Meg Sefton's Blog, page 61
October 5, 2019
build
Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters Candy House by AaronSimsCreative, deviantArt
Build your candy houses, dear hags, to draw hungry children Hallow’s Eve. Say your prayers, dear wee ones, you may be delivered come All Souls’. Board your houses dear parents, keep danger at bay. Tis the sugar will kill them, lured away by candy skulls, forest deep, sugar house.
October 4, 2019
freeze
snowflake 1 by Margus Kulden, flickr
It happened every afternoon now, after classes, in the school hallway, the Christmas snowflakes on bulletin boards becoming real, hovering, a freeze in the air. Kai slumped against the wall waiting for the stepmother who resented him. “Stay with us here,” a voice beckoned. “Go to sleep. We love you.”
October 3, 2019
ring
Ghost by Robin Corps
Imagine Alicia, novice mortician, fevered klepto, having extracted the ring from Mrs. Nováková’s corpse, waking in the dead of night to bony fingers round her throat, crushing her windpipe. The corpse exits the smashed window, abandoning sheets of skin on the glass.
Ring
Ghost by Robin Corps
Imagine Alicia, novice mortician, fevered klepto, having extracted the ring from Mrs. Nováková’s corpse, wakes in the dead of night to bony fingers round her throat, crushing her windpipe. The corpse exits the smashed window, abandoning sheets of skin on the glass.
mindless
Alexandru G Stavica, unsplash
The kind of flesh the ogress prefers are the wayward, the runaways, the unwanted. They cook up nice in their own fat while mothers, mindless of their absence, decorate for the holiday. Oregano and olive oil go nicely with neglect.
bait
Silver leather heels by Housing Works Thrift Shops, flickr
She was bait, a broken-down doll, scuffed Mary Janes, middle-aged, high. Faded beauty, she would do. “Hi,” his crooked smile, the night tilting in his favor. He had known her husband. Possession is 9/10ths. Perfect song playing. He thanked the bar.
October 1, 2019
Welcome to the Realm of the Comforters
girl, before 1823, public domain, flickr
Here is a little project I’ve been thinking about for a while. This is a rough introduction. I would like to post in installments but I am not used to that. Hopefully more will be on the way. I know roughly where I’m going. Other flash work may interrupt these posts at times but I would like to be fairly consistently posting to the project. If I don’t do that please forgive me, lol. My young Comforters are always in my thoughts. Cheers.
The night my father killed me, I saw stars. At first I thought the stars were just behind my eyelids when he cracked my skull with an axe.
But then I realized they were the stars of the night sky and I was flying, shrieking, in pain and agony and fear, my skirt flapping in the wind, my sweater hanging from me like wings, tearing past veils – dark, light, and soft – and I began to be aware of a curious collective presence as soft as my mother’s soft-worn dresses hanging in her wardrobe.
I realized I was floating in a dark night sky. I felt the pain ebbing away from me as it would when Mama would smooth my hair with her fingers.
And now, I was being carried by a feathery presence – or was there more than one? – lifting me, carrying me through mists and vapors, caressing my eyes and cheeks with soft sweet smelling tongues until the dried blood on my flesh softened and melted away.
I felt a little softer on the inside too and I was no longer shrieking or crying. But at the thought of my father with my mother, brother, and sister caused me to cry out as if whatever pain he was causing them he was causing to me too.
A face emerged from the darkness, a young face of a girl about my age, a girl whose eyes were filled with tributaries of blood so that her milky blue eyes looked like veined marbles of the most precious kind, the one we would have wanted to win.
“My name is Rachel,”she said, taking my hand, “We will see to your family.” I loved her immediately.
In the distance, the moon shone over the sea. We flew closer to the dark waves, which rose in huge swells.
“You will understand all of this in time,” Rachel shouted over the sound of the wind in our ears, the waves. “But first there is someone who needs us.”
She pointed to a tiny white cooler rising on the swells of huge waves. There was screeching, a baby’s cries. I could hear them, even over the storm.
“She has just died, Fannie.”
We swooped down together. We dove into the wave where the cooler was bobbing along the crest. When we emerged, Rachel grabbed it. As we hovered over the swells she had me hold the bottom while she retrieved the tiny wet frightened child.
“I thought you said she had died,” I said.
