Meg Sefton's Blog, page 70

Demonic Household!

I am appearing in this publication by Battle Goddess this August. Dark humor stories featuring items found in your household! The stories progress from light and soft to dark and gory. Let’s just say, my story falls somewhere near the end of this spectrum! I am happy to appear with friends here, an anthology edited by the highly creative Valerie Willis. Don’t forget to pre-order now to take advantage of the special pricing. Time is closing in. Projected paperback release date: August 10.

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There is a short term pricing offer for pre-orders if you are a Kindle user for $2.99.

The Peculiar World of Mrs. Pompidou

 

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What is going on with Mrs. Pompidou’s hair? From the first sentence you will learn: Something very unusual! But Mrs. Pompidou’s new life as a widow is showing in the foundering infrasctucture of her locks. How will she finally leave the past behind and break out into her future? A bizarre little tale of wild proportions.

Happy Friday. I invite you on a brief dizzying journey that will take about five minutes of your time: It can be found here.

Also another story I recently posted won the short short fiction award. It is longer than the tale of Mrs. Pompidou but maybe you’ll have more time to enjoy it this weekend. It can be found here.

And isn’t it a wonderful thing that it’s Friday!

 

The Peculiar Life of Mrs. Pompidou

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What is going on with Mrs. Pompidou’s hair? From the first sentence you will learn: Something very unusual! But Mrs. Pompidou’s new life as a widow is showing in the foundering infrasctucture of her locks. How will she finally leave the past behind and break out into her future? A bizarre little tale of wild proportions.

Happy Friday. I invite you on a brief dizzying journey that will take about five minutes of your time: It can be found here.

Also another story I recently posted won the short short fiction award. It is longer than the tale of Mrs. Pompidou but maybe you’ll have more time to enjoy it this weekend. It can be found here.

And isn’t it a wonderful thing that it’s Friday!

 

clear vision

 

Read this here.

Meimei is a Chinese immigrant who fled to the United States with her grandmother after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. When she begins working for her adopted parents, the Wongs, they discover she is a clairvoyant. She learns disturbing things, enlightening things, puzzling things. It is not long before she divines the future of the Wongs: another upheaval for this family. But this time, the upheaval takes place in their new country, America.

Cannibal Witch: A Florida Fairytale

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For fairytale go here.

A Review of Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River

BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog

By Emilio Carrero

On a soccer field I met my childhood best friend. Our elementary school was mostly white, and we were the only Spanish kids standing on the field that day. We were the last two picked.

As a kid I never realized this fact: the two of us were oddities, a brown Puerto Rican and a white Mexican roaming the hallways. We were familiar to each—the both of us quiet, hardworking, and stumbling to navigate between our Spanish cultures and American culture. But we were also different. I was better than Pepe at soccer and I spoke better English. I knew this, as a kid, because the white kids were nicer to me. They eventually picked me regularly to be on their team.

I remember resenting Pepe for not speaking better English, for embarrassing me around the other kids to the point that I distanced myself from him…

View original post 764 more words

Realm of the Comforters

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Harli Marten, unsplash

One project I am pursuing this summer is a longer work for older teen readers and young adults: Undead teens who have been abused by parents and caretakers help slain children, also dead at the hands of caretakers. These children are lost, scared, and bereft during their first night of the afterlife. The teens of The Realm, teens who have experienced injustice unto death, bring hope to the broken, comfort to the inconsolable, and a new world order to the living and the dead.

I could use your help and support this summer.  I have posted chapter one and I invite you to follow the link and read. Some of you may recognize it as a story I published in Asylum Ink under “The Baby Justice League of the Undead.” I have written more chapters to follow, however, which I will post as time goes on. If you could encourage me with a read, a like, or even a comment, I would appreciate it. You can also download the wattpad app for easier reading. I hope to update with one chapter a week.

I would like to warn you the story is not for everyone. Certainly it is for a mature audience only. The subject matter may bother some and I understand. If you are sensitive to subjects of abuse and trauma, this may not be the story for you. If you would like to check it out however, here is the link: Realm of the Comforters

Grey Gardens Society of Central Florida

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symmetry angelic by Zack Gingg, flickr

part 1

Sissy Day stood at the microphone under the arbor of Dot Backson’s home on Rosemary Beach. The sprawling Key West style two story had been selected by the Florida Grey Gardens Society of Women for its first annual conference “In Defense of Freedom: An Examination of the Lives of Big and Little Edie Bouvier Beale.” On this late Friday afternoon in September, she was waiting for the conference attendees to settle, to get their drinks and snacks and find a chair. Sissy was opening the conferences bedecked in a white floppy sunhat, the style worn by Big Edie when she sits on her bed in the disintegrating home in East Hampton and sings “Tea for two” in the documentary film Grey Gardens. She also wore the 1940s style swimsuit Big and Little Edie both wore when they sunbathed on their porch. And she wore a kaftan tied around her waist in homage to Little Edie’s fashion flair and the Grey Gardens’ fashion principal that clothes designed for an intended purpose are not functionally confined to the original purpose.

