“Treat Tuesday”
Dale Hoffmeyer
Inspiration piece

Donuts
By Marla Deschenes
Response

When I was very young
My father would take us on
Sunday morning walks to the local donuts shop.
Bess Easton Donuts

He would always buy the newspaper
And donuts with chocolate frosting and sprinkles
For my little brother and me.
Our small hands held tight to his pinky fingers then.

When I was fifteen years old
I went to work in the same donut shop
Bess Easton Donuts

Getting up at 4 a.m. on Sundays
Which is the unfortunate time
Donuts are made.

My favorite machine filled the donuts with jelly
Before my frosting each on
In pink or white or brown.

When I stood so young
Filling donuts with jelly or cream
Hoping against hope that a certain boy
Would visit me at work
I realized how much each and every person
Is very much like a donut

We are all different colors
Shapes sizes and flavors
And we adorn ourselves however we wish
But all of us are stuck in this box together
Trying desperately to fill that hole
In our centers.

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“Quiet Neighborhoods”
Nancy Ramsey
Response

Sudden Storms
By KJ Hannah Greenberg
Inspiration piece

Bits of flotsam, truly all manner of bunkum,
Surfacing after bonking around milder climes
Of emotional whoevers, pile near, build up,
Dangerously close to quiet neighborhoods.

Afterwards, such litter, those clotting gutters,
Those wee kittens seeking food, shelter, heat,
Learn harsher certainties, learn their origins’
Truth, realize animosity that destroys publics.

Supposedly, bristling branches, shoots bearing
Seedpods, leaves, occasionally buds, rain down
All manner of goodness, on cultures, universally.
Really, sudden storms precipitate Fajrs, Zelzals.

The wise gaum sunless days, with cloud-crowded
Skies, aren’t dreary darkness, but Heaven’s kisses,
Short breaks in the irrational, international sadism,
Aimed at the People of the Book, who abhor war.

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Jay Young Gerard
Response

Awake
By Robert Haydon Jones
Inspiration piece

Jimmy O’Hara had already said goodbye to the widow. He had wished her all the best and was almost out of the concert hall walking slowly because of his wife’s arthritic knees – when the widow clattered up to them on her high heels and said, “I just want to say goodbye.”

She put her arms around Jimmy and hugged him.

It definitely was not a hug goodbye. It definitely was a cleave. She arched into him. He automatically gave it back. The third rail surge zapped through him head to toe.

He stepped back. Her eyes were shining. Her face was flushed.

“I just wanted to say thank you”, she said.

“It was good to meet you again. Thank you for listening.”

Jimmy said something routine and dull back like, “Good to see you.”

With that, the widow turned and headed toward the taxi exit. It had been a 10-second diversion. In three steps, Jimmy was back along side his wife.

It was a short walk to Clarkes West — where they had drinks and plate after plate of delicious oysters with his son, Randy, and his wife, Cindy. It was a lovely evening in early spring. Jimmy slurped his oysters and wondered how on earth he was going to fend off the widow. She was coming after him – he knew that for sure.

It had been a family event. His 17-year old nephew, Edward, was in a select high school chorus singing with the symphony orchestra.

Jimmy and his wife, Amy, sat with Edward’s mother, Julia, his younger brother’s widow and her younger sister Sarah – suddenly widowed a year back just two weeks after making a “mid-life fresh start” up in Boston.

Jimmy had driven in the fifty miles from Connecticut at a leisurely pace. He had planned their departure a full hour earlier than he would have a few years ago. So, he was able to enjoy the drive. He stayed in the slow lane. Once again, he had been pleasantly surprised by spring. At first, Randy kept urging him to go faster, but after a while, he gave up.

Jimmy relaxed and enjoyed. When they rounded the curve straight into that first view from the hilltop down at the Hudson River, he was astonished as always. What a river! He wondered what Hudson and his men felt when they had their first view.

The ladies got out right at the concert hall. Then Jimmy and Randy went to park the car a few blocks away at a discount garage Jimmy had scouted out.

On the way in the very heavy theatre district traffic, a white Mercedes cut them off. Jimmy wouldn’t move. The guy in the Mercedes honked his horn. Just like in the old days, Jimmy yanked his door open – stepped half way out into the street and snarled at the guy to back off. The guy backed off. Randy was very upset.

