The first snow. It's two weeks early. I quickly dig out my skis and wax them in the small space of my kitchen. The sun is setting and the snow keeps falling. 30 minutes later I'm clicking my boots into the bindings and slide forward through the white stuff. I weave through the trees and decide the glow of lights from the city in the distance is enough to see by. I turn off my headlamp. It feels good to finally be back here. I get to my favorite bridge where the view opens wide. I stop and take it in. I spin my head from left to right: the pond is starting to freeze; the spruce trees are a perfect silhouette against the pink city lights; the trail ahead is framed by branches laden with snow. I keep turning my head and to the right is the lake, the glacier, and the distant sound of the waterfall. I close my eyes to make sure it imprints itself and I can't help but smile. And so another winter begins. 

It’s Friday! And we all know what that means - we get to find out about another Proser. This week we shine a questioning yet respectful light on the little sceptered isle of England, with a wonderful Proser by the name of BethyG.

P: What is your given name and your Proser username?

B: Hello, I'm Bethan, but most people call me Beth. My Proser name is BethyG, which is what my best friend used to call me when we were younger. I think it was because we both had surnames beginning with the letter 'G' and our first names had a similar rhythm (Jess & Beth). I guess, this led to the creation of Jessy G and Bethy G and it's kind of stuck.

P: Where do you live?

B: I'm from Kent - otherwise known as the Garden of England, which I've always thought was a rather nice association...and, you know, it is really green here.

P: What is your occupation?

B: I'm a professional escapist, dreamer, lover of words...also known as a writer. I currently work for a magazine, but I'm also writing a YA book and do some freelance work too.

P: What is your relationship with writing and how has it evolved?

B: I think we're frenemies? You know one day, writing is all like "oh hey you - how have you been?" and then the next it's ignoring me. I've wanted to be a writer since I was little (or littler, I'm still pretty tiny) and over the years, we've certainly had our ups and downs. I think it's true love though - you know the kind that makes you want to scream one second and then laugh the next. But that's when you know it means a lot to you, because you're always thinking about it, because it affects you so much, because it's a part of you. It's a passion that will never die.

...It's all very dramatic.

P: What value does reading add to both your personal and professional life?

B: When I was younger I was a huge bookworm and I don't know what happened - life got in the way, perhaps - but I sort of stopped reading, and then after a little while, it kind of crept back in. I was having a bit of a rough time and I found books were very healing and now, the book bug is back. I knew I had always wanted to write a book and reading helped me with that. In my opinion, it makes you a better writer...I mean, how can you write if you don't like to read? I read for fun for sure, but it certainly helps me on a professional level too.

P: Can you describe your current literary ventures and what can we look forward to?

B: I'm working on a young adult book at the moment - and looking for representation for it. It's a tough feat though! And I've started writing a murder mystery, which is something completely new to me. I'm finding it fun, but it's very challenging! I don't really plan my posts for Prose - I just write whenever I get that niggling feeling in my fingertips! Which leads me onto my next answer...

P: What do you love about Prose?

B: ...I love the fact there's so much inspiration on here, not just from the prompts, but also from each other - everyone is so supportive. I love it. I stumbled across Prose on a blog and I'm so glad I did.

P: Is there one book that you would recommend everybody should read before they die?

B: Arghhhh! I hate questions like these because I never know what to say (or write in this case). I think it changes on a weekly basis. I'm a YA fan, so I read a lot of that kind of stuff. I recently read Am I Normal Yet? by Holly Bourne - it's a really important book. 

There's a lot of stigma around mental health and although people are becoming more aware of these illnesses, it seems that phrases and "harmless" jokes about illnesses such as, OCD seem to be rather common. It's something I've always hated, people using serious terms like OCD to describe themselves when they really don't know what they're talking about. "I'm really OCD about tidying my room" (I've heard that more than a few times!). 

This book doesn't just highlight issues like this, but also really shows the reader the serious struggle of this illness.

I'm also a huge fan of The Fault in Our Stars. What a beautiful book. I have always enjoyed a book that can make me cry!

There's so many others and I know I'll kick myself later on saying, I should have said this and that one and oh what about that one!

P: Do you have an unsung hero who got you into reading and/or writing?

B: Jacqueline Wilson. I loved her books as a kid. Girls in Love, Vicky Angel, The Diamond Girls, The Lottie Project, The Illustrated Mum - there's SO many. She's amazing and has such a talent. I'm pretty sure at times she had mind reading capabilities - she could really get into the teen mindset.