Mimi Carroll looked on approvingly at the costume. She had also chosen to start the conference wearing something very much of the sensibility of Little Edie, especially, and found it a relief since losing her hair with cancer treatment, she could don a teal linen swath of fabric on her head, the tail of it going down her back like a ponytail with a matching strand of yarn tied at the nape of her neck. She had been told by the others upon their arrival that it set off her brown eyes. A long articulated gold earring pierced through the fabric just over her right ear moved in flowing, serpentine motion and flashing in the light of the setting sun. She wore the big round glasses Little Eddie wore when she sunbathed.

Jules Carpenter, Mimi Carroll’s assistant, was a little less impressed with the women adorned like street people when they were so much wealthier than she was. “White people,” she thought, as she took note of shirts worn as skirts and pinned with costume jewelry pins, white block heels with bathing suits, head costumes that could have passed as religious head coverings and yet there was no religious reason for them and except for Mimi, they were not a cover for baldness. She was given to understand that all of these fashion quirks and more on display before her were a part of the sensibility of Jackie Onassis’ aunt and cousin who became destitute after Phelan Beale, husband of Big Edie, father of Little Edie, abandoned the house and the women. Even the film subject seemed very white: How a mother and daughter became poor and destitute and crazy. It was a little more than that, though. This pair had rich relatives. So maybe it was a commentary on how these two could have stooped to this level when their family was so rich and famous. It was hard to figure. Yet the women at the conference seemed to embrace the poor, crazy pair. Jules was going to try to sneak out to pick up her whiskey at a liquor store she spied in town. Note to self, she said to herself.

The only person the first speaker Sissy Day knew from her small home town was Grace Alan. The meeting had been arranged through social media and most of the ladies in attendance were from Orlando. “Whore,” thought Grace Alan of Sissy, watching her tap the mic under the arbor of sea grapes, trying to get everyone’s attention. She hated her guts. Sissy had slept with her best friend’s husband. Nothing had come of it, but Grace’s friend had cried when she found hints of the affair and Sissy’s late night texts. But Grace loved Grey Gardens too, and she had once loved Sissy as a best friend can love. And she had been in Sissy’s Bible study, but certainly that was over. People found out. But probably most people here didn’t know about her, guessed Grace, probably no one does. We’ll see what happens she said to herself, maybe something will have to be made of it here, and she adjusted the pin that held the fabric of the sweater she had made into a skirt.

Within a short walking distance of the thirty ladies or so that gathered on the veranda and front lawn of Dot’s Rosemary Beach home breathed mother ocean, the tides advancing in maternal interest and care and receding with the aloofness of maternal unfeelingness and self centered old age. Advancing to love and caress the shore, receding to let the shore dry in the sun abandoned and malnourished. Big Edie had used her maternal power to keep Little Edie dependent and Little Edie gave up her dreams of pursuing Broadway. That is, at least, one version, the gravitational pull version, the force of the moon mother on the tides of behavior version.

And to read more of this story you’ll have to tune in tomorrow…

glades

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water ripple by nullality, flickr

They all want to see the gators tucked back in the brackish waters she navigates in the tour kayak through the glades. Take me to them they say but then they hunker down when eyes, snout, jaws, emerge from the murky water where armor like bodies search for sustenance, prey. Or they are a bit more relaxed when the gators, spotted up on the shore, bask in the sun, seemingly content for the day, or afternoon. They take pictures of their massive bodies, along with creatures hovering above them in trees – owls, a nest of baby birds. Sometimes if they are quiet and still, which she encourages on her tour, for the best chances to see wildlife, they may spot a bobcat, or even sometimes a panther, through the dense mangroves.

There are all assortment of creatures she points out to them – possums, pelicans, egrets, cormorants, raccoons, heron, sea turtles, snakes, osprey. She tells them of the fishing tour they can take for snook, snapper, red drum, sheepshead, and more, tours which can include the cleaning of the fish and a meal with either cooking provided or cooking instruction. She doesn’t tell them she could also provide them with instruction on catching and cleaning possum, for example, and a lesson on her granny’s recipe handed down since early settlers, possum n’ taters. It was safer to stick with a conversation about cooking fish. Though to loosen the mood when they saw a gator, she gave out the recipe for fried gator tale bites with mango chutney. She could get a little chatty sometimes, but mostly when she was trying to make her passenger comfortable.

She doesn’t talk about the time she lost her balance when she was alone in the kayak and a gator clamped down on her arm with its massive jaws. The beast rolled her and the salt water invaded her nose and mouth and her screams mixed with his deep and primitive grunting. In her anger and panic she thought of the dens of rotting meat gators keep just below the outcroppings of shore. She managed to stab it in the eye with the hand not under control of its grip and extract herself from the bloody water. She nearly lost her arm and required three surgeries, but it was repaired, not without nerve damage and scarring. But she didn’t talk about it, unless compelled to by a curious tourist, though sometimes she lied. The truth was bad for business though she always coached her clients on how to behave in this wilderness.

