scribblings

may 27

the writing

Gran showed me the jar of beasties when I was too small to reach the shelf she stored it on, but big enough to understand.
“If’n you’re ever needin’ some home-brewed judgement, Sissy, you take this jar n’you smash it open where it needs smashin’—and then you run like hell, girl.”
Maybe twenty years went by. Gran would remind me, time to time, before her time was up. Where the jar was. How to use it. Calling what was in the jar her beasties, her nasties, her lovely little devils—once, when she was very drunk, she even called them angels, fallen ones, that some ancestor of hers had captured up for some vengeance long forgotten. 
I had, by turns, believed her absolutely, and thought her a crackpot old woman. Mostly now, I just missed her, and kept the jar out of a sense of nostalgia. Or so I told myself—for maybe twenty years.
And now, on the morning after the Priestly wedding—I’m running.

~

snapshot, overexposed 
blurred shirt, hand reaching— 
red smudge of her smile

~

There was a figure, hovering high above the crevasse, clad in black & holding an orb swirling with flames. They did not move or speak, merely watched the sky for three days. 
Ilya woke up early on the fourth morning, to a knock on the door…the figure in black politely asked for breakfast.

the reading

Poem: “Waking in Deep Night to the Great Bear” by Susan Deer Cloud

“[…] That summer Midnight Sun Woman 
speaking soft as candlelight to full moons 
awaiting winter in a black wolf’s eyes, 
to bears and many ravens also black, 
to bull moose grazing by a valley lake 
in the Brooks Range. That summer 
the heart you had lost returned the way 
fireweed burst forth where wildfires left 
gray ghost spruces and charred forest floor. […]”

Short Story: “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong (from The New Voices of Fantasy)

“ ‘I’m not in your head, love. Your thoughts are spilling out everywhere around you, for everyone to see.’ She leans in, propping her chin on her hand. The thought twisted around her head like a living crown let out a dry, rattling laugh. ‘I like you, Jenny. You’re ambitious. A little careless, but we can fix that.’ Seo-yun taps on the table, and the waiter reappears, folding up the tablecloth deftly and sliding a single dish onto the now-bare table. An array of thin, translucent slices fan out across the plate, pale and glistening with malice. Bisected eyes glint, mouths caught mid-snarl, from every piece. ‘All it takes is a little practice and discipline, and now one will know what you’re thinking.’ ”