P: Describe yourself in three words!

B: Indecisive – hang on a minute, I’m not too sure about that one now…let’s go with – imaginative, fun loving and quirky.

P: Is there one quote, from a writer or otherwise, that sums you up?

B: You know, I've never thought about a quote in that way. I have favourite quotes for sure, but not one that I've said - "hey, that's me!" I feel like that's probably the worst answer, but I don't want to just write a quote for the sake of it. Instead, I'll leave you with this quote from the two books I have mentioned, which have stuck with me.

“Everyone's on the cliff edge of normal. Everyone finds life an utter nightmare sometimes, and there's no 'normal' way of dealing with it... There is no normal, Evelyn.”

– Holly Bourne, Am I Normal Yet?

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” 
– John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

P: Favourite music to write and/or read to?

B: I have so many playlists and they're all put together to create a certain mood. So if I'm writing something that's meant to be all fast-paced and "epic" I play one, there's another for sad and happy and chill-out. Generally though, my go-to music is Ludovico Einaudi - Islands.

P: You climb out of a time machine into a bookless dystopian future. What do you say?

B: A world without books?! I don't have time for this...but I do have a time machine that will take me to a better place. Come with me and I'll show not just my world, but a million others. If anything, I'd want them to tell me what happened!?

P: Is there anything else you’d like us to know about you/your work/social media accounts?

B: Find me on Twitter @bethgrylls

I also blog on another platform storiesbybethan.wordpress.com

Thank you very much for this opportunity to have a Friday feature and I hope you like it! Much love x

What a great insight into the life and times of another Proser. If you have yet to do so, please follow and interact with her on here and on Twitter. If you yourself want to feature, or would like to nominate anyone, do please get in touch. We have the next couple of weeks lined up, and then we need more of you to be featured!

girl only knows tradition—mother and father, boyfriend and girlfriend, harry and sally. girls meets boy, attempts to fall in puppy love through flip phone, text messages reading, nm u? girl likes his smile, the way it stretches when she teaches him how to spell chihuahua, how to do long division, how to study the fifty states' capitals, sayings like trenton got a new jersey. girl likes his eyes, the way they dip over her, right past her, to whichever girlʼs breasts are developing. girl flops into bed and cries.

girl yearns to be his for six years. girl accepts his cruelty as a gift, an act of love, sees soulmates when myers-briggs inventories match, sees boy sucking on emily arnelloʼs lips and not hers, retreats to choir room to spend the rest of life alone. girl, devastated.

the rest of life is three years. girl reads about girls who date girls, girls who kiss girls, beautiful girls who hold hands beneath tables with other beautiful girls. girl questions, doesnʼt ask her mother, doesnʼt tell her father about the way the woman she passed on grand avenue had eyes that captivated her because they swooshed and twinkled like van goghʼs starry night. girl keeps quiet about the sparks that ignite in her bones when she sees her.

girl meets girl, feels something.

girl panics.

girl faces self in mirror, black craters under her eyes, repeats: i am not, i am not, i am not. girl bites bar of soap, grits teeth, lets sour settle on her tongue, mixes something sanitary with her saliva for once, tries to come clean, fails. girl is what her mother defined her as: flotsam that will never amount to anything except death of the albatross, lodged in the throats of the ones who donʼt like the taste of her.

girl cannot sleep, girl lies awake with the moon and wonders what she deserves, what she wants, what she can get.

girl dates girl and no one knows. girl keeps secrets inside her screen, locked away with a four-digit passcode, 1743, numbers that feel familiar but are faint and foreign. girl glues phone to heart, holding on for dear life but is not strong enough, avoids capital punishment but must meet her makers face-to-face and admit her mistakes.

counselor mediates in february, mother and father deny until may. girl holds hand in public in july, is talk of the town for the entirety of her senior year.

girl is confused. girl is a lesbian. girl loses her best friend. girl wins scholarship, is asked if she received it just because sheʼs gay. girl encounters angry father. girl graduates beside the boy whose father posted fliers of her kissing her girlfriend in every business in town, saying girl is worthless and will never be as great as the valedictorian, she will forever live with the number two stamped on her transcript, along with the word dyke tattooed across her forehead.

