The snow it fell so

I could not see

Could not perceive

The road ahead

I had your face

In my heart

Oh, baby, I won’t be able

To make it home, it seems

My limbs are freezing solid,

Tonight, there will be no fire to warm me

I am quite afraid

You’re not near to comfort me

The snow flurries past me

The white waves become thicker and thicker

Until I cannot even see my feet

But, I just struggle onwards, still trying

.....

It’s been a few hours now

And the blizzard has calmed down

But I do not know where I am

Baby, I will never come home

* * * * * * * * * *

Prompt: Write a poem about someone who cannot find their way home in the snow.

When you're young, your idea of love is big.

You picture fairy tales so epic, they could be written into chart-topping Taylor Swift songs.

Your first kiss feels like an electric current that runs through your veins and singes the insides of your eyelids so that every time you close them you can't help but remember how it felt.

The first time you have sex you swear that you're "making love" and revel in the idea that you've finally been seen by someone. And you'd never tell them this, but sometimes it feels like you want to unzip their skin and cuddle their bones because you just can't get close enough.

When they go away for a week on their family vacation it feels like forever, and your reunion seems like something out of a movie. You run to each other in the falling snow and when they lift you in their arms you're sure everything is moving in slow motion. Their skin is the same it's always been and yet, it's the best it's ever smelled and you know you have to make this night last forever.

When you get older, love gets smaller, but that's okay.

You see it in the way they have your tea ready in the morning, made just the way you like it with way too much sugar.

You feel it when you share your millionth kiss before you leave for work, when they're rushing to catch the train but still stop at the front door because the day just wouldn't feel right without it.

You know it's there even when the fancy date night ends with you both falling asleep in your clothes because you drank too much red wine. And in the morning, you laugh so hard your headaches get worse but you don't mind.

Love is a funny little thing.

A crazy big thing.

A moment or a lifetime.

But always worth it.

love is a feeling

like a beautiful painting

or an intricate song

its ring lasts out

and its color stays with you

even after its gone

it brings happiness while it lasts

but pain when it ends

but still it was worth it

and i'd do it again

because love is real

its both temporary

and its eternal

because its what you feel

Deny me freedom,

lock me in chains,

hide me from the light,

but there is one thing

you can never do;

take away my Lord.

Blind my eyes,

cut away my tongue,

cripple my legs,

but I still see,

still walk,

still speak with my Lord.

Do with me what you will,

shame me if you must,

but one thing

you can never do,

is leave me locked with my sins;

for they will be broken by my Lord.

I died on a warm August morning.

Took the coronary people six days to find me keeled over in the backyard, all moldered up and decayed, the crows having pecked out my eyes. Unceremoniously, I was hauled from the premises in a black thing that vaguely resembled a garbage bag, the flies dancing around, desperate to infiltrate. My wife was out of town, in case you were wondering. I’d like to think she would’ve noticed my absence had she been home; but I doubt it.

Honestly, with how the past two years have gone, things would’ve probably played out the same. She’d flit around the house, head in a dream, singing softly to herself, playing games on her phone, or maybe texting him, her brotherly coworker. The whole “he’s like a brother to me” part is her shtick. My opinion holds a bit different.

Brothers don’t typically drape their arms over their sisters’ shoulders like that, or lean that close to whisper into their sisters’ ears. Brothers don’t typically undress their sisters with long, lingering glances. And he does. I’ve seen him.

Oh yeah—and a brother doesn’t typically poison his sister’s husband by slipping arsenic into his morning tea. That was a lovely surprise. The day after Tanya left on business, he showed up on my doorstep, looking like a lost puppy. Said he’d had a fight with his girlfriend and thought maybe I could give him some advice. So, having nothing better to do on my day off, I invited him inside to share my breakfast. That was my first and last mistake.

He must’ve spiked it when I got up to get more napkins. How anticlimactic can you get?

And now I get the pleasure of watching their story continue without me. Yes, watching. I may have died but I didn’t go very far. Reverse the old adage and you have it: “Forgotten, but not gone.” Devoted as my dear spouse was, it took her a whole day to move on. And then she was off to find comfort in the arms of who else—Ted McGhee, her brotherly coworker. The pretense kinda’ dropped after I left the picture. She stopped calling him her brother and started calling him all the things she used to call me.

