy running Screnzy in April—but it’s just as rewarding and interactive.

*cough* Okay, fine. I’ve never done it. But for the past few years I’ve been meaning to, so I think it’s time WHO’S WITH ME???

~Sandy

-FDR’s First Inaugural Address

Buildings stretched impossibly high, perspective skewed by late hour and dismal storm.

Lightning cracked, nature’s gunshot, illuminating the wet and dank streets of New York and a figure trying to get home.

Marie pulled her soaked collar up, trying fruitlessly to calm her heart. Yes, the power must have gone out in this area and, yes, it was dark and raining. But even muggers and rapists weren’t crazy enough to go out in this weather.

She couldn’t remember why she was walking home in the rain. It didn’t matter. All that did was getting home safely.

The awning Marie walked under suddenly released a torrent of overflowing water from its gutter onto her head. Shuddering, she gasped and her shoulders tensed up.

Lightning jagged across the sky, popping her adrenaline. Wind suddenly screamed down, almost pushing her backward. She leaned into the wind and squeezed her eyes shut to block the sting of the rain.

When Marie slitted her eyes open, the gray and black world was still the same, still cold and miserable. But now there was another human walking towards her.

The sky rumbled over Marie as she clutched at her jacket.

The figure walked with his or her head down, moving quickly towards her head-on. Impossibly, the person was right on top of her before fight or flight kicked in. Marie tried to step aside, but the stranger body checked her hard enough to make her hit the ground. It all happened faster than comprehension.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the stranger snarled.

Marie had barely gotten her hands under her, but still ended up face first in a puddle swirling with grit and grim. Her palms throbbed, her heart beat a harsh tattoo in her chest.

She spat out water. It tasted bitter and her skin felt clammy.

When she got to her feet and looked behind her, down the way she had come, she didn’t see her attacker in the gloom. Shadows played tricks on her eyes because she thought she saw a new figure – not entirely human, surely – dart across dark, gunmetal gray sky in a flash of lightning that whitened the world.

Thunder rolled. And when Marie turned forward again, the bleak, rain strewn scene showed more figures approaching. All indistinct, heads down, wet and dark clothed like the other stranger.

Marie’s blood ran cold, her heart stuttering painfully in her chest.

Run.

But they were on her already. Hands shoving, burning eyes, body checking and shouldering her painfully, kicking at her ankles and shins. All so sudden and fast that Marie was wheeling helplessly and almost spinning in 360s from being jarred so roughly so many times.

And all the while, furious murmurs.

“What are you doing?”

“You know what you must do!”

“Why are you here?”

“You know.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Marie! You know what you must do!”

A foot hooked around her ankle and yanked easily. Already disoriented and winded, Marie fell to the ground. A quivering slither of pain wracked her body and Marie whimpered, rain hitting the side of her face and other cheek scrapped raw from the sidewalk.

They were gone, as if they had never been.

Marie took in a shivery breath. It set fire to her side, making it excruciating to breathe. Vivid pain, chilled skin… Broken ribs? Or was this just bruised? She couldn’t breathe.

Marie coughed and got to her hands and knees, one arm around her torso as if to hold herself together. Her heart was a hummingbird’s beating wings.

She gazed unfocusedly at the pavement. Her arms shook. Black spots mixed with the already practically black and white world. She wasn’t sure if it’s her pulse or the thunder that’s making the pounding in her ears.

Marie looked up.

It was Fear, a cloak made of humanity – blacker than the storm itself.

Lightning cracked the sky in two and suddenly the pain was gone. An adrenaline rush, so strong she almost passed out, hit. She was running before thought entered her mind.

The only thing you have to fear is fear itself. And when you meet it, the answer is simple.

Run.

She had never seen this place before, this world she fled in, but Marie scrambled inside the old building without a conscious thought driving her.

Fear, her mind babbled. FearFearFear. Ohrunrunrun. OhFearFearohrunFearrunOH.

Perhaps she could hide from Fear. It was an instinct she followed, fleeing up the stairs, ribs a distant burning in someone else’s body.

The building was old, full of pockets of shadow and dense blackness that required either the foolish or the terrified to traverse it safely. Somehow, Marie managed to make it up the rickety stairs and into the first room she came to that held a door. She closed it with shaky hands even while her mind screamed at her to slam it close.

Marie backed away slowly, gasping sobs escaping her that she didn’t hear. Her mind pinpointed on the door.

“Marie.”

Fear paralyzed her throat, her lungs. All she did was spin to face the window as her legs gave out in face of Fear itself.

“Marie,” Fear said. “Marie, you know what you must do.”

Marie stared up, whitefaces and shaking at the darkness filling the window and her mind.

