April 8, 2025
Foxglove Daisy Tulip
Ladies’ Aid
Six middle-aged women, all with young adult children and pleasant husbands, met once a week to visit and support each other in whatever was currently going on in their lives. They were friends and became very good friends after three years of their “Ladies’ Aid Meetings” which also usually involved snacks and maybe a drink (G and T in the summer and wine in the winter) at their homes in rotating order.
Three of the women attended church on occasion, two had no religious affiliation, and one was open about her atheism, though having all been raised to be polite, neither religion nor politics took up the bulk of their conversations.
Then one dark day, something happened that for the six of them, suddenly took precedent over all of their other concerns. Their country, which they believed to be the greatest nation on earth, had somehow elected a miscreant and scoundrel to the highest office in the land and each of them were appalled.
Following his installation, they stood powerlessly by as the most central tenets of their great nation were destroyed in a whirlwind of chaotic executive commands, each more flagrantly simple-minded and illegal than the last.
It was a bitter cold winter that followed with snow piling up and every day, reports of spreading viruses run rampant. The assault on their homeland’s laws were also spreading like disease, rendering everything they thought they could count on, unreliable.
It might have been easiest to remain home hibernating with the news off, but the women were determined. They would act, and they would fight against what was happening within their government. They had no choice, they had to do something for the futures of their children, but what?
“Pray,” one of them suggested.
“Yes,” another agreed.
“We will pray for his death.”
“We can’t do that,” another argued.
“Why not?” The atheist wanted to know.
“Because that isn’t what prayer is for or how it works,”
This came from one of the church goers who understood such things and so they prayed properly. Surely, the elected leader and destroyer of their country would see the errors of his ways, through the power of their prayers and with God’s help, and reform. But he did not.
“Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. Amen.”
This was the prayer they eventually decided to say out loud, and for ten minutes of their tenth prayer meeting joined their voices in unison, raised and echoing in the family room of the gray house on Brady Street. After finishing, the women all felt better, lighter, and turned to other topics to carry on as usual.
The next meeting the prayer circle lasted a half hour and by Easter, their thirteenth meeting taking place as the world was collapsing around them, the wording had changed and their voices combined for nearly ninety minutes.
“Let him die and return to you, Dear God, where he may know peace.”
“Receive him, Oh Lord, and let him sing with the angels for eternity knowing neither pain nor hate. Amen”
“We offer him to you, praise be, his blackened soul to be made bright again like the happy child he never was. Amen”
“Death would be a comfort to him and the world, Sweet Jesus, and his soul put to peace with his gentle passing. Amen”
The women were never short on ways to entreat a deity half of them did not really believe in. And if the prayers had no power to change the course of events, the women found themselves growing ever closer in their shared effort and stronger in their commitment to their cause. They accepted the possibility of nothing coming of the old-fashioned words they uttered together, but it altered them, nonetheless, made them feel less silenced hearing the bold sounds they made as more and more of their rights were stripped away. They were not dancing naked in the woods in the wild moonlight, but knew what doing so might feel like.
When the police came, the women wept and screamed and explained all of this, to no avail. They had clearly been overheard and then recorded praying for the death of their beloved leader, cursing him like witches, in fact, and as such, each of them was considered a threat to his safety.
Three of the women were incarcerated for seventeen years. Two of them for five and one, the atheist, took her own life. Their children and husbands never spoke of them, and eventually their remains were shipped to Mars and interred at the base of a monument in the shape of a rocket with the name of the vile leader they had wished dead carved deep along its phallic length—whether as a punishment or a reward—history has failed to specify.
April 1, 2025
March 23, 2025
Where should the missing comma go? Or is that a trick question and there are no missing commas?
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Sometimes stories begin out of nowhere, as if they are happening somewhere, somewhen.
Hidden within a copse of slender white birch, Belial gazed at the pale trunks, skeletal and still against the lowering sky. As the ancient reverend she straddled gasped and strained beneath her, grinding his cassock and its thirty-three buttons into the dirt, she raised her eyes as if in prayer.
