Read this poem, and then check out the prompt!
Haint Blue
By: Siaara Freeman
“Red, White and Black make Blue” - Andrea Feeser
Grams says a haint sat on her bed when she was a girl. When I was a girl I got to visit her childhood home, where she learnt how to be the third girl. A lesson she taught my mama who taught me. Some thangs just got to be learnt on a porch. I am the third girl of a third girl of a third girl of old blood in a new body. I am a Freeman. I am love & craft & country. I got some steady eyes in the back of my hope. Some spells just take centuries & so much blood to complete. I be a good book in bad hands. I am the sword & the stone it was pulled from. I am pinned to my own chest like a note from a teacher. Education is a woman who comes from porch people. Ancient like
darkness. Each strand of her hair is a new name for a god that you won't even try to pronounce correctly. Her heart is on backwards. I am to go back and stop her from crossing the water. I am haunting myself for generations. I am haunting myself into myself, into my self. The water is whatever you think it is. I am right after something borrowed. A gift that will not be returned easily.
Indigo child, my sister Angie called me Indigo child when I was a child. I looked it up only once and it scared the prayers out of me. Just like in third grade when that lady with a smile that filled the whole classroom, sent me home with a packet. I read it before sharing it with my mom or my grandma. I couldn't stop shivering. It said your child is terribly gifted, it did not say with what.
PROMPT: “A gift that will not be returned easily.”
WORD LIMIT: 1000
If you’re in my Writing the Weird: 4 Weeks, 4 Uncanny Creations class, please feel free to respond to any of the prompts we’ve covered. Just be sure to give me a heads up about which prompt you chose.
If you’d like only encouraging feedback, let me know. I can also give constructive criticism. It’s up to you to make your preferences clear.
Excited to read your work!
Hi Erica (and others from Erica's Writing the Weird class!),
So I'm posting the first 620 words from what I'd hoped would be a flash fiction piece (right now it's 1,200 words sigh). The "gift that's impossible to return" isn't revealed until the last lines, so I'm interested in knowing if this first half works (you want to know the rest of it), and if you see anything that can be trimmed. Thanks, and hope you (all) enjoy!
Gratitude
“Those little thank-you flames are my favorite...”
from "Put Another Nickel In" by Claudia Brevis
There aren’t many of those little thank-you flames these days — but some people are regulars at the Church of Penance and Gratitude.
You’d never know it if you saw them on the street or in the grocery store. You never can tell from the outside.
This one for instance: a woman, perhaps forty years old wearing the dull shadow of a wool coat. Her winter gloves are stretched at the wrist, shredded at the fingertips. Her only pair of boots are run-down and uneven at the heels. The black purse she carries has a shoulder strap so worn the vinyl is ripped and peeled back.
You never know what someone else believes — but what this woman wants to believe is certainly enough for her to stop at the Church every day on the way to work.
When she enters the Church, there is a humbleness in the way she genuflects, in the length of time she holds her arms out, opening herself to the altar in the prescribed Gratitude Gesture of Acceptance. The purse slips a little on her shoulder.
Today, after performing the Gesture of Acceptance, she bows her head, keeps her eyes on the floor for too long, almost as if she’s afraid to acknowledge the shadows that inhabit the prayer niches arranged along both sides of the Church. She wants to believe the saints have granted her enough.
When she raises her chin, she pauses for a moment to gaze intently at each niche, stopping at St. Christopher, St. Jude, St. Catherine, St. Francis, Mary Magdalene, then peering ahead, looking, listening.
The stained glass windows shed no color into the shadowed quiet. The oily scent of extinguished beeswax candles hangs in the air, thick enough to taste. A gust of wind skitters along the outside walls. The timbers far above her head grumble responding like a man ready to shout.
Her boots scuff and echo softly as she walks the ancient marble floor toward the recessed niche in the farthest, darkest corner. The niche is partially hidden behind a stone column and few people seek it out. As she moves closer, she pulls her gloves off to expose the chapped skin on her hands. She knows there can be no relief without exposing the truth. Her skin is rough, irritated, and burns a little in the dead air.
A few feet from the column, she stops again. There are no lit candles; the niche is dark. High in the rafters above her, something moans. Sudden moisture slicks her palms.
She enters. The hidden alcove contains a shrine dedicated to Saint Solus, the patron saint of Solitude. Shadow has washed into the alcove with her, drowned every surface, filled every crevice. She looks behind but no one is there.
She has prayed in this alcove before. Wax-smeared glass cups are lined up on the tiny platform before her. There is a disorderly pile of wood splinters to one side. The air here is laden with abandoned petitions and heavy with dissipated smoke. Oils from decades of dying candles have grimed the ornate frame holding the image of Saint Solus.
She slips her purse off her shoulder and digs in it for loose coins to drop through the slot beside the dead candles. The coins clatter and clink as they fall into the metal offering box. She sets the purse on the floor. She shrugs to escape the confines of her coat. A frayed seam in the lining of her sleeve rasps across her sore knuckles. She drops the coat beside the purse, wishing it was that easy to let go of…
Hi Erica,
This is Tim from your writing the Weird class. I think this is how you meant for us to share our in class writing. If not let me know and I'll delete it. I'd prefer constructive criticism please.
That said I wrote this in class last week using the 'The experience of "a foreign body within oneself, or oneself as a foreign body."
B.I.D.s
I tried not to look at my hand. The pail, almost yellow skin. It looked dry and flakey. Cracked with pores like termite holes. I say my hand, but I know it’s not. It is "a" hand. Whose hand I don’t know, but it’s not mine. My hand is inside. Like Jell-O in a glove.
I can feel the imposter's hand over my hand. My hand is small and moist. I can feel the imposter's intent sliding over mine. Like a slow-drying clay. It’s that electrical intent that lives in the spine and the nerves; between thought and action.
I used to do experiments where I would think really hard at my hand to do something. Pick up a pencil. Flex. Point. These thoughts were loud and in words. But they wouldn’t make my hand do anything. They were just thoughts. This was before the imposter replaced my hand.
Then I would make my hand do something without thought. Without overthought. I would look away and then have the pencil in my hand. It was that ghostly feeling you have when you make your body do something involuntarily. Like walking. Or breathing. But now that thing was conscience. My body was slowly becoming not my own.
“Body integrity Dysphoria. Or BID if you will.” The doctor told my parents in a dry, flaky voice. Disinterested. It sounded like the type of voice my hand would have if it spoke. Maybe the same thing that that was taking over my body had already taken him over too. Either way I knew I couldn’t trust him any farther than I could throw my own rebellious hand.