Meg Sefton's Blog, page 5

Red

Florida Memory, Talbot Island,1997, flickr

There is a glass coffin on the beach. In it lies a fair woman with lips red as blood. They say this is judgement ahead of the winds. We feed it to the ocean on a raft of flowers. Yet the sky congregates against us, dark as iron, a fist.

Lizzie and The Artifice Girl: Letterboxd

Public domain photo, flickr

Have you watched the movie “Lizzie” (2018) starring Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart? I watched it yesterday and wrote a short film review on Letterboxd. I have been logging in films here and there on the site though I don’t often write much. I just give a sense of their impressions, about a sentence or two. I wrote a bit more about “Lizzie.” Another film I watched recently is The Artifice Girl.

Bluebeard’s Kingdom

Bonnie Moreland, flickr

I must away from him under cover of the wood, away from his towering presence and greedy eyes, away from what I have undertaken to see and point out. My sisters call to me from the plains and their cries are plaintive, knowing, wise. I must away from him before he beats me for taking the bleeding key, the blood of women slain behind his door. “You are forbidden,” he has said. He has slammed other doors as well: “Never say this. “Never do that.” “Do not wear…” “Do not ask me….” “Do not make…” “You are worthless in your passions.”

Shreds of me are falling off among the fields, my feet are fleet, my heart beats fast within my breast. I will run before I am taken.

On the path I meet a woman before a shack. She says, “Come in my child for the wood after dark is no place for a flesh and bone woman.” She took me into her stick abode saying women sometimes build their own houses with all the strength they have to lift and tie, but there were some who knew what rocks to place before the doorways, the open places. A ring of stones surrounded her bleached cottage which was pitiful looking against the wind. “No spirit will enter,” she said and dipped a ladle into a pot of soup swaying over a fire. She poured the broth into a hollow gourd and placed it into my hands.

The liquid made my tongue dance in my mouth, and I said: “I have not spoken for a long time. I have been mute.”

She went out while I supped and returned carrying a dripping burlap sack. From the sack, she scooped up a clod of wet earth and plastered it across my forehead. Trails of mud dripped down my cheeks. “You have been stone. I will make you clay.” She stoked the fire and ordered me to strip.

She brought in more mud to cover my head, my neck, my chest, my arms, my hands, my abdomen, my hips, my pelvis, my rear, my legs, my feet. She then cleansed me with water from a wooden bucket. She breathed into my nose and and covered me with branches. When I was dry and dressed, she took me out beside the largest stone before her doorway, where we were guarded, and lifted her craggy hand to the sky. “I will make it as if you have not been ruled by the hours. I return to you the time.” And the sky became as if full of diamonds and I remembered my mother sending me out to my groomsman—my mother hopeful yet worried— and my sisters, crying. “Your kin await in the dull place,” she said, knowing my thoughts. “Because I have unstopped your mouth, you will have the courage to speak to them about this thing that has passed and the grief in your heart and body, grief that will rule over you no more.”

She gave me a new cloak. How she could afford it I was not sure. She seemed to be literally made of earth. It was gilded and long and fur lined. She spit in my mouth, and it was like honey. She covered my face with golden powder of ground rocks and my beauty was returned to me as if I had never been aged by rapacious furry and tears. She encased my head in her hands and I remembered soft things like petals and dreams and my mother’s cool arm.

I left her as day dawned, wearing an amulet of fire against my breast, a dagger tucked beneath my cloak to ward off those who would seek to harm me, to have me believe I am nothing but flesh to be consumed as if there was no other purpose but for another’s passing whim. I had been remade. I was no longer who I was; I was some former version though not completely. I knew now how to fight and whom I must fight. “Your mother and sisters have never known these things,” said the woman, “you must teach them,” she said, dipping the dagger in poison. “You must protect your dreams and they theirs. There is no one else to act anymore on a woman’s behalf. It is coming, a dark epoch, evil will prevail except in places it is not allowed breath.”

Beyond the plains lie the mountains where my mother and sisters live in the castle of my good father, but he grows old and weak and feeble-minded. Our task lies immense before us not the least of which defeating the spirits which rise up from the plain and take residence in the heart—they have nowhere to go and no special aim. They take up residence in the feeble and those improperly girded—the empty and aimless. They nip at me as the roiling sky bites at my back, the gold of my cape deflecting the penetrating darkness.

