My "teddy bear" was a lion. I've had him since I was two. I cut his mane thinking it would grow back. It didn't. I used to give him baths and brush him until he was fluffy and bushy, apart from the back of his head that was bald.

I slept with him every night until I became a child bride at the age of 18, and my husband wouldn't let me. I packed him away through tears. I would wait until my husband went to work, and I would sneak into the box where Liolyn lay, and I would take him out and sniff him.

When I left my husband, ten years later, I left the country. I left everything behind. I trusted him to send me my childhood best friend. He threw him out. He never cared.

Challenge

Write a poem about a maze of some sort. It does not have to be a physical maze (although that is cool too!). Think outside the box.

kwess1234

45 reads

Inequality with ease

I now recogize

the walls

which I am in

invisible, yet immovable

which way to go?

left? right? center?

if only

I had a ladder

you too, do not realize

the glass walls

in front of your face,

ancored in their place.

this fun house

does not bring pleasure

unless you have

tools of measure

some have keys:

they unlock many doors

but since you have none,

you stay poor

you ask yourself

how and why

these clandensine corrordors

are of supply

due to society, unimproved,

keepers of the keys

are all-consumed

bringing others to their knees:

inequality with ease

Challenge

Write about a teddy bear. What is its significance?

97 reads

The Plush Army

I slept alone a lot as a kid. Being an only child for seven years, with a single mom for at least five of them, I don't have a lot of memories sleeping in a shared room. I have more memories of laying awake at night trying to sleep as shadows swirled around my room in the moonlight.

Like most kids, I didn't like the dark. I had a vivid imagination and I could think of all kinds of fantastical monsters that lived in it. Yet I had a stubborn independence streak; I couldn't go crawling to mom so instead I took a tactical approach.

I assembled a plush army.

Every night, as I climbed into bed, I created a stuffed wall around myself. It started with my first and favorite teddy bear, but a general alone does no good. We recruited stuffed dogs, a Glow-worm, stuffed snakes (I started to choose animals who represented what I thought of as "natural" monsters - all the better to fight against the imaginary ones) and a few more bears. My ritual each night involved making sure they got tucked in around me. I usually did this myself, although occassionally my grandma or ma would help, with a soft chuckle at my horde.

Eventually I realized the stuffed army couldn't replace my real-life support network. Yet good soldiers never die; I kept them all. While I no longer needed them to stand guard at night, I retired them to shelves in my room in places of honor. A few I donated to smaller kids I knew, when I recognized the need for a trustworthy stuff-for-hire. The rest still live with me, carefully tucked away but always prepared for battle.

As a joke for my 20th birthday, my mother got me a giant bear that looked just like my original general - just three times the size. She smiled. "Well, I figured you were bigger so you'd need a bigger bear." It still sits on a table in my bedroom as a tribute to the plushes that kept a small child safe.

My partner laughted at it once when we first moved in together; the death glare I gave quickly ended all future jokes on the matter.

You do not ridicule the honor of teddy bears.

They have fought the darkness for much longer than you.

Challenge

Write about a teddy bear. What is its significance?

RobinEgg

99 reads

Something to hold

Dad is dying,

Mum forgeting,

my sister and I go, to move them to a home,

we pack all their stuff, efficient, brusque

cardboard coffins stuffed with paper and memories,

black garbage bags dumped in the charity bin,

books donated cruelly, like orphans by

unfeeling aunts, who turn and leave, releaved to be rid of them

then my sister finds a Bear, an old beat up thing with ratty matted fur and a broken

button on one eye, and now she is no longer

my ally, she becomes like my parents, emotional

confused, very childlike, full of tears

the tattered bear has a name,

as silly as his felt pink tonguse

she pets him, hugs him

reminds him of days

that smelled of cut grass

that sang like a Red Robin

that laughed like a little girl

that kissed like a mother.

she can’t recall his name

but somehow Mum

who can no longer find the mailbox

knows his name is Freddy Bear

And then she finds my Eddy Bear

and we laugh in the kitchen

and I remember who my parents were

and hug who they are now tightly, regretfully

Challenge

Challenge of the Month XII

The Finale. You’re living on the streets and want it to end. Write about your last moments, why you’re over it, and how you’re about to go out. Fiction or non-fiction, poetry or Prose. $100 purse to our favorite entry. Outstanding entries will be shared with our publishing partners.

