Meg Sefton's Blog, page 2

Breakthrough Queen

View of Chipola River from porch, Florida Memory, circa 1885, flickr

I am very happy that a personal essay of mine, originally published in Cowboy Jamboree‘s Townes Van Zandt issue “Travelin’ Thru Townes,” was published today in The Journal of Radical Wonder on Medium. It is a brief exploration of what it means to be a creative person living with bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation. I am thrilled it found a second home in this beautiful journal. This link is for friends–no paywall.

#WritingCommunity https://medium.com/the-journal-of-radi

Dark Easter

Florida Memory: A young girl poses with the “Easter Bunny,” circa 1953, flickr

I have a dark offering for those of us who feel the rose is off the #Easter bloom, especially since the inception of the pandemic a few years ago. A brief summary: four 50-word #horror stories set in a pandemic age in which children experience uncertainty, loneliness, and fear, in which darkness and anxiety are magnified. I am providing a #Medium friend link, no paywall. If you like it, please follow me here, on Mastodon, or on Medium. I return follow. Reblogs/boosts are always appreciated.
https://medium.com/morning-musings-mag

Hefeweizen Jesus

El Hefe by Morgan Burke, flickr

In a darkened arthouse cinema pub on a Saturday night, the women watch a documentary film called Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, about a beautiful, famous man who tragically dies. The women sitting at two adjacent tables close to the exit are known to each other, but they prefer the anonymity of the darkness and use it as an excuse to ignore the women who are not seated at their table. At one table, there are two sisters who are close and frequent the cinema. At the table adjacent is a table of women variously known to them from previous interactions at houses of worship, at children’s school functions, at events in the community. All of them relish the cover of the darkness and a self-deluding belief that they are in fact invisible to these others who know them. For once, they want to experience being someplace else that is not their large yet also small town. They want to escape.

All of the women have believed or have told themselves they have “known Jesus” in some form though the authenticity of their “knowledge” could be up for debate. All are in some stage of divorce. When the elder sister at the table of two sisters was going through divorce, her younger more religious sister became angry and judgmental, and yet when the younger sister started divorcing, they began to more fully reconcile, having bonded through a similar experience. A woman sitting at the table behind them had lectured the elder sister about how to stay married, yet years later, this woman is divorcing as well.

Together, and yet separate, they watch the clips of film of the famous man, a story of his rise in popularity, his wild boy nature which reminds them of their sons as well as men they thought they loved. They cry in their separate spaces; they eat gourmet flatbreads and drink wine. At some point or another, each has judged another in their number. At some point or another, under the guise of faith, each has been rejecting.

Jesus sits in the back. He watches the beautiful man on film. He cries for the man who would kill himself. He knew it would happen all along of course, but he wishes people would stop asking questions about his omniscience and omnipotence: If Jesus knew the man was headed for disaster, why didn’t he stop this man from hanging himself? He knows if the women had known the fate of their lives and the outcomes for wild and beautiful men, they wouldn’t have sung when they were young children in choir about His beautiful being:

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, Thy great name we praise.

Jesus cries in the back of the theater because he really doesn’t know why the man killed himself. Jesus cries in the back of the theater because clearly, the man made a fool of himself with his last very young girlfriend and that crushed him because, by then, the man was old and lonely. Jesus cries as the women cry, out of catharsis, out of something personal, because of something lost: the man’s lost beauty, the women’s lost beauty, a loss of desirability.

There are no old hymns anymore, thought Jesus, And not as many people believe in Him, or not in the old way.

Jesus orders a Hefeweizen.

Jesus knows his own fate as surely as the women know theirs. The women beg lawyers to help them find a way to survive, attempting to stave off the inevitable. Jesus sees his fate clearly as the man saw his: The man, who in imitation of Kurtz entering the Congo, films a dramatic, if not actual, descent into insanity. Jesus knows fewer would turn to him, even in homelessness and plague. He knows of the coming dark.

He orders the spinach artichoke dip, a pear gorgonzola flatbread, and another Hefeweizen.

Corporeality isn’t everything, but sometimes it takes the edge off.