Lightning suddenly lit the room, making Fear’s face easily seen.

Marie moaned.

Fear glided forward and touched Marie’s cheek with a cold hand.

“Marie, child, your mind is playing tricks on you. All you must do is wake up.”

At Fear’s final two words, she did. Marie came awake in bed, a scream clawing at her throat. Rain lashed the window as she breathed a sigh of relief and collapsed back into bed, heart still pounding.

And outside her window, Fear smiled.

Finis

Without wax,
Miracle

One day, when the middle-aged lawyer was driving his Ford Taurus, Spearmint and Evergreen turned into peanut butter and got his seats dirty. So, he hired a cleaning person to fix the mess. Then, he realized his life’s calling was to move to the Arctic and become a stock trader. So he did, and he lived until the end of time.

The End

P.S. Ask Hades about Sheildwolf.

Designed by Tim Sainburg from Brambling Design

a blue sphere nested

in a branch of our messy universe.

We forget the sky,

the brightest blue on earth.

We let the murky yolk

of the world

grab us and

squeeze crush pinch

us into submission.

We neglect to look up

to the shell all around us.

We fail to remember

to always tip our faces up

towards the ever azure dome.

We forsake our dream

from long ago when we were young:

that, as the shell cracks open,

far above our bowed heads,

we want to see the light dawn.

The crossroads of memory and

imagination a dusty location

history- the children’s propaganda version;

that unattractive moral hypocrisy (we are all a part) of broken

truth that extends only so far then shies away:

the event horizon of a half-lie;

a broken truth less telling than falsehood for

an outright inversion reveals

as much as it conceals-

every action shows a little more; you wake up feeling

like a chipped mirror or

something more organic…

…but decayed.

Because you can’t defy observation

there’s no escaping speculation (about insignificant

daily habits, or perhaps something perverse

and mildly disgusting) unlike electrons

people can’t perplex all the instruments of science

only hide in the anonymity of the crowd where

we think ugly thoughts about one another

but no one is anybody special.

Sometimes I picture myself as a character in a history book-

for characters they are, as one does not see them

with their naked/tear-streaked faces

turned skyward in despair and confusion-and picture pretentious  discussions

of what I wrought occurring hundreds of years later

and wonder

and wonder if it is worth it to strive for change

when thoughts seem static

ideals unaltered

I feel almost vindicated in my…

…revulsion.

Designed by Tim Sainburg from Brambling Design

the cold

the pullulating masses masked and fearless

hiding in the library

in the curve of a stairwell…

between two white walls

I become a commodity

and the children decorate their records

with silver stars

how proud will you be when I bring home eleven?

the mother

the father

the brother/sister

the pullulating masses

masked and fearless

I  wanted to warn you

that such a transaction-

truth for love- can only result

in tragedy

oh the cold

my form is unfixed

I come and I go

like frost/youth/night

I cannot find my mask and there is a reason for disguise…!

the recorders

the writers

the students

so meek they inherit

the broken places of

light and emptiness

but not the age of Iron

it’s all just foil stars

marching along the paper’s edge

today/tomorrow…

Then type them up, change a word or two, and plop them onto the Worst Ending.

Here’s my “Tiny Fairytales” pinterest board, teeming with interesting images: http://pinterest.com/prettybowerbird/tiny-fairytales/.

First Picture: Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Bursts of blue bloomed against her skin, more lovely than oxygen, more lovely than the gritty shore and brittle grass. The water nudged her lips, slid between her toes and legs and fingers and cells, filling her, spilling into her mouth and stomach. People who drown don’t die of lack of air, she realized. They die of being too full, too full of water, or maybe too full of earth. The earth and water meet and ignite. Fire! Black flames flicker at the corners of her eyes. She would burn until all the earth inside her was consumed and all that remained is the rush of her soul frothing in the waves of the ocean.

Second Picture: A Drawing by Arthur Rackham

Though the adults shunted the old man into a corner with a rocking chair and lukewarm cocoa, the children spoke his language. His hands told his stories, gleaming with candlelight, broken like his horses, thin veins and tendons sticking rod straight over his bones, bulging against his skin. He reached out over the children’s heads and spun cobwebs around sleeping beauty’s castle, set winged demons loose on the rooftop, floated a tiara down on a princess’s head, sparked sunlight in an airless cave. His crumbling lips hardly made a sound, croaking wobbly syllables. Maryanne said he sounded like God sneezing, accidentally erupting frogs, and her mother sent her to her room for blaspheme, but the children understood all the words his hands spoke.