She covered half her body with a tattoo, a gator stretched out, his tail along her back, his body over her shoulder and his head on the arm that had been crushed. She had him decorated with flowers and butterflies. She didn’t allow herself much time to worry or think, just went back to work as soon as she could. She was learning what it was like to support herself without a husband, not in the way she had been raised, but the way she was learning to survive.

Schneewittchen

I am listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Dangerous Old Woman: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman. She analyzes myth and stories showing what they can teach us about ourselves. In her analysis of Snow White, she points out that each character is an aspect of the self. I wrote this particular piece when I first became interested in retelling fairy tales. I had just read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and wanted to try my hand. In this piece, I do not go into a detailed retelling but this is the idea behind this voice piece which explores a bit of modern day jealousy in the literary world. Let’s say it takes the saying “murder your darlings” in a different kind of direction. Flash fiction writer Kathy Fish posted a flash fiction exercise this past week having to do with voice which you can find here and I thought….oh, so that is what I was trying to do. What would the voice of each of your favorite characters sound like if you retold a fairy or folktale through their perspective?

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woman in the studio by Craig Cloutier, flickr

There was never a time I knew Anoushka when she was not in some sleepy-eyed phase of a delayed bloom. Yes, she was much younger than I was and much more beautiful and far more talented. I felt some inexplicable responsibility to protect her though at the same time, I wanted her to wake up and not rely on me. It was becoming so that I was constantly reminding her of her talents just to keep her going. Yet she remained untried in the real world and I grew weary. I wanted her to ply our trade, to finish her stories, to submit them for publication, to suffer.

And while I haven’t wanted this mother’s role of reassuring her and encouraging her in her writing, I have found myself taking up this mantel. Maybe there has been something to gain by my being her friend, OK, call me creepy if you want, call me a sycophant, call me a desperate, middle aged lady who’s flattered that this twenty-something would want to be friends with me, someone who is – what – not hip to the scene or whatever it is they’re saying these days.

And no, I’m not a lesbian. I’m happily married to a man, thank you very much. I’m happy most of the time, that is. OK, let’s just say I’m happy enough to get by, alright. But one can still have beautiful, young friends, can they not? Yet I grew weary of the dewy youth on this one as I waited for her to break out of her writing virginity, to publish the product of her labors. She secretly gloated that she was much better than I, better than most. So out with it, I said. If she demanded so much from me by way of reassurances to her ego, do I not have a right to insist she pop the publication cherry?

It was her lethargy I craved to kill, but as my weariness grew, other aspects to her personhood and our relationship became vulnerable to my vicious fantasies. I wanted to be rid of the very idea of her and of our friendship. I could not afford the ambition she siphoned off with her need, her expectations that I love her for her looks and her humor and her youth and as if that weren’t enough, her cracker-jack ability with the words which came rolling off of her, spinning out as a beautiful vine of roses from fertile soil, as if there were never a phenomenon more natural.

The market supports and encourages those of her ilk, who take beautiful cover photos, who will not make waves, whose writing, above all free of what may disturb or unsettle, or at least not to an inordinate degree. You can see how, my readers, this may be a problem for me, admitting already as I have that I am: a) jealous, b) covetous, c) ambitious, and d) of the murdering persuasion as it applies to the murdering of one’s literary “child.”

You can only imagine my narratives. You can only imagine my look behind the podium given what you can guess of my age, given what I covet enough to abolish. Other writers would not be as forthright as I. I have seen many a female writer who will swear they have never felt competition with any other female writer and yet they cut and undercut other women like a scythe mowing a hayfield. It happens. Men don’t know it. They are the compassionate hunters who can’t believe some woman has sent them out to cut out a heart.

So here was how I murdered her, so to speak, my gorgeous literary darling:

1) The corset binding. I forced her to gaze upon what was inconsequential to the writing itself: Her looks. I emphasized over and over how beautiful she was while she drew herself to the mirror and away from her desk. I cinched in her waist and she was mesmerized by her own proportions. By my manipulation of her waist size, she almost ran out of breath as she was overcome by a sense of the futility of self-expression in light of her growing dedication to her physical form.

2) The poisoned comb. I infected her thinking with faint praise, going in deep to kill the root that would poison the bloom, once and for all. If this had been successful, she would be like the women who yearn to write but who finally give up because of self-doubt.

3) The poisoned apple. At this point, she had found others who were wise to me, clever girl, so this step was the trickiest of all. I was determined that she must see me eating from the same fruit, as it were, and so I told her: “You can be a writer and have it all. Don’t listen to what people say about giving up the life of wife and mother to dedicate oneself to one’s art. Choose as I have chosen. See, I have done so, and it hasn’t killed me!”

These are only half-truths because my children are estranged, my husband sleeps on the other end of the house, my career consists of shredding up budding artists at the women’s college to whom I feed poisoned apples. My creative output consists in enumerating these tales of my passions, my crimes, but I’ve found the market responds, for grist and the gristle can be literature as long as it’s beautifully spun. The market eats almost anything in a pretty package, and Anoushka does too, chomping down on the succulent flesh of my tempting suggestions, taking the bait, wedding a man who loves only her beauty. After a while, he can’t even stand the sound of her voice.