Photo: Rosalind Chang on Unsplash
It was a thing they would not utter. Ineffable. In their home, at least.
So much that it baffled them to see how others in their own homes — and often without a moment’s hesitation — did.
To them it felt impossible. Dangerous … though they wouldn’t dream admitting fear or conflict.
Those, too, were taboo. As was to contradict.
Their parents’ word was law. Speak “No”, and you would certainly be whipped.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: ineffable in 70 words
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
Until you manage to get
Past the jagged edges
Of life’s cliff,
You’ll dream of rivers
Soothing through
The valleys
Of What If.
Till then you’ll hold on
To old anchors
That keep you
Safe from doom,
And luxuriate only
In dreams of
Rappelling out
Of your fear’s womb.
For the Word of the Day Challenge: Jagged
He eyed her twirling in her tutu and his heart squeezed with longing.
He wanted to do that, too. It was not fair that it was not allowed.
That only girls could.
Be princesses.
Wear dresses.
Put on make up.
Play with dolls.
Paint their nails.
He’d tried, of course, but he could tell that even those who did not outright take things from him or forbid him or call him hurtful names, didn’t really feel comfortable with his choices. There was that look they gave, the forced smile, the way they inevitably ran out of patience and gave him “other suggestions” or directed him toward “trying other things.” He was given gifts that made it clear that what he’d asked for was not acceptable and therefore required others choose for him.
He could tell his parents were ashamed.
They loved him. He knew. But they didn’t quite love that part of him. The part that he loved in himself the most. The part that he hated. Sometimes.
It wasn’t even that he didn’t like sports, or climbing trees, or making mud pies. He did. It was just that those weren’t fun without adding a bit of dance, of looking for fairies amidst the branches, or pretending that the mud pies were part of a birthday bakery for princesses.
They kept saying how “wonderful it was to have such an imagination,” but their body language told him that they’d have much preferred if his imagination didn’t quite go where it wanted to. That they would have liked better an imagination of the kind they felt was more appropriate for boys.
“Do you want to be a girl?” his sister asked. They were in her room for a tea party. She was wearing one of her ballet-princess dresses and the full set of jewelry she’d gotten from Grandma just the other day. She let him wear the crown. They pretended this made him a princess, too, but they both knew she chose the crown because it would be easy for him to take down if someone walked in.
Or say he was a king.
Sometimes he envied her so much that it carved a hole into the center of his being. The ease and confidence with which she could prance around in rustling taffeta and glittery baubles, the smiles she got when she dressed up and smeared lipstick on her face … It hurt. It hurt. It hurt.
She let him into her world, but they both know that it was not his to live in. They both knew that when her friends came for a play-date he would be excluded. They both knew that even with no dress on, and with a crown fit for a king, at any moment someone might barge in, and frown, and find a reason to ‘redirect’ him.
Her question made him cry.
Because he didn’t want to be a girl.
He wanted to be a boy who liked playing with dolls and painting his nails and having tea parties and trying on dresses and decorating mud-pie cakes for princesses.
And yet … it would have been so easy. If he were a girl.
No frowns. No shaming. No overhearing adults talk of how he needed “toughening up” or was “too sensitive” or was “definitely gay-material” or “headed in the wrong direction.” Not having to know that Mom and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa were kind of ashamed of him.
“I want to be me,” he sobbed, and fingered a dress his sister discarded and that he would give his heart to be allowed to put on without fear. “I just want to be me … and I don’t understand why it is wrong.”
For Linda Hill’s SoCS challenge: dress
She crouched and tried to still her heart and limbs so the water would not give her away in wavelets or ripples.
Her teeth chattered. She wasn’t dressed for wet and the day’s sun had little warmth, none of which reached the shaded culvert.
She strained to listen.
She did all she could think of to hide her steps, but she wasn’t likely to escape the dogs. If they brought them. Oh pray please, please, that they did not. Not the dogs.
Her breath hitched and she bit down on her lip to try and swallow the sob that rode on it. The metal taste of blood filled her mouth. She heard barking. Surely the dogs could smell it. And her fear.
She closed her eyes and prayed to become stone.
She would not feel their chains, the bites, the clubs, their touch, their lashes, if she were a stone.
For the Crimson Creative Challenge
The floods had culled the herd. The fires cleansed the land of dead, returned the grasses to the dirt, where bones lay, staring at the sky, unbleached. They will not be interred.
A falcon soared above their heads. It dove and disappeared, its freedom deferred, its sight hidden under the dark small caps it let have drawn over its vision in a servitude preferred.
The stallion whinnied. The yearlings, cocky and too young to know better, had cantered up ahead. They stopped at the sound of his impatience and turned about as their obedience stirred. But the mares and foals kept close on dancing legs. The smell of smoke still in the air rendered them simultaneously docile and quick to bolt, their reason blurred.
He knew why that was. The two-legged that had fled, have returned. And the smoke curling from the nostrils of their leather dwellings rose, awakening dread.
Photo: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
It lingered, hidden.
It’s potential ever present
Yet hoped
To in deep sleep
Remain.
Till it found purchase
Someplace where the
Balance
Could not be
Maintained.
“It’s metastatic now,”
They said
And shook their head
And watched her deep breath
Rise
Along with the determination
From last time,
Returned.
It will be
What it will,
But even if equilibrium
Was difficult to
Attain,
She was going to meet
Life
Head on
Again.
Dedicated to those who are facing this challenge now: You got this. We got you.
For Linda Hill’s SoCS challenge: “-tast”
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
What had happened to you
In the short life
You knew?
Your wings’ rhythm
Aflutter
To a drum
Gone
Askew?
Your beauty imbued
By what could life
Subdue,
You flit on right
Through,
Gloriously determined,
To be you,
To be you.
For the Sunday Stills challenge: A bug’s life
Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
I am not yet
Extinct
From here.
The winds that came
Once more
To blow me into an
Oblivion of preemptive
Grief,
Are yet to fray
The threads that
Hold me
In the hope
That this time, too
Will turn
A test, not
Doom.
For the dVerse Quadrille Poetry Challenge: Extinction
Luanda, Angola; by Jorje sa Pinheiro
“Why is the top of that mountain rusty?” he asked.
His grandmother’s hand tightened gently around his wrist, then released it, almost in apology.
“For your ancestors,” she said.
He looked at her, uncomprehending. She had a way of speaking without saying everything she meant or with saying more than she meant and then cloaking it so it was still a tangle of implied meanings. He didn’t always know which it was. Or both. Her lined face was held up in what looked more like grief than awe.
“Grandma?” he asked.
“This rust is the mountain holding up the iron bled by your great-grandfather’s chains and the chains of those before him, and before, so many generations that the rust of those shackles rose up. It is the blood of the mountain and like the blood in your veins, it is them. They live in it. They live in you.
For the What Pegman Saw challenge: Angola
Photo: Amitai Asif
She flitted gently by his head.
The slight bow noted, the sorrow that was there
But perhaps not heard.
She knew he had to hold himself up
All this time
That it was the only way
He’d learned.
And yet she could discern the hidden
Effort that it took
To rise against the gravity,
In times where drought of hope
Returned
Again and again and again.
She understood the energy required for
Making the Herculean appear effortless,
To constantly correct
The wobble under
Winds and strain.
She hovered for a moment
Letting a space of permission
Manifest
Before she landed, feather-weighted and,
Delicate
On his chest.
For Sammi’s Weekend Writing Prompt: Delicate in 106 words
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