Month: December 2024

Addie – flash fiction

My old house was creaking under the weight of ghosts, and I knew it was the uneasy time labeled bed. Sleek, blue Addie hovered in her crystal aquarium.

“Goodnight Addie,” I said, placing a few pellets on the serene surface, that ether boundary of her world, residing as she does in the meniscus of life.

Later, I am yanked awake from fitful, light sleep by the sound of splashing water. Eyes bleary, I stumble down the hall to the studio to Addie’s aquarium.

Inside was a feral little girl, curled up inside the tank, her bony, bluish body pressing against the glass. Her hair, brown and unbrushed, was tangled and soaked.

“Where’s Addie ? Who are you?” I gasped.

Then she looked at me, staring bleakly out of her hollow face, and I knew it was Addie.

I blinked, and the girl was gone. The aquarium was still there but almost completely empty. I felt inwardly disheveled. My discombobulation turned to horror when I saw Addie beached on the neon rocks, gasping for breath, her gills clutching at whatever water got too close.

I ran to the sink and filled a measuring cup with water. I dumped it out into the tank quickly. First one then another, until the tank filled.
But when I returned to the aquarium with the last cup of water, Addie was gone. Wet footprints scampered out the door, and a wisp of a child somewhere runs wild.

Buttons

Violet fancies whisk me away to a paradise of buttons and zippers. Imagine being able to hang into every good thing, tight fisted like a covetous toddler. Buttons are images of togetherness. My dress, the way it drapes over my body like a sheet hiding old furniture. This house is haunted by the ghost of fall. Zipper in Spanish is a beautiful word. My language doesn’t have a word for the feeling I’m surviving right now, but my blood pulses to the cadence of someone else’s imperial march. The Button Museum is in Connecticut, a short drive from the land of split seams and cruel themes.

Flowers

Friendly flowers clamor
For my scantily clad attention
And my runaway money.
We bring corpses into the house
To freshen our rooms,
Our wounds,
Our wombs.
I press grass,
Leaves.
My leaving a black spatter on my mother’s door.
Flowers are gregarious narcissists.
My mother is a flower
I plucked from my rib cage.
See how the sun croaks her old song,
Raining dry energy and
Nefarious bruises on us all.

36

My biological clock is tangerine textured and linen flavored. It ticks almost cutely beneath the kitchen sink as images of Man and his daughters dissolve in a pan of citrasolv above. My clock, let’s call her Norina, is fashionably late. My eggs play badminton in my cramping womb, and I feel the children that could have been vaping in my chest. Norina knows she will end soon, an Armageddon all her own, her own chapter in my personal book of Revelation. The greatest gift in life is life, and Time is scooping it out of me like ice cream. I have so little to offer. I was built to be soil for a generation of redwoods. Instead I’ve become the grime at the bottom of an old casserole dish, growing age and disrespect.

Christmas Eve

Salvation writes His manifesto in these dark hours of living. A child is born, light scented and perilously full of love. Salvation will begin and end in blood, in pain, in unjust humbleness. Beauty sprouts from dust, just as it always has. Just as the camellias jab their smiling faces through sheets of ice to lend the dead world their color. Christmas gleams like a gem on each desiccated year because the light of our savior shone through the eyes of a child. That light, that sweet, serene fire, is purifying us for endless euphoria.

Christmas Poem

Among the Christmas scented pines, my good deeds burning with the rest of the greenery in His all consuming fire. How paltry is my finest, purplest day next to one second of God’s goodness?

Salvation comes from the womb of a girl with a blue soul, blue as purity, as truth. Salvation that begins and ends in blood, in pain, in unjust humbleness. Beauty sprouting from dust, just as it always has. Just as the camelias jab their smiling faces through sheets of doleful ice to lend the dead world their color.

  • This poem is in progress. I am still refining it for the church Christmas celebration

Victim

Heavy happenings stain me like ink. When the clouds tease me, they rain just enough to mist my hair. I can never quench my thirst or rinse the shine from my skin. The world is a foil sparkling in my kitchen. Darkness darkness everywhere and not a drop to drink. The crashes out on the train tracks are daily now. I am a victim not yet assigned a death.