They were married three weeks later. By then I’d learned a neat trick. If you concentrate hard enough you can move stuff as a ghost. It’s a dimensional thing, popularized by TV and apparently applicable here. So I started following them, knocking stuff off the tables. I’m a pest like that.

Ted always prided himself for his machismo, or whatever you call it. I learned very quickly that it was all a facade. A few moving pieces of furniture captured by our glitchy old security cam and he was out of his mind. Tanya was the one having to comfort him, and I could tell the luster was already fading. The thing about people like Ted: they’re good at pretending, but give them something real, any taste of conflict or fear, and they fall apart. I downed a lamp and he dove for cover behind the couch; first making sure nobody was around to see.

I didn’t consider it revenge so much as entertainment. I was bored and lonely—predisposed to both in life, but they were even less tolerable in death. My mind began playing with the question why. Why was I still here? What had kept me from crossing over? I wasn’t the one in the wrong. And my heart wasn’t really revenge-bent, as one might’ve assumed. If Tanya wanted this guy, who was I to stop her. I knew more about him than she did. And I knew them both enough to know that they deserved each other.

The answer arrived on a warm August morning, almost a year after my passing. Ted wasn’t feeling so hot, so he’d taken off. Tanya was away and he was alone in the house. I overheard him on the phone with someone, and I could hardly process what followed.

“Yeah, she’ll be out of the picture real soon. I just gotta’ work a few things out. The spark’s gone. There’s nothin’ in it for me anymore. Plus Tanya’s old hubby was worth a small fortune. Get her dead and we’ll have enough to spring for a royal-tier wedding. We can retire nice and comfy in the Bahamas, just like you wanted.”

A million thoughts pounded in my skull. Not only was this two-bit hustler looking to kill my wife—well, I guess ex-wife—but he was talking to this ‘other woman’ like they’d been seeing each other for months. I couldn’t help but wonder how long he’d been planning this. Probably since the day he and Tanya tied the knot.

By the time Tanya got home, Ted had a nice candle-lit dinner ready and waiting.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked, red smile stretching, bouncing on her heel with that adorable enthusiasm I used to love.

I knew then that I couldn’t let this monster kill her. She wasn’t mine anymore. But she didn’t deserve to be his.

So when he offered up her tea, I promptly knocked it over. She let a frightened squeak, and he nearly jumped out of his socks as per usual. Upon recovery, he went to get her a refill. I prepared myself for round two. It was going to be a long night.

Seven refills came and went before Ted got fed up. Angrily, he flipped the table so hard and high that it struck the window. Noticing the gaping hole it left in the glass, an idea crossed his eyes. He grabbed a steak-knife off the floor and lunged at Tanya. I knew then that he was going to stage it and make it look like a breakin.

Tanya was small-framed and fragile. She didn’t stand a chance. And that was what dogged me most about cowards like Ted: they only preyed on the weaker. He would’ve never tried a thing like that with me.

Gathering all my concentration, I sent a vase crashing into the wall. It missed Ted by a hair. I figured if I could incapacitate him, maybe that would give Tanya a chance to run. I hadn’t even bothered to look what vase I’d grabbed. Imagine my surprise when my own cremated ashes puffed everywhere, like a smoke bomb in a riot. They blinded Ted, and he staggered around, refusing to relinquish his grip on the knife. By the time the ashes cleared, Tanya was already out the door and running up the street. Ted made a break after her, but he failed to account for our elevated threshold, and tripped out the front door, landing facedown on the porch. When he rolled over, I saw the knife had stuck in him, and blood climbed thickly from both sides of his mouth. As he died, it was almost as if our perceptions brushed for a moment, him staring directly into my eyes and me staring back ever-so-calmly.

“It was kill or be killed...” he muttered in delirium, in what was the most unconvincing excuse I’d ever heard.

That’s what I call a twofer’ one then, I wanted to retort. But I maintained my class and upheld my silence. No need to lower myself. He already knew that he’d lost.

The life left him, and there I stayed, stranded on the porch against a world that I was no longer any part of. I’d helped save Tanya, but I was still here. Nothing had changed.

And then I saw it, a light in the distance, so radiant it couldn't be natural. I ran toward it the fastest I could manage, and as I collided with it all became new. I saw a great many instances, the proverbial life flashing before my eyes; and it all ended with Tanya hunched over, panting and tearful at the end of our street, and a half-muffled “thank you” stirred off with the wind.