Overhead, the remaining clusters of bright yellow leaves autumn had yet to strip from their branches suddenly fluttered. How like candles they were, she thought, glowing bright even as the chilling twilight gathered, though they produced no warmth at all.
The reverend was finally close to dispensing what Belial needed, what she had lured him here for. She could tell by the quick panting breaths, the rough guttural grunts and the way he reached desperately toward her apron. But even as she rode him, her revulsion would not permit the laying of his gnarled and knobby hands upon her breasts and briskly swatted his ugly claws away. She also glanced briefly down at his grimacing, grizzled face where smoke-like puffs issued from his open mouth full of bared, rotting teeth, then quickly looked away as his coated tongue, stiff and shiny, poked out at her. She was grateful for the sudden rush of frigid air that swept down along the valley to drop the bright leaves and cold flames all around her. At least she could smell nothing but the bitter, damp chill.
Having hoped for a tantivy, Belial began to grow frustrated and angry over the reverend’s sluggishness and thought to urge him on—“Come on old man, you can do it!” but she refused to speak, to give him the pleasure or stimulation her high-pitched and frantic fifteen-year-old voice might provide. She had little left of her pride but refused to squander the remainder of it on this, on him.
And then, without warning, the writhing body of the holy man seized, bucking up with surprising avidity for his fifty-plus years, his face contorted, his rheumy eyes rolled back in his head, his frail legs drawn up and shining even whiter than the birch. She bore down with single-mindedness of purpose until she was sure she had wrung every last drop from him. Exhausted and relieved, she rolled off the used and motionless form failing to notice the reverend no longer drew breath.
Flat on her back and tucking her skirts and cloak around her legs, she raised her feet to rest against one of the papery trunks and waited, her thoughts invoking a soft and welcoming womb where the faintest spark of life could take hold. Even as the wind she felt might freeze her solid grew in strength, she continued to wait, knowing she must be open and patient.
To distract herself from the brutal and insistent cold, she moved on from the idea of heatless flames to imagine the falling leaves with their jagged edges as gold coins raining generously down. With them she would find a way out of the village, away from the starvation that would surely follow this third year of failed crops, diseased livestock and a river so poisoned only the most desperate pulled sustenance from it.
Like the environment, the enforcement of cruel laws that had been written hundreds of years ago to prevent total calamity and presently upheld by men like the foul reverend to supposedly give the most viable a fighting chance of survival, were also firmly against her, as she was neither the youngest in her family, nor the strongest. But this was a chance at changing her position, a chance at saving herself.
Though the reverend had already begun the process of decomposition within the slimy dark recesses of his dead body, Belial felt only hope and a minute twinge of life within hers.
The Bray Harp Of Dyerbroooke
When friends take your new book on vacation! Here is The Pine Shadow Poems enjoying a warm gettaway in Aruba!
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Right Here, Right Now
I’ve never blogged before. I’m a writer and I write books. However, every literary agent I research and query for my latest novel, The Pine Shadow Poems, expects me to have an author website. Even if I only decide to self-publish, a website is necessary to inform potential readers of my work. Okay. Got it. I don’t want to, but I’ll do it.
I’ve been writing on and off for nearly sixty years, almost from the moment I learned how, but now, time is running out. If I’m ever going to be traditionally published, or have anyone read what I have self-published, having this website is apparently paramount. It is the key to my existence as a writer. What I actually write is secondary to branding it and marketing it. I always believed this was the reason to have a publisher, but things change, old ideas die, and we have to adapt. I’m trying.
This year I spent so much time reading, watching videos, and discussing with other writers what to include in a query letter to pique an agent’s interest (most of whom appear to be younger than my children) that I took almost eight months longer than I anticipated to finish my book. During this time of editing, polishing and working the novel into shape, I was often unable to devote myself fully to it as I was so consumed with navigating the “publishing industry.” Yes, I’ve learned a lot, and yes, here is my slapped-together website. But now, I have to get back to The Pine Shadow Poems. Excuse my bitterness, but sometimes it is all that keeps me going.
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