“Yes, but we are going to help her rest.” And she gave the child her pinky finger to suck and the child at last quieted and drifted off to sleep. “Welcome to the Realm of the Comforters.”
September 29, 2019
The Bony Lady
La Flaca by Patrick Landa, flickr
The night before All Hallows’ Eve, the heavy oak door creaked open while I sat in the hall of the church manse. It moved like an old grandfather, obscuring my face and body in darkness. The dark had a voice. It called to me, a preacher’s daughter, two months before the age of my confirmation. It said Brynn Violet, we have come for you.
Why was I drawn to the hall every night, wearing my white cotton gown, like a bride of Christ? The thick air of the Florida night laid heavy in my nose and mouth. The ocean kicked up breezes, billowing salt air into the curtains down the hall, illuminated by the moon. My back felt sweaty against the bead board.
The open door kept me waiting for hours and hours in its shadow. When it wanted me to leave, it slammed shut, waking my mother.
“Why don’t you sleep?” she would say, standing in the light from the room she shares with my father. She would stand over me in her curlers and robe. “Why do you sit in the hallway all night like a wild hyena?”
There was whispering only I can hear, women’s voices, reciting something over and over, like a prayer, though I couldn’t make out the words. A shadow of a long-nailed hand appeared to poke mother’s curlers. I wanted to laugh but I was scared so I slunk away to my room while her words stabbed my back: “I wish I had never adopted you.”
The spirits of the dead had come for me the night before All Hallows’ Eve though my father, a minister in the Purify Church movement, has banned celebrating the holiday from our island.
My adopted mother often reminded me my biological mother was a witch. The Church had tried to drown her beyond the reef of Marathon Key to test her. It had been a stormy, dark day and she disappeared into the waves. Word had it she was still alive, that the devil had saved her.
There were constant reminders of the practices of my female ancestors, ancestors as far back as my great, great, great grandmother, Maria Fuentes, who escaped the violence of the Mexican Revolution and immigrated to the United States with Grandfather Alberto.
Grandmother Maria, housekeeper of the wealthy Warren family on Key West, had survived the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. For the holiday, she and Grandfather Alberto were visiting relatives on Islamorada. When a category 5 hurricane hit, she was swept out into the bay. Later she was found exactly where she had started, clutching a small robed statue that wielded a grime reaper’s scythe, Santa Muerte, a demon’s object, my mother always reminded me.
“What she sacrificed for her devil worship was her husband’s life,” my mother always instructed, “Your great, great, great grandfather.”
Yes but she and her baby, the baby in her belly survived, I wanted to say, but didn’t.
By the time I was in high school The Purify Church Movement was purging all people of foreign descent, people who were brown skinned. Only my status as an adopted daughter of a white evangelical minister saved me.
In the hallway at night, Grandmother Maria sent word that I would be protected. In the darkness I was in her embrace. I let my nails grow long and sometimes stood to look at myself in the mirror, the silver tarnished from the salt air. I tapped on the glass. Grandmother Maria tapped back, smiling, hair dark and wild like mine though she wore a death mask.
On Halloween the year of my confirmation, there was a little dark rabbit in our yard, a swamp rabbit nibbling the saw grass.
“Shoo!” I said though I wanted to make the rabbit my friend. I had been tasked by my adopted mother with keeping rabbits away. I was thinking I could convince her I wasn’t a witch. I was thinking since rabbits are a witch’s familiar, I could show her I thought they were dirty, nuisance creatures and I wanted nothing to do them.
“I’ll be back,” he said as he darted away. But how could he be speaking? I wondered.
One day when I was cleaning the church after school, a woman wearing a wide brimmed hat and carrying a burlap bag found me in the kitchen. Her skin was the same color as mine which had become rare. She wore a long braid down her back. She appeared to wear the clothes of a gardener or farm worker. Likely she was indispensable to a rich and powerful person.
She took my hands in hers. “These things belonged to your Grandmother Maria. Put them in a secret place and pray to The Bony Lady, our dear Santa Muerte. She has brought me to you so have faith. And she loves our Jesus.” I realized she may be assuming I had adopted the faith of my parents and wanted to reassure me.
She gave me a quick hug. Her hair smelled like the outdoors. She left me in a shocked silence.
When I got home the house was empty. I hid in my closet with the burlap bag. What I found was a massive statue of a painted skeleton woman wearing a robe and carrying a long blade at the end of a staff. She stood on a huge mound of skulls.