Note: This is strictly fiction as I do not believe in ghosts, nor do I condone fighting with cremated ashes, not even your own. Peace. :3

#fiction, #strictlyfiction, #donttrythisathome

I wish I would’ve told you no instead of giving in, instead of lying still beneath the crushing weight of your bare skin.

I wish I would have told you go instead of playing cool, for retreating to the girl you knew when we were back in school.

I wish I would’ve said to you my body is my own, and that I owed you nothing, despite the “ass” I’d shown.

I wish I would’ve used my voice and risked your stupid wrath, because your rage would be much better than this self-loathing path.

I wish I would’ve punched you then, when you shared with all your friends.

I wish I would’ve yelled and screamed and not just played pretend.

But instead I swallowed all the pain and seethed like mad inside. It’s so fucked up to betray yourself just to save one young man’s pride. So he doesn’t call you bitch or tease or throw shit against the wall. So he feels like some great giant, when you’ve never felt so small.

And now that I am older I can look back on this and say, that I’ve learned how much I’m truly worth and there’s no way that you could pay. You could promise me the moon and stars and still your tries would fail, because now you’re nothing more to me than a cautionary tale.

The rain tapped gently on the window – pit, pat, pit, pat. Outside, the sky was a shade of gray that soothed her and helped to quiet her mind for the journey. She laid on the bed and closed her eyes. Breathing deeply, she focused on a red doorway at the end of a long path shrouded in shadow. Like the times she’d done before, when she arrived at the end, she reached forward and pushed the handle, her eyes opening as the door released. Today, there was warm water, her body felt weightless. She floated in a spring that filled the air with thick clouds of steam.

~

The time before that, she’d awakened on the precipice of a mountain, just steps away from falling to the valley below. Startled, she fell backwards upon the hard, frozen ground. Though it was still fall, snow covered everything this high up, and the footprints of fawns speckled the earth here. She couldn’t help but picture the poor creatures slipping over the edge, and wondered. If she had fallen, would she land softly upon a blanket of autumn leaves or would they make a crunch just like her bones?

Though no sooner had this thought crossed her mind did she feel a tingling between her shoulder blades and the sudden rush of relief and of knowing. Somehow, she quickly became certain that she could not hurt in a place as beautiful as this.

~

The next time it was a meadow. She found herself sitting in the middle a family of grazing deer. They looked up now and again to meet her grassy green eyes, lingering for just a few moments or so. They were not unphased by her presence, but they were not unsettled either. And she too sensed that she belonged right there among them.

She’d enoyed mere minutes observing the gentle animals before she noticed movement in the the distance. A hunter steadied his rifle. Though she wanted desperately to stay, having never been close enough to count the spots on a doe, her need to protect them was greater. She looked at the mother and whispered, “Run.” The deer, somehow understanding, bowed her head in thanks and darted with her family toward the tree line.

She closed her eyes and brought herself home.

~

Today, as she swam to the edge of the spring, she felt hopeful. She raised herself onto the ground and lay down upon the moss, directing her gaze skyward at a canopy of trees. She marveled at how the sunlight shone in tiny beams all around her, guided through gaps between leaves. She was so enchanted that she hardly noticed the plant’s grip until she flexed her foot and felt a tug.

A vine from the spring had twisted around her ankle. She tried to untangle it, but the harder she fought, the tighter it became. Soon, she realized that this particular vine was not just a living plant, but a thinking one as well. And quickly, it began to pull her toward the water. She turned on her belly and clawed at the earth, grasping at weeds that let out tiny screams as she ripped them from the ground. Startled at the sound, she looked up, and there, she spotted mother deer along the edge of the forest.

“Fly,” mother yelled, but the girl did not understand.

“I cannot fly! I am no bird!”

Mother tilted her head just so. “Child, you are not of heaven nor of earth. You needn’t be a bird to fly!”

It was then that she felt the familiar twinge between her shoulder blades once more, the rush of memories flooding every crevice of her body. Gossamer wings sprung forth from her back, covered in a shimmering dew. They were the wings that had helped her fly from this world to the other, so many times before.

She closed her eyes tightly and flew high and away, breaking free of the vine that bound her. She’d been away too long and had almost forgotten herself. She’d been tested so she could remember.

As she danced among the clouds, she laughed and gave thanks for the magic of Irish rain. But most of all, she gave thanks to her ancestors before her, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the fairy folk born of Mother Nature herself.