They parked and walked back to the theatre. Jimmy was feeling the fatigue that comes after a sudden adrenalin surge. He felt bad he had upset Randy.

Just when Randy thought it was safe to go out!  Where was the justice? You work hard for years to change – and then in a second, you get triggered right back to where you started.

The concert hall was very pleasant. They were in an upper level, center stage, six-person box. They had arrived forty minutes early, so there was plenty of time to chat. After some seat shuffling, Jimmy was placed next to Sarah, the new widow. Jimmy said it was nice to meet her – and she told him that they had already met back in November at a Thanksgiving party.

Jimmy said that — come to think of it, of course, at the Thanksgiving party! He felt like an utter old fool. It was a lie. He had no memory of her at all.

She was a brown-haired woman of medium height in her mid fifties. Not easy to remember. Jimmy asked her how she was doing.

She hesitated for a beat and then told Jimmy that she was not doing very well. Her husband had been fighting cancer and had beaten it after a long struggle. A year back, they decided to give themselves a fresh start and had moved up to Boston. Each of them had a new job there. Their only child was living in  Los Angeles. They had fun decorating their new, slightly downsized, apartment.

Two weeks after they moved in, she woke up at dawn and her husband was not beside her. She found him dead and cold on the floor of his bathroom. Heart failure. After the funeral, and the burial, she was alone.

For the first time in thirty years, she was alone in the bed. After work, she came home to an empty apartment. She ate food by herself. She watched television by her lonesome.  It was dreadful.

Her work was saving her from screaming. She had contact with numerous humans. Regular contact.  She took to looking very hard at people she encountered at work. She had never realized there were so many different sorts of ears. She watched her colleagues while they talked on the phone. She noted hands. She catalogued flirts. No one noticed.

Jimmy is an experienced mentor. When it comes down to it, violence is part of his job description. So, he knows what to say to survivors.

He asked Sarah if she was getting grief counseling. She said she was – once a week. He asked if she had joined a grief group and she said she had. She was in a group of ten that met Tuesday nights in a meeting room at her church. There had been six in the group a year back. Now there were ten – and nothing had changed for her.

Jimmy asked her if she was open to change. She didn’t answer. Jimmy said that one of the toughest parts of grief is that it is so huge and you are so alone with it — that it seems profane to even think of moving off it. To even think of not suffering.

Jimmy said this pretty automatically. Over the years, he had learned that big grief is everlasting and selfish.

He told Sarah the other automatic part. That the key to the rest of her life was what she decided about her grief. Unless she stepped in front of it, her life would be hard.

She looked at him and smiled. It morphed her from forgettable to memorable.

“I hate being alone,” she said.

Jimmy was ready.

“Of course, you do”, he replied.

“You’re not crazy. You are grief stricken. Bad hurt. You’re not supposed to like being alone. We are not designed that way. You need to comfort yourself. You need to give yourself permission to reconnect with life.”

“It seems wrong,” she said.

“It seems bad.”

“It is not bad. It is your life force surging in you. Please be brave and give it a chance. You may end up alone – but you will not be as lonely, I promise you.”

She said thank you and then her sister leaned in . The performance began and they did not talk again.

As Jimmy drove home, he worried about what Sarah might do next. He wondered if he had been truly supportive or if he had been looking to take advantage. Just when he thought it was safe to go out!

No, he had been trying to be supportive. Everything he had told her was standard. It had all seemed good until she had given him that hug. That was when the idea of taking advantage had bloomed in the midst of the electric shock. That and the look, the shining eyes, the flushed face, the arch at the center of the hug. Jimmy had seen them all before. Trouble!

That night, just before he fell asleep, he thought of Sarah’s smile. And the arch.

Big grief. There was nothing like it! He hoped when the time came, he would have the strength to decline. He thought he would. In a way, he hoped, that would feel good to her.

She was coming – that was sure. As he slipped down into slumber, Jimmy prayed for strength. After all, he was only human.

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Amy Souza
Inspiration piece

Green Branches
By Juleen Johnson
Response

The wake is a testimony about being awake.

The absence of being there or being three degrees removed in

the safety of the light house­­

your future self keeps the sun from setting behind­

the cyclorama ocean.