I sat with my back against the opposite wall and studied her. Then I perused other contents in the bag. There was a little book of prayers and instructions, a bottle of liquid called Florida Water, and five candles, each a different color.
I cleaned The Bony Lady according to the instructions in the book. I lit a candle and spoke to her using one of the prayers. I thought of the woman’s words “She has brought me to you so have faith.” I felt a little frisson of power transfer to me as I looked into the stark skeletal mask of the Lady’s face. I also thought what the woman said about The Bony Lady loving Jesus. Somehow, I don’t think my parents would see it that way.
That night I dreamt I was in a mangrove swamp. The mud held me tight. I fought it but I was beginning to sink. The dark rabbit who had invaded our yard sprung past. He shouted at me to hurry up and follow. The earth loosened its grip and I trudged behind dropping heavy mud from my feet and gown.
We went deep inside the arcs of the mangrove roots. I became small so I was able to follow him. “Where are we going?” I said. The aerial roots overhead looked like arcs of a cathedral.
Without turning he said “You are to become my bride.” And I could hear his teeth smack against his lip.
His bride? I felt as if I cannot breathe but still I followed him until we reached a little home deep in the mangrove swamp. The floor of his home was covered with leaves. The walls and ceiling consisted of mangrove branches and mud.
I was to be married here? Where was my mother? My father? Who was to marry us?
I woke with a start, shivering and sweating. No one was awake. I checked on Santa Muerte in my closet. She was still there. No one had discovered her or taken her. I sat down cross legged and lit a candle.
“Dear Lady, what is happening to me?” It was All Saints Day. I do believe she had become my saint and intercessor.
She stared at me, stern and uncompromising, but not distant. Her stillness was like the compassionate copper Christ, a statue anchored in a reef off Key Largo, the Christ of the Abyss.
“Please help me,” I implored her.
The next day the swamp rabbit was in the yard again.
“Shoo! Shoo!” I said, lunging and stomping my foot so that it hopped to the edge of the yard.
A dark cloud passed over. It stood on its hind legs. “Come with me, ride on my tail. I will make you my bride and save you from death.” Then he scampered away into the hedge.
That night I dreamt the hare took me deep into the mangrove swamp again. I had become skilled at walking through them, I did not sink or get stuck.
“You are becoming a woman,” the rabbit said, stopping to admire my progress. “It won’t be long now before we will be married.”
As if on cue, a crow flew down, the sun gleaming off its feathers. In its beak was a huge strand of raffia.
“Hold out your hand now,” said the rabbit. “We will measure you for the handfasting. You will be bound to me for your wedding night.”
And the crow flew around my right hand, binding my wrist tightly. With the rest of the raffia he bound me to the rabbit’s leg.
“The crow is our parson. Now you are mine, Brynn Violent!” he said, hopping off into the mangroves. I followed my captor at the other end of the tether. My head was in peril as I tried to duck quickly under the aerial roots. I had been tricked!
I awakened in a sweat. I leapt into my closet. I lit a candle for The Bony Lady. “Thank you, thank you!” I said, “You saved me!”
The danger was real now, it was not a dream. A dark crow landed on my windowsill with a long strand of raffia in its beak.
In the prayer book beside The Lady a page was dedicated to All Souls Day or Dia de Muertos. I picked it up and read out loud: “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. Chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed, because God tried them and found them worthy of himself.”
Just then Mother burst into the room. She opened my closet to find me with my shrine. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “What in the world are you doing?”
It was decided by the Church I must be practicing witchcraft and would be tested in the waters off the reef of Key Largo. The test was severe: A chain around my ankle, tied to a huge stone. If I were truly a witch, I would escape. If I died before anyone could save me, it would probably be for the best. I practiced the folk religion of drug lords and prostitutes.
I sank to the bottom of the ocean, the heavy rock landing hard on the ocean floor and shaking the chain, yanking my ankle. I had never felt so alone, so scared. Though down on the ocean shelf, a few hundred feet from the abyss, it was beautiful and separate from the evil above.
In my heart, I began to pray something I had memorized: “Lady, My Most Holy Saint Death, I declare myself filled with love and devotion for you, and I surrender myself to you. I recognize myself as your subject and recognize you as my queen.”