Third Picture

I am twelve years old and I am full of sky. I can taste it in mama’s mashed potatoes, in a glass of sweet tea, in a quick lick of brown sugar, something so wild and blue and spicy that it stands on my tongue even after I’ve swallowed. I can smell it on the walls of our house, every brick tingling my nose and scaring up the  hair on the backs of my hands. Molly didn’t even know hands had hair, when I told her she couldn’t stop laughing at her hands, didn’t look at mine with trembling fingers and electrified hair follicles. F-O-L-L-I-C-L-E-S. When I stand outside I can smell taste feel hear see the sky and that’s when I know deep in my soul that sky is what I’m made of. I hold tight to the grass so it can never take me back, and when I sleep, I tie my wrists to my heaviest books just in case my ceiling isn’t strong enough to keep me in. But I know if the sky wants to swallow somebody, it could swallow the whole world to get to her.

a short story

We hide from the moon, clinging to the shadows. And because we use their shadows, the forest claws and grabs at our skin, clothing, hair.

We barely notice.

Every snapping stick is a pursuers’ footstep. Every kicked pebble is a gun’s safety clicking off. Every sigh of wind in the leaves is the hiss of breath between the teeth of our pursuers.

And there are monsters.

With my eight year old eyes, my eight year old mind turns branches into talons and trees into giants that will pick their teeth with my tiny bones. The grown ups don’t help my fear. Mommy carries me until she has to put me down and then she clutches my hand so hard my bones feel ground together already. Why is Mommy helping the giants?

Mr. Leader, leading, turns suddenly into a cave-like awning of trees, and the rest of us follow. Mice to his pipe.

“We will rest here, for the moment,” he says. His shadow stretches over us, long and darker than the trees themselves.

“Hawkins, get a fire going.”

“Is it safe?” the man with a hawk-like nose asks nervously. He is nothing like the proud and beautiful birds I’d seen circling in the sky, nothing like his name sake.

“What?” Mr. Leader asks distractedly. “Oh, yes, yes, it’s perfectly fine. Everybody please sit in a neat, ordered circle around the fire. Oldest and youngest closer. Mae?”

I jump at my name, peal out of Mommy’s skirt.

Mommy looks at Mr. Leader for a long time. “Go to Uncle Cleveland, Mae.” Her words say one thing, but her fingers say another. They try to clutch me back again.

But I go to Mr. Leader, the strange man that makes Mommy’s face tight since Daddy’s death.

“Yes, Mr. Leader?” I ask, holding my hands tightly together in front of me.

“How are you, Mae?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” I say. I stare at him, this man who leads us to freedom. There is a question gnawing at his tongue.

“How is your mother, Mae?” he asks finally. He stares at me with earnest eyes.

I don’t like him. He changes and melts and is not solid, like the man with a hawk’s nose. He is a Man of a Thousand Faces. Ever since Daddy went to be with angels, Mr. Uncle tries to solidify himself for Mommy. He becomes forced gentleness and hugs me and treats me like I’m glass – always watches Mommy out of the corner of his eyes to see if she’s watching his empty kindness.

And he smells of cigarette ash and metallic guns that my taste buds hate. Nothing like Daddy: peppermint and love.

I don’t like him.

“Mae?”

“She’s okay, Mr. Leader,” I say.

His face is changing before my eyes again, and he is no longer Mr. Leader. He is Mr. Uncle, trying to be Father.

He stares past me at Mommy with burning eyes.

“That’s good,” he says.

I nod and make a sad face in the dirt with my scuffed shoe. The sad face needs tears, so I sprinkle grass on him, and do not look at the Man of a Thousand Faces.

“Mae?”

“Yes, Mr. Uncle?”

“Do you like me?”

“No, Mr. Uncle.”

“Why?” he asks, and his voice shakes.

I look up. We are a little away from the group and the small fire paints gleeful shadows of death on his face.

“Your face is made of wax,” I say, honest like Mommy taught me. He is silent, and a shadow dances across his eyes, casting them in darkness. Save the red glow of fire reflecting in them.

“Everyone, break’s over! Go back to your mother again, Mae.”

“Yes, Mr. Leader.”

I go back to Mommy and she clutches me to her breast. The fire had just started, and I can see confusion as to why we’re already moving.

“What did he say, Mae?” she whispers, trembles, eyes frightened.

“He asked if I liked him.” I don’t want Mommy’s face to become more moon pale, so I try to be honest. She always wants me honest.

“What did you say?”

“That I didn’t like him. I was honest, like you and Daddy taught me.”