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Elizabeth Eby
Response

Angela Rimbey
Inspiration piece

powerful touch magnified
when I look into your eyes
and see that we are just the same
and that love flows back and
forth
between us
a circle
a sweet web
of energy
that cannot be disrupted

when so much passion is triggered and pulses between my eyes and your eyes and
your hands and my heart and that small simple space between our toes that meet
in the middle of the night as we sleep and snuggle and fit together
because there is nowhere else
for us to go
except
closer

and I look into your eyes
and know that this is love
and that the energy will build and build
as it does when you make love
or when you taste something sweet
or when you write and write and run because you just cant stop
and so much of what’s inside of you just wants to keep growing and growing until it finds a way to bust out and explore and explode all the places that it feels called
so that it can share with life this simple fact
this simple easy truth
that love is truly all that we need

deep within our bellies
that knowingness that we are loved
that our words have value
that our touch has magnified this life
that the light that shines in the stars and through our eyes is a reflection of the work and growth and challenge that each and every one of us has been through
this is love
this is life and this
is a moment
a rare moment
when it all fits
and when I squeeze you even tighter
my powerful touch becomes magnified

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“Hope”
Jay Young Gerard
Inspiration piece

Sad
By Robert Haydon Jones
Response

It seemed as if she had kept practically every scrap of contact from both their lives.

When he went into the elaborate writing desk and started to take the material out of the first drawer, he was startled to see the one and only photo of their wedding at the Justice of the Peace – and clipped underneath it, a color photo of him coming down the aisle in the cathedral fifteen years before with his first wife. He had thought both photos had been lost.

He looked happy enough in both. A bit dazed. But happy. You could tell it was the same man. But, of course, it wasn’t. And, of course, it wasn’t the same woman. But both brides did look determined to look happy. They had that in common. And the groom. The dazed groom.

For the life of him, he could not remember his last day with his first wife. She had asked him to leave. It had taken him more than twenty years to remember that part of it. In his standard narrative, it had always been — he left the wife. That really was how he remembered it. Twenty-one years out, he suddenly remembered she had demanded he leave because she had found another man.

In the next drawer, there was a sheaf of typewritten letters from his father to him from the time he went to prep school at twelve till he was expelled from college.

He read the letters carefully. They were superb letters. Witty. Literate. Fatherly. Tender. Loving.

Jimmy was surprised. He had no memory of receiving these letters. He remembered getting letters from his dad – but not these letters.  He recalled getting letters from his father that his father’s secretary had typed. He had read them quickly. They were utterly routine. Surely, they were not these letters.

Yet, there they were. Kept by Jimmy and then kept by his mother and then kept by his first wife and then kept by his wife.

“And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.”

There on the sad height. That was exactly how Jimmy remembered his father. Stalked by sadness. How valiant he had been to survive his wretched beginnings!

Long ago, when Jimmy was still in his twenties, he had a delicious lunch with his father at an exquisite, expensive, sanitarium, years before 12 Steps were in play at such drying out places.

It was his father’s first extended visit to a facility to help him detoxify. He thanked Jimmy for booking him in. He told Jimmy that he was in no hurry to leave. He declared this destination was right up there with the Great Hotels of the World.

He certainly was qualified to make the pronouncement. He had stayed in all the Great Hotels. His big decision in September was whether to take the Da Vinci or The France. (Purportedly, it hinged on the current quality of their wine cellars.)

An Ivy cum laude at 19. Fluent in nine languages. A legendary success in publishing. A beautiful wife, six healthy children, and still stalked by sadness and despair.

Now, more than forty years after his death, Jimmy was suddenly enmeshed in his father’s sadness again. He had never really seen his father’s letters to him until now.

That was sad.

Certainly, alcohol was the traditional drug of choice for sadness. His father had never been able to live without it. Neither had Jimmy, until in middle age, after many ghastly failures, he learned he actually could live without alcohol and drugs, even though he was almost always sad.

As he sat there with the sheaf of his Dad’s letters before him, Jimmy realized that for all these years both before and after his dad’s death, both before and after Jimmy’s recovery from addiction, he had taken on the same struggle with sadness that had plagued his father.

“The eternal note of sadness….” Was it genetic?

Somehow, Jimmy didn’t think so. His father’s bookplate, etched by his artist father was the epitaph of Cyrano de Bergerac:

“A pretty wit, whose like we lack, a lover not like other men…. he flew high and fell back again…he was all things and all in vain.”