The chain loosened from my foot and slipped away. I kicked as hard as I could, past the Christ of the Abyss, rising to the surface, where I was hidden from the boat by the waves. I swam a good distance, careful when I came up for air that I did not stick my head up too far above the surface.
And this is how I escaped both the rabbit and The Cleansing. I found passage to Cuba and then on to Mexico.
I became a bruja, or witch, and people sought me out for my power. For the Day of the Dead I always gave my Bony Lady flowers and gifts. I practiced white magic out of respect for the Christ of the Abyss. I prayed for the safe return of my biological mother. And I told my daughter of the stories of the magic arts of her grandmothers.
Ms. Myska’s Field of Dreams
before the struggle to exist, there is presence: liquid painting by scott richard; flickr – torbakhopper
Florida Fall Ball was Ms. Myska’s favorite Little League baseball season. Her son used to play in the neighborhood league. He had long since graduated and moved to another city and yet there she was, working the concession stand, having kept a key. Not only that, she tidied the field and toilet, picked up the trash, wiped down the metal bleachers. The city janitor assigned to the park had been shooed away by a smiling Ms. Myska and the young mothers were also summarily dismissed when they tried to insist that she should be sitting outside, enjoying the weather. She merely smiled and turned the oil on for the fries, made the coffee. For all they knew, she kept a cot in there, they said to themselves.
By the end of each season the players and their parents had always developed a strange fondness for the rodent-like woman who scurried from task to task, never speaking much, never making much eye contact. They would have been surprised to know she remembered their concession preferences, knew their faces and voices, knew whether they were confident, shy, slow, smart, funny, knew who their friends were, knew their family members, beloved and otherwise. At Halloween, she gave each of them a candy she knew to be their favorite.
Little did they know that each summer, when they were vacationing, she was scurrying to the store for the secret ingredients to her chili. Making the chili every year made fall her favorite season for baseball. Who could resist a good chili on a cool evening? No one, and certainly no one who had tasted her version, contained as it was in a tiny bag of corn chips, the corn chips serving in lieu of pasta, the small bag a portable meal, ready to eat with a spork.
Nor did they know of her harvest moon night when she turned cartwheels in the field and tilted her head back and sang her full-throated songs. Other mysterious women, bodies worn from giving life and sustaining it, joined her, dancing, singing, drinking wine, running the bases and laughing until they ran up into the night sky and they transformed into other beings entirely, birds and butterflies and delicate moths. At daybreak, they became human again.
The season after Ms. Myska died, a young mother found a chili recipe in the cash box. “Make it with love,” the instructions said, “and you will be blessed.”
September 17, 2019
Among the Broken
celophane paranoia by paulobarzman, flickr
My name is Dyta and my husband and I moved over here from Poland when we were newlyweds. I was excited to live in the States because I had these beliefs like so many young Polish people I knew at the time: That Americans were so kind and so friendly and that unbelievable things happened here, just like in the commercials. It took a while for my American husband to convince me my beliefs were naïve and ill-founded. Had he known me as a youth in Poland he would have seen too why it was so important for me to believe only positive things about people. I was one of those students who was teased and harassed by peers, females as much as males. I truly believed America was the chance to start over and a chance for others to see me in a new light.
I did find a sense of liberation when I audited a fiction writing class at the University of Central Florida soon after arriving and settling in. I found that the students were interested in me simply because I was Polish and now living here. Everything was interesting to them so that I could be the greatest dullard from Warsaw for all they knew but because I was an exotic dullard I had more value than I did at home. The novelty would wear off though I didn’t let myself think about that at first. I was enjoying my new writing class and using my imagination fully, as if someone, or the circumstances, had given me full permission and encouragement and I poured out all of myself for the first time.
I found a group of girlfriends from my class. We were happy people, the four of us, and hopeful and young. We all seemed to enjoy each other and be at the same level in this artistic hobby that was new to all four of us: crafting fiction. We went out frequently, talked on the phone, we compared our stories, nervous as we were to share them with the wider class. For years this went on between us and we grew in our writing as we married and had families.
As is true to life I am learning as I get older, cracks always show, don’t they. I became sick, so sick in fact I had a hard time concentrating on my work and keeping up with my friends who were getting into journals and being accepted to graduate school. I had breast cancer, stage three. My husband was so supportive of me at that time, and bless him, was being patient throughout so we may begin a family when the treatment had finished. I felt like I was falling more and more behind in my life, was losing more of his interest as my looks fell apart and I became more of a patient.