Legendari

146 reads

Submission to Flame

It's a hard living.

Living lower than human.

Begging for mercy

in streets covered with death.

Sick of the sickness.

Ill from the misery.

Exhausted being the vagabond.

Diseased with melancholy.

The oak stands tall.

I am an ant.

My torso is thinner

than its limbs.

Gathering myself

To the point of letting go.

Whispers of death

haunt my lips.

My knees give out

At the feet of the oak.

The spark ignites

and my spark goes out.

The tree cackles.

Crackles with flame.

Goes up in an inferno

of silent submission.

Done with this world.

Thinking of futures to come.

Longing for departure

to my final home.

Challenge

Challenge of the Month XII

CatLady1

628 reads

Lila

...

It’s funny, really.

How we stare from our balconies at the ants scurrying below. How we pass them on the streets—the wanting eyes, the starving mouths, the empty hands. Hair stiff as wire, clothing an amalgam of layered coats and scarves, mismatched socks, worn-out sandals.

We pass them, and we think.

That could never be me.

Look at here. Look at now. In this moment, I’m all set. We get so acclimated to small comforts that our minds can’t even meet them halfway down. We can’t see ourselves in their shoes. Our imaginations just aren’t that big.

I used to think like that. Before the divorce and the alimony, before the recession, before the unemployment and fire and the insurance company refusing to compensate because I didn’t insure every blade of grass in my yard or knick-knack in my study.

I downsized to a trailer. But welfare cut my benefits again five months ago, and just like that I was another ghost at the panhandle. It all happened so slow. It all happened so fast.

And time don’t wait. They say it moves quicker as you get older. All I know is, as a starry-eyed grad student, I never pictured it would end up like this. I never pictured myself as a middle-aged loner sleeping with the rats under blankets of corrugated tin. This isn’t the life I went three-hundred-grand in the hole to build.

But where did I go wrong?

One minute, everything was falling into place. The next it was falling to pieces, and as hard as I tried to preserve it, the decay was just too persistent. It spread too fast, and overtook my future.

Everything’s decayed now.

Even my memories are starting to rust.

There’s a lady out here I used to pass by on my way to work, every day. I used to avert my gaze, never locking with her hungry, pothole eyes. Her chessboard teeth. Her gnarled, swollen hands and yellowed, untrimmed nails. They would reach. And I would walk. And she would call. And I would walk. And she would say “God bless you” anyway. And smile.

And I would walk.

Silent. Distracted. Too consumed by dizzying fantasies of the trophy wife who left me. Our future children that we never had. A bigger house, twice the size of the meager three-bedroom apartment we shared. I always wanted bigger, I guess. Now I have nothing. Now I’d settle for what we wanted to leave behind in a heartbeat.

I met that lady again just the other day. Apparently she’d found a shelter uptown a few months back and they’d helped her get her life in order. She got on as a dishwasher at this little diner. She looked a lot cleaner. Not fancy, by far. But she looked...ever-so-slightly like I used to. It was a sobering reversal, watching her hands.

They reached. And I couldn’t walk anymore. And she called, and from my teary eyes I could make out that her hands were no longer empty. They didn’t ask; they offered.

At the end of the day, I never had the heart to take her money.

But I learned her name.

It was Lila. Lila McPherson.

She had a name.

They all did.

Oh, and one more little bit of information I left out. The last doctor visit I could afford didn’t go so good. Not that it mattered. At this point I’d give anything just to get out.

Another year at most I’ve got to rot in this place.

I could look for the shelter that rehabilitated Lila. But why? I’d be getting polished up just to die. Anything from hereon out is an exercise in futility.

So now all I can do is find my reflection in passing. Wait for a bus window or puddle or mirror. Find myself, and try to recognize. Find myself, and try to remember. Still, it seems every newest version of myself I find, he’s so far removed from the man I knew. And there’s no strength left to change him.

All I can do is remind him, reassure him.

He has a name too.

#fiction, #prose, #challenge, #homeless, #depression