girl arrives to college, meets roommate, never says a word when she listens to her say it over and over: faggot, faggot, what a fucking faggot. girl is desperate, girl shouts into void. void is full of love and helps her move out.

girl joins her first pride alliance, girl meets girls with similar interests: kissing other women, or kissing men, or whoever the hell girl wants. girl is hugged, girl is given safe space, girl cries out of happiness for the first time, girl eats rainbow cake during the homecoming football game with a rainbow streamer tied around her forehead.

girl is accepted.

at first, you will feel like you are drowning. you will forget how to swim butterfly, how to doggy paddle, how to tread water. you will forget how to survive. for weeks, the water will live in the bottom of your lungs, stagnant, pooling until it touches the tip of your throat, then your tonsils, then your tongue. your ducts will store more tears than you thought possible. you will never drink enough water.

once you play with a dead frog long enough, you get used to the smell. you will, too. your heart will feel bloated and your chest will nearly burst every time the sun sets but you will get used to not touching yourself unless you can firmly grip your skin with forceps. wear gloves for extra protection, and get your heart out of the way.

god, the smell. your shoulders will grow stiff and your fingers will grow stuck together and you will wish you had your mother's flies for dinner, anything but the preservatives, you would slurp them off of her lips if you had to, god, please, not the preservatives. you don't want to stay longer than you have to, longer than the garter snake by the oak tree intended.

be careful with the scalpel. you will want to dissect yourself. do not dissect yourself.

when they finally debrief you, tell you they are cutting off your canals, you will float on your stomach. cross your eyes. say okay– and clip the word before it has the chance to dangle, doomed to live life as an amputee, a victim to the apathy everyone has but no one cares enough about to go see the doctor.

open your mouth, let them slash your jaw, stick their latex fingers down your throat until you are choking, and it feels like you are drowning, and you are right back where you started: the mariana trench.

they will ask if you can hear them.

you will blackout from the pressure.

when you resurface, they will tell you your chest is rising. you are breathing. you made it.

eyes barely bobbing above the water, you will choke, gasp, spit out the salty kelp stuck between your teeth, and respond:

this is the taste of air?

you mean to tell me i was alive the whole time?

they will look at you, blink, take your vitals. ask for your birthdate, tell you there’s a great big world out there with your name right on it, you’ve got a whole adventure ahead of you, slap your ass and send you off into the sea with a jar of formaldehyde, saying “drink up, kiddo, even death doesn’t offer hand-outs. you gotta work for it, just like everyone else.”

i.

daughter says to darkness,

let me go.

my glory is not yours for the taking.

yellow eyes glaze over her body.

he cracks her covenant with bare fists—

i will settle for the rest of you.

ii.

speak of the day you died,

he begs.

tell me of the day the serpent swallowed you whole.

i tell him,

it was a day like any other.

bells chimed at 10:30 as i awoke to the smell of hot oats

and buttoned my blouse until i resembled a holy child

worthy of what i dubbed snack time

but my mother called communion,

better than any other bread.

i lived as a cherub, swaddled in egyptian silk

with a lion’s heart,

an oxen’s wealth,

an eagle’s strength,

and man’s flaws.

i had a dream i smashed a stained glass window with a rawlings baseball bat

because i wanted to know if god’s house was as tough as i was

and i made it a reality

when i watched the mosaic of veronica’s veil shatter.

weak.

the naked light scalded my skin, burned these jaded eyes,

but it did not touch these bones.

was the sunlight not strong enough to reach your heart?

not strong enough to penetrate this ravenous wolf’s sheep's clothing.

iii.

why must you hate a man you’ve never met?

why ask if you know the answer?

every time i'm told to pray

someone's tumors are in the process of turning malignant

so i tend to equate god to cancer

and when the priest found out i was gay

he pulled me aside and told me it's okay,

we all make mistakes and sin sometimes.

he told me not to worry

because he's just like me.

see, he's a glutton for india pale ale

and i'm a dyke who eats pussy.

but he wants to fix me,

so i let him,

and when he thrusts

and i quiver,

i feel like judas

taking one for the team of twelve disciples

whom knew at least one jericho was destined to fall.

iv.

ways to go:

-sink my lungs in forty nights' worth of water

-build gallows in the bedroom and allow gravity to snap my skin

-divine death (pray god strikes me with lightning)

-let him touch me again

v.

murderer asks martyr,

who are you doing this for?

martyr replies, i am doing this for myself.

murderer says as he cocks his gun and takes aim,

how selfish.

i’m doing this for someone else.

