Category: Lightening Strikes

The Subject is Words

Photo by Nothing Ahead on Pexels.com

An avalanche of words slows. Letters pile to a stop. You sweep them into pages of prose, organize the words in sentences. The sentences describe familiar subjects. The subjects are coupled with tasty verbs that whet the appetite, the filling in a subject-object sandwich. Pair with a fruity adjective to finish.

Thoughts and feelings spring into paragraphs willy-nilly; words leap to the page in disorganized, repetitive chaos. It’s time to wind down and mine for meaning. A pot of gold waits at rainbow’s end. The end of patience, of an era, of the sentence, the end of the line. Edit.

Witches: Part Two

Photo by Andre Furtado on Pexels.com

She saw him coming, saw him in the future, saw the pain and the pleasure, the sad ending to a tale she might have rewritten if only he hadn’t stirred in her the promise that she could be, for once and only, like other girls. A woman, not a witch.

She carried the child. Raven black hair streaked white, the mark of witches. Intuition stirred through her to foretell truths that no one would believe, the Cassandra gene.

Some don’t believe us. Some call us witches. We know their vision is blurred by greed and power and they are wrong.

Witches: Part One

Photo by Andre Furtado on Pexels.com

Living as she did on the far side of the moor, there were rumors. She looked the part. Eastern European heritage, a penchant for layered gowns, mostly black. Clothes that simultaneously hide and suggest: witch. Circe, a witch. Glinda too. Healers and granters of wishes, witches all. A misunderstood bunch. 

They said her mother’s streak of white hair, a lightening bolt in the thick darkness of her waist length locks, appeared the night her grandmother died. Grandmother, like mother, like daughter, witches touched at birth, not by death, but by the second sight that grew with breasts, blood, and womanhood.

Calculating Thunder

pexels-photo-258173.jpeg

In pairs, we sprawled on a white sectional, arms and legs entwined. A plate glass window framed the grid of city streets. It was one of those sticky summer days that make you want to take a hundred showers. Relieved to drink something cold and watch daylight turn to dusk, our murmurs subsided to whispers. Our eyes closed. Despite the air conditioner’s hum, it smelled like rain.

A bolt of lightning cracked the sky. We counted, and when the thunder clapped, we calculated our distance from the storm, wondering when the elements would come together and the heavens would open.