Bobby pins

Library of Virginia, Thalhimers, shoes, 1957

The Easter Bunny brought Gretel a macrame purse. Inside was a tiny baby Jesus she touched with her fingers, soothing him so he won’t cry during the Easter service. She was all dressed up with her white straw hat decorated with yellow flowers but took it off during the prayer because it was hot. Her dress was heavy and stiff, and the lace of her socks tickled her ankles.

When she got home from church, she stood in her room with her mother, the sun streaming through the high window, the yellow canopy of her bed casting a golden glow around her room. She would be there alone, reading her a Jenny Linksky the cat book, if her mother were not there wearing her angry face, if her mother were not there gripping her clear plastic hairbrush. Her mother said it was wrong of her to take her hat off in church. Her mother said she looked awful and ugly. Her mother said she had not acted like a lady.

Gretel thought of tiny Jesus still in her purse as her mother spanked her backside with the hard plastic. She would feed him from a tiny bottle because she didn’t want him to be hungry and cry. She whispered hard in her thoughts as the brush stung her legs: “It’s ok, Jesus. I will take care of you.” Grown-up Jesus who hung from the Easter cross would have been upset about her bobby pins. She was glad Jesus was still little.

Jiaoren

Granny used to read to me about the amoret of sailers—the Jiaoren, mermaids with black skin and yellow hair, webbed feet and hands, wings, human eyes that cried pearls. They were famous for their art and weaving. If you were given a charm crafted by a Jiaoren, a sign of their trust, you were enabled to breathe underwater, permitting you to visit them. One day, a Jiaoren befriended a family and went home to stay with them. When she had to part, the pearls she cried were her gift.

#promptodon prompt-based writing on Mastodon, the writing exchange instance

Rebellion

There was a brief period of freedom in the land of New Day Dawning when the earth, as if rebelling against the folly of the oppressive regime, ejected the rulers’ headquarters from their moorings and sent them on a gambol out to sea, accompanied by gulls like so many mascots in a parade.

#promptodon prompt-based writing on Mastodon, the writing exchange instance

Love in the Time of Covid

Victorian mourning brooch by Marta Tycinska, Flickr

Ms. Myska had chanced upon a new way to find connection and fellow feeling during the worldwide pandemic. She discovered this by means of an ad in Clock World.

She had inherited an old grandmother clock which was a comfort to her during the partial lockdown, the kindly and gentle chimes reminding her of the quarter hour. It was a grandmother clock which meant its stature was more diminutive than a grandfather and therefore less intrusive in her garden apartment. It merely watched her from beside its place near the fireplace. It did not tower, it did not dominate.

She liked reading about caring for clocks in Clock World. She liked reading about the art and history of clockmaking.

The ad read:

Stay in touch with a set of hands. Do not go it alone. We are all humans here trying to survive this. But sometimes we need help with tools that act as extensions of ourselves. You will feel newly connected without exposing yourself to danger.

In the ad, there were pictures of sets of long skinny artificial arms as well as a long bag for toting the arms on one’s back like a quiver of arrows. Some arms stretched longer than an average human arm would go. They were articulated and seemed to function with mechanical levers. Some were shorter – an average full-length arm, a half an arm from the elbow down, and simply a hand from the wrist down.

If you were an expressive person and liked to show your style you could have yours especially painted or tattooed. Or you could have it monogrammed. Or you could purchase a set of temporary tattoos or henna designs.

Apparently, the novelty clockmaker who had placed the ad had run on hard times with the lack of demand for his special and heretofore expensive creations. There was a picture of him in his workshop at his bench, his workshop teaming with clock faces empty wheels of various sizes like spokes on a wagon, and tools of all descriptions. He seemed kind and was smiling through a beard and mustache, a pair of tiny glasses perched on his nose.

“How charming,” said Ms. Myska out loud to the grandmother clock. At that moment, both the grandmother and cuckoo sounded the quarter hour. The cuckoo had been a fairly recent acquisition from a man who had proposed marriage yet to no avail. The presence of the cuckoo reminded her of a silly child. The grandmother minded the cuckoo all day and this made her feel less alone.