After Amelia

Unsplash photo by Jeb Johnson

At Medium’s Pub Crawl this week, I met a wonderful editor and decided to submit a flash fiction piece about Amelia Earhart and her husband George Putnam. I’m glad to have found a way to revive my involvement with the platform and I’m really excited to have found the publication Morning Musings Magazine. I hope for more such opportunities. This historical fiction is just in time for #WomensHistoryMonth. I’m providing you with the friends link which means there is no paywall. However, I just enrolled in their partners program and I’m not sure how that will affect this link. Please let me know if you are unable to read this story. Thank you. Most sincerely—Margaret

Touching Like Candy from a Baby

Florida Memory, flickr

I did something this week I never imagined myself doing. I touched a man I didn’t know. It happened in the theater, and I shouldn’t have allowed myself to do it. But I haven’t touched a man in four years. Maybe it was like going to the grocery store hungry.

He was a big man, not totally my type, and he seemed intensely clued in on his food. But he was the only man in the whole dark room. Don’t get me wrong, I like them tall and beefy, but he was a bit extra horizontally. Still, he seemed kind of innocent, unfazed, just out for a flick.

I got brave when we started laughing at the same things, the same stupid ads and previews. I tried to laugh as loud as he laughed, louder, so he might turn to see me. He didn’t. He was engrossed in his system of consumption. He had a huge popcorn to his left, a box of candy in his lap, and a tub of soda to his right.

When the dark, atmospheric film began and the actors in period costumes started wandering fields with torches, I moved a seat closer to him. (We were seated on the same row, at opposite ends.) He never looked up, never registered any sign of his surroundings.

By the time the slimy, hungry monster on the screen was moving in on the human kill, I was sitting midway in the theater. Only a few more chairs to go. I marveled that the man kept eating with no breaks.

I waited until dark scenes engulfed the theatre to move closer to him. The only lights showing were the exit signs and track lights on the stairs.

When we were sitting elbow to elbow, he looked over at me and smiled. I took this as ascent and so I took his popcorn and fed it into his mouth while we watched the show together.

I felt his soft lips slobber on my fingers. I felt his tongue.

That was all I wanted.

When the credits rolled, he took his empty food boxes. He didn’t thank me or ask me my name. He didn’t acknowledge me. It was as if I were part of the theater, like the workers who tore tickets and swept up popcorn.

I wondered if I saw him again in the theater whether we might hug. I wondered if he would allow that.

As I stepped out into the sun, I assessed my choices. Maybe I had been too hasty in breaking up with my Greek, my steady from before the pandemic. My Greek had started neglecting me. Maybe I should have allowed it. But how much can a woman take? Besides, men don’t know what they need, what they want, what’s good for them. We ladies have to show them, and risk not getting so much as a thank you and kindness for our service.

I saw my new man drive away. I waved to him from the curb, but he must not have seen me because he didn’t wave back.

“We’ll take it a step at a time,” I said softly to his car as it cut through the deserted parking lot. “You’ll see.”

View at Medium.com

Florida

Florida Memory: Child Petting a Cat, 1880, flickr

On Halloween, Granny makes celery casserole while we play in the woods, the old Oviedo celery fields. We play with the ghost children as the cheese melts and the milk softens the stalks. Under the moon, Papa fiddles while Granny dances on a door to make the ghost children happy.

Drifty

Pawel Nolbert, unsplash

Lanie felt drifty, like a gossamer web blowing with every breeze until one day she detached and flew free, floating over the highway, over the city, over her childhood home, out to the sea at sunset. She would stay here a while, she thought. There was a lot of sea.

Tia Liddie

Miami University Libraries, public domain, flickr

I miss Tia Liddie. She would make us croquembouche, layering cream puffs to form a tower almost as tall as our tabletop Christmas tree, yet it was covered with its own tinsel—gossamer strands of golden spun sugar, with nuts and fruit and tiny toys stuck in the crevices.

Interloper

unsplash photo by Jacek Dylag

Oh Lord, here she comes said Mike to his fellow seminarian about the female student interloper whose long gossamer skirts and scarves overflowed her desk, much like her opinions, emotions, questions, perfume, and lipstick broken free of its lining—some of it spilled down upon her teeth.

Gossamer

public domain photo: Evangeline Oak, Bayou Teche, Louisiana, flickr

My mind insists on a memory, tenuous and gossamer, of my sister and brother and I playing communion on the Louisiana bayou behind Granny’s house, the body the mud, the water full of silt, our congregation an invisible throng of the hopeful and needy, the broken and vulnerable.