As a boy, Jimmy had stood with his father at his grandfather’s deathbed. In life, the old artist had cut a blazing trail from coast to coast. A prodigious drinker, he had followed a bender straight on out to another city and another woman and abandoned his family when Jimmy’s father was five. He returned ten years later to his wife and family to live out his days until well into his eighties.

Jimmy remembered his Grandfather saying that he was sorry he had not been a better father. And his Dad reassuring his grandfather that he had been fine. And his grandfather saying firmly that he had not been fine and that he was sorry.

Was this the sad that had stalked his father? Was this the sad Jimmy had inherited?

Jimmy felt a wave of compassion for his father. To be five and abandoned by your dad who went out for a beer and came back ten years later! Of course, it would be your fault.

Jimmy put the letters and the photos back in the writing desk.

He needed to get to a meeting.

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“Meat Dialogue”
Susan Burton
Inspiration piece

Spinach Pickers
By Naomi Ulsted
Inspiration piece

The day I learned about fear I was picking spinach in the fields. It was an unusually rainy summer and the spinach plants were wet and heavy. They were tall, reaching up to my waist, so leaving my jeans and sweatshirt soaked and heavy as I they brushed against me. I dragged my bag of spinach buds behind me. When I looked either back or forward, the rows seemed to go on like endless parallel lines.

I was fourteen that summer. Like most of the pickers, I was too young to get a real job, but in need of money for school clothes. The bus picked us up from the Wigwam Grocery in town and drove us out to the fields for the day. We made money by the hour. And the hours stretched as long as the rows we picked. It was in the spinach fields where I learned about violence.

Now I know much more about violence. More than I wanted. I know how to distance myself from news stories about violence. How erect a wall around myself while I watch, so I can say, “how horrible,” but not feel the horror. I know how to get past violent scenes in movies by reminding myself the blood is fake, the sound effects are made by stabbing watermelons, the actors are only acting. I know to close my eyes or leave the room.

But that summer I was only fourteen. I lived in the kind of town that was big enough for a Dairy Queen, but too small for a McDonalds. The kind of town where we had to drive 25 minutes to a larger town if we wanted to see a movie. Even a Drive-In movie.  The kind of town with a sign at the entrance listing the 15 different churches ready to welcome a visitor to their flock. The kind of town where children are not generally murdered.

It was the kind of town where violence was usually kept under wraps. Violence was kept secret so that the damage wasn’t obvious, but pulled at the fabric of the community through undercurrents of fear and hate that swirled invisibly around us. Quiet secrets of abuse, hatred, assault, mental illness, alcoholism. The violence of those secrets made their imprint on our community, but this open, obvious, blatant murder of a child, that kind of violence couldn’t be ignored.

I have tried to make safe decisions. I’ve tried to keep no secrets so they don’t reach their claws up to scar my family, my children.  I felt if I could just make myself solid enough, stable enough, I could keep the violence away. But it always lurks just on the other side of the door. I can glimpse it through the cracks. When the door creaks open, it’s hanging there from the metal shackles. Waiting for its opportunity.

My phone rings as I’m pouring coffee and making lunches, and it’s someone I love. She needs to stay at my house because she’s afraid. I am afraid too. I’m afraid because this has happened before with her and I don’t know how to keep her safe. I know what’s on the other side of the door that creaks open for us both.

The spinach pickers stood in the rainy fields and my back ached from bending down to pick the buds near the ground. I listened to the talk. News had spread from neighbor to neighbor. Teenagers had listened to their parents and filled in the blanks for what they did not know. The family was well known in the town. A large family of overachieving children who turned out for after school sports and took piano lessons. They came home and found their youngest daughter murdered. No one knew why. She was twelve, so I figured she’d been sexually assaulted.

When I was twelve, I answered the phone and a man said he was from the police and he confirmed my address. I was home alone with my baby sister, who was lying on a blanket on her stomach, chewing on her hippo toy. I stood in the kitchen, the phone cord twirled around my wrist, and answered his questions because he was a police officer. He asked me to describe how I looked and if I was pretty, asked me if I ever engaged in sexual activity, asked me if touched myself.  Finally, much too long into the call, I realized he was not a police officer. I hung up. I pictured him coming to my house. Peering through the windows at my sister and I. I ran around the house shutting all the curtains and locking the doors. I took my baby sister and her hippo toy and hid in the closet until my mother got home. My sister reached her pudgy hand out toward the strip of light where the door met the carpet, while I strained my ears for the sounds of violence.

