The decision.

She walked as if in a daze through the pavilion of the chief council, past the statue of the hero Prince Klass, a name the elders had insisted he keep, a name that would let no one forget the hell from which they had escaped. She sat on the steps leading up to the great statue, swathed in his ceremonial dress, weapon, and face raised to the sky in what she always imagined to be a triumphant cry.

Today, She did not wonder as she usually did as to how the stone workers had made the bronze so finely, that the cloth seemed to be woven of strands, that the weapons showed the knots and grooves of wood or that the sandals had the rough edges of leather. It seemed so obvious now, the working had been one of the magic users, the obsidian children. The children whose existence stemmed from that same night when rat island had turned black, a shimmering mass of obsidian stone, and the military might of the slavers and their kith was shorn asunder.

Today she wondered of Klass himself. How he had turned on the traitor who would have warned the masters. If he had felt remorse as the blood spilled from the killing blow he himself had had to deliver to quiet that betrayal. She wondered if his heart had been heavy after the fact, or if it was relief. Did he grieve after the deed was done or did he see it as another casualty for their freedom?

She placed her hand over her belly and wondered if the body she had left in the clearing of the park, under the shedding flamboyant tree should have evoked something other than scorn, something other than hot angry hate. If when it was all done and she was faced with the product of their union if she would be saddened by the thought of him or the telling of his story that would be inevitable.

It wasn’t until she saw the face of a passerby, the shock and horror of the woman’s mortified visage that she snapped from her veneer. She took the small mirror from her little bag and there they were, deep green irises circling her pupils. Confirming that she was one of the obsidian children, one of the cursed, the magic users. As one of the blighted she knew what was to come, the militiamen, the iron bars around the cart taking her dazed and sluggish form to the mystery known only as the farm. She had seen the eyes of one such soul one time in her childhood, a woman not much older than she was now, her eyes a chilling blood red, the woman would have been beautiful except for the slack way her face hung, the hollowness in her otherwise brilliant eyes.

Hand still laid on her belly, she knew the decision had been made, she would not be made into that pretty-eyed husk. The woman had been right to be terrified, she lifted her voice once again and held the killing note. She was the cursed, she was the scorned, but for her child, she would not be one of the taken.

_{Footnote: Prince Klass is an Antiguan and Barbudan national hero, he was the leader of a famously failed slave rebellion on the island, and he still stands today as a symbol of freedom, and a reminder of the people to rail against tyranny and oppression. In my story, the rebellion did not fail.}

Cold again

Cold again, shivering freezing cold. He hit the icy water, and was yanked back out again in short order. The boat rocked its nauseating motion hitting wall after wall of water, and new wet cold splashes assaulted the senses.

Cold even as small whisps of steam rose from the hoodie and jeans and socks and shirts. What if it happened again? He did not like the cold, he did not know the stranger, he did not want another plung into the icy inky black of the bay. But if it happened again the little wooden dingy on the inky black tentacles of the Rhedonda expansion he was sure that it would not end well.

He closed his eyes tightly, tried not to think of the cold, tried not to long for the warm, tried not to envision the boys. He had heard stories of mothers drowning their babies like rats, babies with rainbow eyes and strange abilities, babies born with features that didn’t look human, mothers giving babies back to the expanse that seemed to reach out and touch their babies without them knowing. But this was not the time to wonder why him, why his mother, and if his brothers would okay without him, if they would be just like him.

He tamped down on the fear as he felt his hand again begin to warm, because wood and fire did not mix and everyone knew that black streaks in the bay were things to be wary of.

What if he’s taking me to Rhedonda? What if he is giving me back to the exapanse?

He took a chance and opened one eye slightly, just enough to locate the stranger, the tall stranger, who almost looked like a militia man in the blue trousers with the pockets on the leg and black shirt, though his boots were skuffed and worn unlike the shiny armament of the milita men. His hair was long, secured in braids than ran down his neck toward his back, but it was the eyes in his caramel face. Eyes now amber that the boy knew could be red red like the devil the preacher man said was at the heart of the expanse.

The eyes settled on him and he closed his own again. But he felt the weight of the stare, he felt it like a weight settling on his flesh. He felt curiosity, tension, wariness, tension all trussed up in that stare.

“Just control your hands kid. Just control til we reach her.” a voice somewhere between rustling leaves and flute music.

Who was she? Who had sent for him? How did she know when and where? Where were they going?

“It’s a good place, good people, she helps…people like us.” as if he could read minds, a new burst of fear, a new effort to tamp it down. But it was a little less hot, a less urgent, a little less close to the surface. He chanced another glance. Amber eyes held something new, something he was not sure he had seen since his mother had gone to the farm, something that maybe means that she was indeed able to help people like them.

It’s been a while

Yeah, it’s been a minute and I could give 10000000000.0 excuses as to why. Prime among them being imposter syndrome, a touch of depression, and the mounting changes that covid has visited on us all. I could continue to use those as a shield between me and the yearning to clickity clack my form of catharsis into the universe.

I could say that I started to die by my own lofty expectations of who and what I wanted to be and what I wanted to present of myself to the world. I could tell you that life has become work, work and more work. Regale you with excerpts from my inner monologue, and all the crap that has encompasses that hellscape but I won’t. He he.