“Oh.” It is half strangled by her sob and mangled by her laugh. “I’m sorry, Mae, that you had to talk to him. I don’t like him either. We just need your uncle until we can get away. To where you can leave your house without asking for a slip of paper from Them. Where it’s not illegal to go to the market after 12pm. Freedom of speech taken away isn’t the problem, Mae,” she whispers in my ear things I don’t comprehend yet. “It’s freedom to move, to breathe when we need that they took. We’ll be away from all that. And you never have to see your uncle again, Mae. We’ll live by a park and you can go there whenever you want. Does that sound nice?”

Her voice is light, beautiful, floating above the dark – held aloof by dreams and hopes.

“Yes, Mommy,” I say obediently.

“Beth.”

Mommy’s face is suddenly moon pale.

“Cleveland,” she says.

I smile. “Hi, Mr. Leader.”

It is odd how his face is now granite and not wax. He doesn’t look at me. His eyes don’t burn at Mommy anymore. They are frozen over and glossy. She can’t move.

“We’re leaving now,” he says, cold, and then leaves.

Mommy buries her face into my neck and I feel something wet. I pat her back carefully.

“I miss you, John,” I hear her murmur, shaking.

“Why do you call him John?” I ask. “He’s Daddy.”

“No reason, Mae,” Mommy replies. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Mommy.”

Mommy puts me down and holds my hand. The man with a hawk nose, Mr. Leader’s friend, stomps out the fire. We file out of the trees, Mommy and me second to last. Mr. Leader hangs back. When I am about to lose sight of Mr. Leader, he pulls out his cell phone and calls someone. I blink and he is gone, hidden by trees.

Mommy tugs my hand and we leave Mr. Leader farther behind in the cave of trees. The moon is brighter and we stand under the trees, deep in shadow. We’re not used to its glow since we came from the tree cave.

People hold whispered conversations around us but are shushed. Mommy and I remain quiet and we all wait for Mr. Leader to come. When he does, his face pale and hard, he leads up through the woods again. This time, we don’t try to hide from the moon. Our movements are quick and flighty. I cannot keep up so Mommy carries me again.

We are close to the big water, where a small, floating house – “boat” sounds too round in my mouth – will take us to a Free Country. Where we can leave when we want, shop when we want, without Them controlling us.

I don’t understand this. I can’t imagine my life any other way, but Mommy has told me stories of “before.” When the gofern – government wasn’t a Big Brother. I don’t understand much of what she told me – I’ve always wanted an older sibling. A big brother would be nice, wouldn’t it? Mommy had laughed. One of the only times that she had since Daddy went to be with angels and the Man of a Thousand Faces started visiting our house, engraining himself into our lives.

A branch slaps my face. I focus on the shadows and the moonlight has painted everything else white. We’re in an old silent film without the silence. I peer over Mommy’s shoulder. We travel for a while, and I sleep some of it.

I dream of white forests, filled with black men cloaked in shadow.

Mommy wakes me and puts me on my feet. We stand huddled in a group at the foot of a tree as Mr. Leader pulls off a blanket of grass. He checks his watch, looks at his phone when it beeps. I see a flicker of doubt in his eyes, but he barks, “Everyone, single file. Down the hole, don’t make a noise.”

Mommy steps up to be of the first, me close behind her, but Mr. Leader grabs her elbow and she spins to face him, her beautiful hair fanning behind her.

“What?” she snaps.

He almost shrinks back, but whispers, “Beth, I…”

“No, Cleveland! You’ve done enough!”

And with that she sweeps by him, followed closely by the hawk nosed man.

Mr. Leader stares after her, his hand opening and closing in the air where she had just snatched herself from him. His face is melting, thawing, liquefying, changing, forming. His face goes through thousands of peoples and masks, flashing and never settling.

But then… for the first time, I see his face harden with emotion – pain, loss, regret, anger and hate – carved deeply into it. No more is he wax or solid or blank granite. And I think his face will now always be etched that way, terrible emotions painted on for the world to see.

His hand drops and the Man of One Face blinks down at me where I stand demure with my hands clasped and head tipped up and open to him.

“I don’t like you,” I say. I watch his face. It doesn’t change. I’m not surprised. “I don’t like you, but thank you anyway. Your heart was cut, but you meant well, didn’t you?”

He stares wordlessly at me.

“Goodbye, Mr. Leader.”

I turn to go down the hole Mommy went down. I wonder why she hasn’t come back up for me -

“Mae?”

I look behind me, and the moonlight is behind him. So his face is covered in shadow.

“I’m sorry, Mae.”

I cock my head at him.

“I think I forgive you, Uncle,” I say simply. I smile just for the Man of One Face. And go down the darkest hole to join Mommy.

I am not astonished to see Mommy and the rest of the group, save the man with a hawk like nose, tied up, with guns at their heads, and Them dressed in black.

 Fin