King and Queen

This piece was published at Camel Saloon on August 7th, 2011.

King and Queen

The King lingers over the Queen's heart
Only in thin lines on a page.
His dull button silently clicks her facsimile cards.
O! Living miracle divine,
Meaning in a sign.

Bake Up

This piece was published at Mad Swirl sometime in 2011.

Bake Up

She had imagined once that love was soft and squishy like carrot cake or banana bread. With Claude, it was at first, if not a little moister than she wanted. But as the initial passion wore off, she found it to be a little more light and flaky– croissants, cherry pinwheels; she found the portions bigger but less filling.

Three years of her life had been given to Claude, and she could no longer pretend that she even liked him. They had grown distant, torn by the pressures of life, and unable or unwilling to do the kneading needed to keep their affection growing.

Evelyn was considering leaving him. The relationship had become crunchy and dense like the crust of the pie she was baking. It was going to be a surprise for Claude when he got home. Yet, even though she wanted to show him how much she loved him, she couldn’t help feeling that they, as a couple, were already dead. The pie would not take away the hurtful things that had been built between them, layers of bitterness caked together into shells hard as bricks.

Evelyn watched the pie in the oven. It browned into a beautiful gold. It was the finest pie she had ever made. She waited, the shell grew darker. It cracked, and the peak began to burn. The pressure inside built, and the pie grew, mountainous, monstrous. When the crust was completely deformed and black, Evelyn removed it from the oven. Crying, she left.

Holy Words

This piece was published in the now defunct Fiction at Work in 2011.

Holy Words

I have read these words before.  A mythology posing as liturgy.  Some things seemed restrictive, others simply inexplicable, and He... He seemed to be the greatest rule monger of them all.  But there was that one image that stood above all others.  It haunted me.  I could see it stand starkly against the circle of the sun, forming a window into some unfathomable mystery.  I would describe it as the scarecrow of calvary, terrifying men into sanctimonious sanctity, or alternately I would make deification into a sin worthy of forgiveness.  Who better, though, to forgive that sin than He Himself.  And I read these words, and they seemed a bleak house, a terrible damnation built in the clouded eyes of bald-robed hermits who drank deserts like salted cacophony, their cauterized cognition vaulted by hollow-toned stone cathedrals with devil vermin falling like waves off the bells.  And I hated these words.  And I hated His message.  And I hated His followers. And I hated Him.  And I wished to humiliate Him, to overpower Him, to destroy Him.  But I loved Him, too.  And now I find that these words have humiliated me, overpowered me, and destroyed me, because He did so.  For they were no words to read until they attuned to the living word that comes dwelling in me, just broken shells devoid of glory.

The Shadow Back

This piece was published in the September 2011 issue of Eclectic Flash.

The Shadow Back

The editor lifted her hand to rub her eyes.  It was late, the stack of submissions before her was as tall as ever.  The light from her desk lamp threw her shadow into sharp relief.  When she said that she wanted her notions of what writing can do exploded, she didn’t mean she wanted high-powered grit and hip imagery redounding on the glitz of life, lust and love, dragging it into the exaggerated grime of romanticism posing as pessimistic realism.  The black letters were failing to stand out against the page, diffusing in washes of white.  She hated Arial.  If these pieces did not improve she would be without something to publish, every editor and every writer’s nightmare; all the good ideas have run out.

What was she looking for?  She could not remember.  The long night had worn down her once defined impression of her goal.  She would know, she kept telling herself.  It is always obvious when something is good.  There is a certain quality that we can identify when it’s before us, but cannot describe otherwise.  We can only expound by example, proving something by its shadow.  She had not even encountered the tip of the shadow, yet.  It projected behind her.

She wearily pulled the next submission into the light.  Her eyes fell on the page, lazily at first, but the story drew her in.  She furrowed her brow at one point, at another she pursed her lips, her eyes would widen periodically, and she released a soft, questioning noise at one point.  The story she was reading broke through her, redoubling the relief at her back.  The hair rose at the nape of her neck.  She was not where she saw what she saw; while pouring over the page she came to be otherwise staring at her own back as if from behind her shadow.  She tried to turn but found that too many twists and turns had taken place.  She could not move her gaze away from the sight before her.

As she stared at her back in the dim light, she began to see things.  She thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, but the more she saw the more she understood the truth.  All the cracks and flaws twined their way along like insects and reptiles.  Every defilement she hid became apparent.  She had been looking for something that showed her herself.  But this seemed a bit presumptuous.  The author was under her skin, where she wanted no one.  Her nature thrust against her very being, tugging her from her intricate about-face.  She thrust the page aside, and shrank from her shadow.