And all those parts of the telling would be true but they really are just bits, they really are just symptoms of a disease that I myself have yet to name. A disease that I believe is coming to its end phase because I am fed up of hiding, dulling myself, saying less (an insipid term in this modern vernacular if you ask me), and just not being gloriously randomly me.

I mean I’ve grown so the me I present now isn’t the me I was when I first started this, I am now stronger in my conviction to be who I am and to keep learning who that is as life keeps knocking me keel over kettle (Is that the phrase? No? It feels right so its the one). So here we are, at the start of another one of our conversations. I have myself a glass of wine and an urge to engage.

Sadly all I have right now that I wanna put out there is work-related. I’ve done the remote learning thing, the google classroom thing and while it has been a challenge I feel all the better for it. Why? Why you ask? Well because it’s made life easier, more organized for my messy self, and offered me a level of security against a lot of the issues that arise when one is steeped in the business of teenage academia. What’s crazy is the amount of bad press associated with it and the fact that it all seems to be levered against the teaching service. Like really Broonhilda, really? We aren’t taking pot shots at internet providers, politicians, ourselves and/or the tiktok generation? Have you seen some of the content on tiktok? Send those suckers to film school please and thank you, Hollywood, Bollywood, and all the woods need them. The lack of equity in the cussing out has to be the most frustrating as well as the most amusing part of all of it. Anywho…

I’ve also found that I’ve expanded my social circle to a point where at times it feels uncomfortably large, which is fine because I now know it’s perfectly okay to not engage when my people meter is full. I also now fully acknowledge that opinions are like assholes, essential for some things but often full of shit, so really not to be taken too seriously. I’m rambling again, meandering though words because it feels right, abling on lyrically, not precisely sure where all this goes.

I wanna be random again, I think, no more of this structured non-sense. None of this to be a success in the blogging world BS, I don’t need that, this is my journal, my exposition on everything and nothing and anything. A means of escape and release and maybe even comradery where it presents itself.

It does not at this point feel like work like it did before, and so I am here and comfortable and letting the words flow from my fingers and fall from my lips in ways that for far too long I have refused to let them because I honestly don’t know. And who gives a crap it’s the past.

Yeah, that’s it, I’m done for the day. Bye.

With Love

Eulogy

‘V was a praying woman, she was always ready to offer a prayer for the sick, those who had trodden the hard path…’

I stared at the words, but they didn’t seem right. They didn’t feel right. They were absent of a great deal of truth. So I started again.

‘V was a good woman. She suffered much, she touched the lives of many. She was selfless in her dedication to her students…’

That didn’t feel right either. It was all true of course, the woman had been a saint, but this was not the entirety of her story. And so again I began.

‘V is dead. She tried to live a selfless life, she tried to love a selfish man, she succeeded at both and died as a result.

You see V, was a praying woman, she believed in the power of prayer, she believed that those words spoken with eyes closed and hands clasped had the power to change the world, and maybe she was right.

Maybe when she had come thin and wraithlike, despite her long days working, when she settled her frail hands into those of her warrior sisters we had asked her what she needed us to pray for she would have told us she was starving because all her money went to booze she didn’t drink.

Maybe when the makeup couldn’t hide the swelling anymore, and she knelt beside her family in Christ, someone had helped her off her knees and granted the shelter she had asked for under the hand of the spirit. If only we had had the strength to be even one finger on that hand, to point to her house, to dial those three numbers when shouts, turned to screams and the sound of broken china.

Maybe when she showed up limping, and testified that God was good for leaving her with the one good kidney, we had stopped in prayer and reflection, and fasted of our apathy. Maybe we would have recalled that blood showed up, even against the mud on tanned work boots. But instead, we sang with her, we made a joyful noise that she had survived our silence this long. We let free the sound of jubilation that our good sister had absolved us of the responsibility of being her keepers.

Maybe when she turned up blind, after months in hospital, even one of us praying at her bed side had looked up when the social worker had asked if we knew how she fell, how a woman scared of heights, crippled and in constant pain had managed to make her way, with no assistance into her husbands new home, to confront his new mistress, who stood screaming behind him as he peered out the shattered window.

Maybe then, on any one of those occasions, maybe if we had taken those words to heart, and been the instrument of salvation, taken the mantle of the army of Christ, and fought for his humble. Maybe we would all still be worthy of our faith. Maybe we would have proved V right, maybe then, we would have given power to the prayers we encouraged her to say for aid in her desperation.’

I wrote the words in anger, not at Heathcliff her husband, her beneficiary, her murderer, but at myself his accomplice in silence.

Fishing for comfort

In response to photo-fiction 33

“Give me two reasons.” I heard the shudder in her voice, she was trying not to let me hear the tears. She was being dramatic, like always. I told her as much.
“Please.” asking in that quiet way she had. The way she had each time she did this, each time I fell for it and indulged her fishing for compliments. I rolled my eyes and hung up. Not this time. I wouldn’t be sucked in. This was not my circus, I needed to get her off my back.

I woke up to 15 missed calls. Hell, when she wanted attention she really knew how to get it. Thank god for silent mode. I turn on the news, and there she is. Cute and smiling, confident. I drop my coffee mug. She was just being dramatic. Like she had been a million times. A million times she had called me in the middle of the night fishing for comfort. Looking for reasons to stay in this life.

Not this time.