“I will try this,” said Ms. Myska and counted out just enough money to place in an envelope. She ordered an entire set though she eschewed the personalization option. Her dog woke from her sleep on the couch and stared as Ms. Myska was talking. “I may try the temporary decoration later,” she said, jauntily, as if she were naturally a person who would wear tattoos or henna in her pre-pandemic life. The animal put her head back on the couch, comforted in sensing her owner’s outer range of change and disruption. Also, it wasn’t time yet for her food.

When the arms arrived only days later, she unwrapped them with care. They were wooden and carved whimsically like arms ending in Victorian hands.

“This is amazing,” laughed Ms. Myska, patting her dog with the wooden hand. The dog gazed at her, holding her station on the couch, abstaining from the temptation to jump down and find a spot where she could continue napping unbothered. Yet she emitted little miffed snorts as she often did when indulging her owner.

Ms. Myska placed the hand back in the quiver. In the outside pocket of the quiver was a small satchel to help the owner convey and receive objects. One loaded the satchel and cinched the drawstring around the wrist, thus securing it in place.

She then heard the ice cream truck. The tinkling melody of “It’s a Small World” drifted through the apartment complex as children yelled and scrambled onto sidewalks.

Buoyed, she pulled on her walking shoes and face mask, pocketed her money, and leashed her dog who was all too happy for a change of scenery.

She had never bought from the ice cream truck and especially not now when she would not allow herself to come close to others or risk touching another hand in the exchange of money for a cold confection. She would use her longest arm. She would test it out. Normally, she would have been too self-conscious, but somehow the need for being in public overrode her fear of social risk.

At the truck, she retrieved her longest arm from the quiver, placed her money inside the satchel, and attached the satchel to the dainty wooden risk. She extended the wooden arm out over the heads of the children. On a note inside she had written “Orange Creamsicle please” (her favorite). The unmasked children began laughing at this production of a wooden arm hovering over them but somehow she didn’t care. It would be nice to sit at the picnic table with her new quiver and dog and pre-empt the daily summer showers with a frozen treat. From the picnic table you could see the pond and the fountain and beyond that, the pool, also full of unmasked children and their parents.

When the ice cream man saw the hand, he took the satchel, as if the situation explained itself. Once he took the money and filled the satchel with the ice cream treat, he shook the hand. Once more the children burst out with glee.

When she was sitting on the bench, she noticed he had included a small note to her: “If you would like to speak from a distance tomorrow, meet me here at the same time.”

The next day, Ms. Myska felt brave enough to include her own note: “My name is Katarina Myska.”

Their note exchange continued all summer and into the fall. Once cooler weather set in and the world was coming closer to a vaccine, Ms. Myska retired her arm set. The desire to shorten the distance to ice cream man Tony Lasko overtook her natural reticence and fear of life-threatening illness.

He was sweet, and quiet, like Ms. Myska. And he seemed not to mind her.

Gustavus Adolphus

My aunt, an ailurophile, kept picture books of cats dressed as people. My favorite, about a cat commander named Gustavus Adolphus, introduced me to a dream world where cats fought for control of the realm and became kings. I pretended to be Gustavus and strutted around in a costume my aunt had made for me. I lived in that liminal childhood space of genderless grandiosity and pretension. I was free at my aunt’s house. She gave me fresh cookies just as she did my more feminine sister.

#promptodon prompt-based writing on Mastodon, the writing exchange instance

Mother

Dear Mother,

On your birthday, I see your amaranthine beauty in the golden sunset as we stand at the mouth of the cave, watching night approach. It is because of your teaching that I am strong. And Bolin, who is much recovered, tells me how you were mother to him during the campaign to purge our country of superstitious beliefs, that it was you who told him of the vision of a remnant who would bring fresh hope. We camp in the gracious shelter your spirit has provided.

Meimei

#Promptodon prompt-based writing on Mastodon, the writing exchange instance

Feng shui forest

Loquacious spirits woke us in the night we slept in the Feng shui Forest, burned when the New Day Dawning government suspected its link to the Olds and their feudal superstition. (We had counted on the forest to offer cover.) The rider who made his way under the moon, through the mists, appeared as a manifestation of our melancholia. He wore the weight of so much tree death. Though a bird appeared on a charred branch to cheer him, it did not reveal our campsite.

#Promptodon prompt-based writing on Mastodon, the writing exchange instance