Effing Feline is a poet #8Sunday

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I, Effing Feline, have a plethora of divine accomplishments, but you may not know that I write poetry worthy of the ages. In honor of Mother’s Day, here is one of my masterpieces:

Roses are red, violets are blue,

You love me, Mommy, and I love me too.

Ed’s nearly completed WIP (now finished! First draft, at least). It’s tentatively title Audra Fleeing, Audra Finding. Audra Verhailey, a runaway young mother, flees with her baby from Oregon to Kwadra Island — a “duplicate” of Vancouver Island that its Native American rulers “hopped” here from an alternate Earth.

Penniless and desperate, Audra lets a Kwadran construction worker guide her up a wilderness mountain to a back entrance to Kwadra’s abandoned underground cities, where she hopes to be safe from her abusive boyfriend. But she defiantly tells the Kwadran she won’t have sex with him, no matter how helpful he is being. Trying to reassure herself about her quiet guide, she asks a question that ends up increasing, not decreasing, her anxiety.

If you didn’t know what a guy wanted or what he was afraid of, there were no handles to grab to steer him in the direction you chose. And he was too alien and spooky for her to grasp anything about him.

When a new possibility hit her, her legs wobbled so much that she lurched to the right and had to lean against a huge tree trunk to keep from falling. “Are you with the police?”

His bark of laughter reassured her — until he spoke. “Only when the gendarmes lock me up.”

Oh God, she’d hooked up with a criminal. “Not for murder?” Please let him not be a murderer. “Or for rape?”

Effing Feline here again. Ed is no poet — you can take my word on that! — but he does have a tagline for Audra Fleeing, Audra Finding. You’ll notice that unlike mine, the tagline doesn’t rhyme:

She’s running from an abusive lover — but what is she running to?

If you have any thoughts about the title, tagline or blurb (below), vent your spleen in a comment. And be sure to visit the other writers in Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday.

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When her abusive lover threatens to take custody of their baby, Audra Verhailey flees to find safety where even he can’t follow: the forbidden underground cities of Kwadra Island.

But can her desire to make a safe and quiet, if isolated, life for her daughter withstand the love of an emotionally damaged Kwadran who vows to fight off rebels determined to expel her from her newfound haven?