My friends, busy with their lives and I assumed trying not to be sad, avoided seeing me or talking to me. I felt I had hit upon something dark in this country. People were friendly and bright when everything was going well. But people ignored what they didn’t want to know or see and this included sick people, even their friends who are sick. I began to feel a certain way about my new friends that started my deep rift with them. It made me yearn for some of the old ways of my people. We were used to sadness, took it in stride, even to the death, mourning beforehand what we were afraid of.
I realized too I was just as guilty of shallowness. I had loved my new friendships for that wave of a bubble of good feeling they gave me, not for anything deeper or more meaningful. It had suited me. But now with no hair, no abilities, little humor, things were quite different.
It was unfortunate that after my recovery, I divorced from my husband. Too many things had happened, or not happened, between us, and we didn’t survive the illness and the aftermath. He just seemed to lose interest.
A few months later as I was growing my hair back and beginning the transition to life, one of the members of the writing group, Evie, called to inquire about the beach house I had shared with my ex’s family. She left a message on my phone: Do I still own a share in the house? If so, could we go there as a group sometime? Maybe we could all do some writing and sharing our work?
I’ll have to admit I was a little irritated. Evie had not inquired about how I was feeling. She had not made any attempt to see me while I was undergoing treatment. But I was also still in the mode where some of my feelings were discounted by my sense that I must still be learning about this culture. Furthermore, my leniency had really entered in with chemo brain. It was hard to separate out reality still, to make sound judgments, and so I tried to withhold judgements as much as possible, while at the same time experiencing frustration. And Evie was married and had her first baby. She was perfectly healthy and publishing, had been accepted into a prestigious MFA. It took a few more months before I was able to return her call.
When we got together again for the first time since I started treatment, I thought I could sense both the condescension and the competition. Was I writing again or was I up to it? Self publishing certainly was for the declasse wasn’t it? And who didn’t know about the hierarchy of journals? To sell yourself short to the bottom rungs was to doom your career to the eternal stagnation of the unknown. Do I have a platform? I definitely need a platform or I would never be taken seriously.
Tacia caught me in the bathroom where I was refreshing my lipstick. She was drunk, something that never changed. “You sure are a HANDSOME woman, aren’t you?” And she laughed, leaning into me, observing her smile in the mirror, she was usually pretty taken with herself. She was not giving me a compliment. It occurred to me I had been magically transported back to my school in Warsaw again. I had far less hair, though. It was now just a very short mannish length. And I had more wrinkles, more flesh.
At the table, I drank my wine, as much as I could and still manage to make it home.
I determined I would give Evie the key but would not go. I envisioned myself alone at home with the cat feeling more peace knowing the group was out of town plotting literary maneuvers while I wrote modest pieces and prayed for inclusion somewhere. Besides I had come to enjoy my afternoons working shelving books at the bookstore. Once I had allowed to let them use the house, I would never feel obligated to again. I don’t even know why I felt obligated in the first place but for some reason I did, maybe because early on, when we were all seemingly close friends I had foolishly said something to them about sharing a time away together at the beach.
In Slavic mythology, places beside water are not always safe. There are female spirits there who are sometimes mermaids or sirens who lure men to their deaths. They are the souls of those who have either had evil committed against them and so they bring about more evil and tragedy or they have committed suicide and live on as the undead, in misery.
I am not saying I would wish anyone evil. But I do know myself well enough now to know I think I know better what lurks inside the hearts of men and women. I am not as naïve as I once was. And I’m not as naïve about myself as I once was. I know of what I am capable. But also as well I respect my level of tolerance.
I am not saying Boginki or Rusalki exist anywhere, but who is to say they do not. Having known about them from childhood and reflecting on my disappointed feelings as an adult, I have more sympathy for those mythological beings who act out of passion, out of rage.
I stay away from people who do not know me or wish to know me, who do not wish to walk with me in my darkest moments. They do not wish to know me in my darkness. Trust me, they do not. I yearn for my old mother Poland some nights. I think of how foolish I once was. I wonder if I should have married and allowed my husband to take me away from all the things I had ever known. But Mother Poland and my family are with me always in both my brightest and my darkest heart. America is a pale imitation of a culture, of a medium for life, though she is mine now in all my loneliness. She is my ugly stepchild. But still, she is mine, and I hold her dear.
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