She spends the night at my house, her children curled around her like fiddlehead ferns. She is accomplished, professional. Smart, educated. Vibrant, beautiful. Like the town I grew up in, with its country roads and fifteen churches that gave the illusion of safety, she seems put together. But secrets bring their violence and they are rising up, threatening to overtake her. I watch, as helpless as I was at fourteen in the spinach fields.

As the summer wore on, we picked the fields clean and talked of the investigation. We waited for the predator to be found. It turned out she had not been sexually assaulted and that perplexed me. I was used to hearing about rape. Girls were frequently raped and killed in the big cities, or so it seemed from the news. The Green River Killer had been raping and murdering women along the I-5 corridor for the last two years. But why kill a girl from a nice family if you weren’t driven to assault her? Nothing made sense. When I slept, I dreamed of walking through spinach fields. The spinach leaves towered above me, dripping rain in the moonlight. I turn to drop some spinach buds in my bag and there is a man behind me. He breathes heavily, like the man on the phone. I try to run, but I have grown into the ground, my feet rooted there between the plants.  I hear his breath come closer. I jerk awake, eyes wide in the darkness.

The murderer was not found that summer and would never be found, not to this day. The Green River Killer was found and is now in jail for murdering some 90 women. But this child’s murder remains unsolved and the killer is likely still out there.  Hopefully, the violence no longer overwhelms him and he’s left to wallow in regrets and sorrow and shame. Maybe he has already suffered and died. I can hope.

We talk late into the night over wine while her children sleep. I offer counsel. I offer humor. I offer love. I don’t have expectations. I imagine that we strip away our clothes. The silk blouse, the comfortable socks. We let the color fall from our hair so it hangs in true grey. We wash the makeup from our faces and the mirror shows us pale skin and dark circles. We peel away our careers, hobbies, volunteer work and stack them all neatly. We strip away our skin laying it carefully to the side. We stand, blood and bone, vulnerable and exposed. We feel the fear.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Sandy Coleman
Response

Limen
By Jennifer Fendya
Inspiration piece

Those glimpsing moments as light

grows, when caneware walls begin

a slight glow and my feet, restless

at night, too eager, poke bare noses

out into chill air and scurry

back under downy blankets.

My palanquin, my bier, borne

solemnly through dreamland last night,

now a messy nest of sheets, pages

crushed and buried beneath my feet

when I turned to run from a grizzly

roaring up suddenly in my path.

Now, day, and its light insists on

day-time things, my feet, poised to march

   To-the-tooth-brush! To-the-tea-pot!

day-dream of darting almost

unnoticed, back under a blanket

of twigs and soft leaves.

I turn to look over my alarm.

My feet, suspended a moment, find

slippers and I fall into reverie, hoping

for a moment to glimpse a bear

and tomorrow morning’s light.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Amy Souza
Inspiration piece

Night Flight
By Morgan Fox
Response

The jangling woke her, how crickets or grasshoppers can sound like sleigh bells in the emptiness of summer, the heat-distorted sound echoing across the prairie. But this was different, closer, it cut above the bugs to jingle right in her ear. She reached up, swatted it away, fingers knocking against something hard. Piety Ann opened her eyes. Mathis sat above her, dangling the Cessna’s keys in her face. The worn metal caught the pale light from the window, refracted in the plastic diamond hanging at the bottom of the keychain, casting fake stars across the walls. “C’mon P’yay,” he said. “It’s a clear night.”

Piety Ann pushed past him, scrambling to the window to see for herself. A smattering of stars like freckles dotted the broad dark face of the sky, cleaved by a sliver of a moon. The air practically crackled, while a crisp breeze curled through the trees. “There’s no dust,” she said.

“Nope. C’mon, let’s go.”