A man can only work so long for another man before his head explodes, left to squeeze down his ambitions to the space this man allows for him to breathe, to think, to dream. A woman preserves her dreams inside a space her boss man doesn't know exists. She knows how to put on her humility, to cover herself in it and wait to breathe another day, on her own time, where she doesn't permit the man she works for to infiltrate her thoughts.

Our nearest neighbor was carted off the other day for putting his fist through the wall again, for attacking the same wall he'd just slammed his wife's delicate frame into. The commotion sent a small quake through our apartment, my parents' wardrobe at the quake's epicenter punctuated by a wave of trembling aftershocks. It's bad enough he couldn't breathe. Then here she comes breathing just fine, her day at work no less trying, her tribulations no less suffocating. Yet showing up that night breathing in his face, asking how his day had been was more than her man could take.

It was a simple impulse reaction, gripping his wife by the shoulders, driving with full force into the bedroom wall before backing away, his hands at his temples looking to get a grip on his anger. She scrambled through an open closet door before agitation could wind its way up again inside his clenched fists. He took aim instead at a vacant spot above the dent the blade of his wife's shoulders had left in the wall plaster. Saw in her crumbling silhouette the incarnation of every boss man, the weight of a million feet resting on the back of his neck, crushing his windpipe.

Later that night, my father escorted the man's wife to the precinct house, assured her that my mother and he would stand by whatever she elected to do. I listened for a key in the door to signal my father's return. My mother took up post in the hallway leading past my bedroom door. She stared long at the hulking mass of my father laboring to remove his overcoat with that earnest, somehow hurt, mostly relieved look only a doting wife can muster before shifting her staring to me. Her look said, 'Talk to your son. Help him understand. Tell him the things only you can tell, things that he'll only hear from another man.'

She wanted my father to prepare his son so I might have words at my disposal when the time comes to have the conversation with the neighbor kids, the lot of them left to choose sides along battle lines drawn between mother and father. She wanted him to assure me that my father is not that kind of man, that I am not that kind of man, that the neighbor boy, if he can help it, doesn't have to grow to be that kind of man either.

When I asked what might bring my father to help a man who would lay hands on his wife, he took care to remind his son that every man deserves to be judged in the same color light. "How bright are the jewels of his crown?" he pondered. "How thick is the dust on the soles of this man's feet? How calloused are his hands?" He presented his own bruised knuckles before me in living testament to the persistence of life's hardships.

"You must ask yourself, how heavy is the weight around this man's neck? How deep are his regrets?"

In the end, the man's wife had the police drop the charges against her husband. After all, she understood the boss man, recognized the strain it placed on her husband though she desperately wished he'd find some means to redirect his contempt in a way that didn't involve her. She would press and drop charges against him a half dozen times before their eldest son, Ramon, and I could graduate high school.

This was my first practical life lesson brought to the end of my nose by actual events making the lesson, rooted in what not to do, impossible to dismiss. It was a miserable tale bearing an unfortunate truth about your average man who, lacking the temperament to set aside his grudges in the space between workdays, allows his animosity to stew, stirs the pot until the time comes when he must breathe the same air with this man again. One look into those soulless eyes is all it takes to bring the rage to a boil inside his temples again.

Had he only learned to adopt his woman's stance, train himself to live like she does, free of any burden that's not staring her straight in the face, he'd at least have that small amount of time to himself, to live again, to breathe, to wander the safe haven of his dreams free from the boss man's suffocating presence.

we’ll be there

together

or

on the way

to each other

to meet in the middle

or at the end

of the beginning

to reach up

and

stroke the

long silk necks

of the

beautiful

horses.

On the bookshelf rests a lamination of dust,

So fresh and fine that a spider would leave footprints in it,

Almost like a snow of dead skin, dirt, and dander,

Even the afternoon sun beams are strong enough to stir them,

Collecting them in motes to float about,

Dancing in the heated rays,

Only to settle once again on another surface,

When the day draws to close,

As they most often do.

Humidity drapes warm sheets

from head to toe,

& our clothes cling in defiance,

threatening permanence to our shape.

City senses slow and widen,

swallowing whole, these new beats

from an ancient primal drum.

Here is a oneness long lain dormant,

what our conscious long forgot.

A sixth sense of awe--

I taste the color of this ripped flesh.