He was already dressed except for the duster, slung over one arm, the other holding out the flak jacket at her. Piety Ann pulled her dungarees over her shorts, thick woolen socks and then her boots, hardly stopping to tie the laces. A flannel button-down over her nightshirt and then the flak, its sleek black sleeves too long, oversized. She grabbed her helmet and goggles from the nightstand and followed Mathis out the door. They tiptoed through the hallway, jumped down the stairs two at a time to avoid the creaky boards, then Mathis stopped short at the bottom, holding up a hand to stop Piety Ann. Two steps higher than him, she could peer over his shoulder to see Pap, face-down and snoring in the middle of the main room.

“When did he come home?” she whispered in Mathis’s ear.

He shushed her, then a moment later patted her leg and said, “Piggyback.” Piety Ann slung her legs through his arms like stirrups, clasped her hands around his neck. He bounced her up higher into a more comfortable spot, then crept slowly toward the back door. Piety Ann buried her face in the duster’s cowl, breathed in the smell of her brother, of tobacco and dust and the heat of summer. She counted Mathis’s steps across the floor, imagining their progress, until Pap’s chainsaw snore cut through the room and Mathis stopped.

Piety Ann looked down. Pap’s head was half a foot from Mathis’s boot, and they had five more steps until the kitchen.

His hands squeezing her legs, Mathis shifted his weight, trying to edge around Pap, but they were already up against the wall. Piety Ann held her breath; she was starting to sweat under the flak jacket, her hands getting slick, and she gripped tighter as she felt herself start to slide. Pap snored again and grumbled, then threw a punch at some unseen adversary. His knuckles scraped the back of Mathis’s boot. Piety Ann stiffened, muscles so tight she thought she would snap, and Mathis clenched his elbows to her sides to keep her quiet. Pap barked, some drunken incoherent curse, jerked his head even closer to Mathis before flipping over, to fight the beast on the other side. Freed, Mathis took off like a bullet, not caring if he made noise, and then they were out the back door and into the night, whooping and hollering all the way to the Cessna.

“Goddamn that man!” Mathis said, pulling back the tarp from the plane. “Three weeks! Three weeks he hasn’t shown his face around here.”

“Why you think he came back?”

“Ran out of money, probably. Got thrown out of the bar finally. Does it matter?”

Piety Ann pulled the chocks from the plane’s wheels, the next question burning on her tongue, but she didn’t know how to ask, stifled by her fear of Pap.

“God I hate that man.” Mathis stood still beside the plane, crushing the tarp into a ball between his hands, gazing back emptily toward the farmhouse. “I’ll kill him. Mark my words, P’yay, it’ll either be him or me.” He snapped out of it, tossed the tarp aside and climbed into the Cessna. “C’mon, let’s get away from here.”

“What about the engine? You’re not worried it’ll wake them up?”

“Maybe, but so what? What are they going to do? They can’t fly, can they?” He held out a hand to help her up. Piety Ann glanced back once at the house, at the windows still darkened, then took his hand even though she didn’t need to and took her seat behind her brother. Mathis turned the keys in the ignition, and the plane roared to life.

The Cessna rolled and bounced over the rocky ground, gaining speed, and no matter how many times she’d flown Piety Ann’s stomach knotted and lurched, rocking in time to the plane’s jerky motions. When her hands started to shake she clasped them between her knees, and in that moment they lifted off, leaving the ground behind. How Mathis kept his hands steady, even with the engine rattling its power up into the controls, she couldn’t imagine. But Mathis, lean and wiry on the ground but always flighty, his movements unsuited to the solidity of gravity, always poised as if about to fly away. Mathis belongs in the air.

Maybe that would save him.

“Want to go higher?” Mathis called.

“Higher?” The ground below them had already turned black, empty, while the sky brightened, the stars peeking out of the void, filling every visible inch in every direction. Looking past Mathis and the nose of the plane at the horizon, it seemed to Piety Ann that they flew upside-down, the sky and the stars becoming more real than the ground. “How high can you go?”

Mathis didn’t respond except to laugh and pull the Cessna vertical, nosediving into the sky.

The wind grabbed at Piety Ann’s face, caught her surprised shriek and flung it away. After the shock she laughed, howled at the moon with the thrill of it all. Mathis leaned the Cessna into a corkscrew, and wing over wing they spiraled, accelerating and twisting tighter as they climbed until the stars became a blur, whirlpool of light drawing them in. Frost formed on the engine. We’re going to break the sky, Piety Ann thought. She saw them, crashing into the moon, the ice dome of the night splintering and cracking around the Cessna, and all the stars and all the planets falling to Earth like giant ice cubes, but they would be free. They would fly all the way to Neptune or Pluto, one of those cold blue planets that the sun would never reach, that would never dry out because they would never melt. And there would be no Ma. And there would be no Pap. And there would be no dust, except that left by the vapor trails of comets. There would only be her and Mathis and the Cessna, and they would fly and fly and fly.

Piety Ann opened her eyes. The sky was no closer. The stars still spun around them, but slower now, the engine going quiet as the plane approached its terminal altitude. And then, it stopped.

For a brief moment the Cessna hung suspended at the center point between the ground and the sky, as if waiting for its string to be cut in either direction and it would fall either with gravity or escape velocity. Air empty and cold all around: there would be nothing to catch them. Still. And then the plane started to fall, backwards, tailspin toward the ground below, and the weightless moment completed Piety Ann’s heart slammed into her stomach and the engine roared back to life and the Cessna banked and righted while Mathis laughed maniacally.

“Mathis Wilcox what are you playing at, you could’ve killed us!” Piety Ann shouted, once her pulse had settled.

“Killed? Not me!” Piety Ann knew the smile he flashed then, even though she couldn’t see it. Full teeth, lips pulled back, the dimple in his left cheek. He even smiled like a fighter jet. “Nosiree, I’m the best damn pilot in all of Arklatex!”

And one of these days he would fly away, and leave her here. Piety Ann turned, watching the horizon as it edged around the end of the world. She wanted to enjoy the rest of the night, drink the cold air like water. But as she watched, the line between the ground and the sky blurred. Dust. Somewhere some distant wind was kicking up the dryness, blowing it up and around until it obscured all again. And the sun will rise. And with the sun will come the orange heat. And this night will end. And to watch it all would be unbearable.

“I don’t want to see the sun rise!” Piety Ann shouted.

“What?”

“The sun!” she said, pointing to the eastern horizon, just starting to lighten. Mathis nodded, and banked for home.

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“History”
Nancy Ramsey
Inspiration piece

Accused of Lèse-Majesté when Writing
By KJ Hannah Greenberg
Response

When accused of lèse-majesté, of distributing rough verdicts, of galvanizing rebels,
Our princess endorsed, to the royal court, assorted notions appraising hidden riffles.
Staunchly, she espoused print’s role as society’s paramount vehicle, even though
Electronics yelp for drilling regoliths, utilizing supercooled water, shirking taxes.
Reportedly, that woman’s physiognomy was set opposite publishing’s latencies, against
Innocents’ utterances, which indicated ethnic beliefs, or matched “balderdash” to “tosh.”
Similarly, she hewn the Internet’s self-deconstructing ways, including its circulating of
Detritus, cultural saboteurs, inveigling charmers, and busboys possessed of copyrights.

That sovereign, who proved pinging oafs to be reynards, comprehended that arrhythmic,
Inept semantic herders of printed materials, of author headshots, of long mabe strands,
Were baldly implicating the commercializing of: cellular systems, dismal living spaces,
Pretend hedgehogs, plus dub-stepping contrabasses saxes harmonizing with theremnists.
Altogether, that ascendant attributed dolorous sentiments to key sycophantic major-domos.
In turn, her frolicking in traffic won her enemies’ courtesy. In overlooking their diddling
With private bits, she removed her liability. Comparably, in waiting out chirpsing politicos,
She deterred their pursuit of Boy Scout promises, while escaping their odd emoluments.

Witnesses claim that our noblewoman demanded gear unctions as well as basset sensibilities;
That her words employed rhetorical devices, self-opinion, friable facts, many colorful bursts;
That she wedged oboe players into hinterlands, dropped ancient user interfaces, adopted
Shetland Ponies, eschewed competitors’ recoveries, tossed cutmen’s fungible plasters.
Per se, that ruler’s “almost lemans;” her nemeses, countered with daft manuscript dates,
With liberating incarcerated histories, crackerjack bomb experts, boy toys, moldy dinosaurs.
They grasped how her appassionato diction, relationship folly, explosively brilliant designs,
Would produce: misemployed enmity, blundering, sour tummies, dire acts of literary treason.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.