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@bri-kitsune
16. Paper Storms
The process always started the same. Before each court hearing, or trial, it always started with a single piece of paper. A subpoena. In the beginning, I always waited anxiously after the call from my advocate, a woman just a few years older than me. She had a slim frame, a slight stature, and a hand that had been permanently marred by her own past. Don’t wait around too long she’d…
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15. One Million Tiny Flames
15. One Million Tiny Flames The Healing of Hot Air Balloons
Tucked inside the worn and dog-eared pages of my old and weathered journal, I kept photos of us captured in time of your visit to Albuquerque. The color of flames stretched across one photo, and two wide smiles stretched across another. I remembered the balloon pilot offering us Mimosa’s that morning, and felt you nudge my shoulder as if to say go for it, it’s okay. I shook my head…
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14. Emerald Echoes
When I remember the thin, beachy stretches of Emerald Isle, I don’t remember the way dawn bled foamy indigo and purples across the Carolina skies. I don’t remember the summers my father and I spent there, and how the sweet southern ladies sipped lazily on sweet tea and commented on how exotic I looked, fresh from the deserts of places they’d never been.
I don’t remember my father, standing…
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13. From the Flowers to the Forest
13. From the Flowers to the Forest
So, in the absence of insatiable, hungry men who tore into her, who reached and seared apart the fabric of her dress and soul until nothing was left, she felt changes deep in the soil of her humanity sprouting and unraveling.
Like a root, she unknowingly planted the beginning of something beautiful. She burrowed deep into her pale melanin-painted skin, praying to become not the rose that could…
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12. Flowers From the Moon
He buries his head in the cradle of my neck and grazes sharp teeth slowly along my tender coffee creamer skin.
With every kiss, he plants seeds along the cracked soil of my earth, and I desperately want to bloom for him.
In the foggy atmosphere of his haze, exploding cherry blossoms beckoned along new, fresher seasons.
But it was a season ringing along the wind of violent memories…
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The Nameless Face in an Ocean of Others
The Nameless Face in an Ocean of Others
That’s how it always is with love; I could never write about the Others.
I could never paint those moments before they caught me in their grasp. I only found words hidden in the cracks we left behind but, even then, I could never press ink to paper in those final tailspin flares as we unraveled.
Did I even want this?
Although I’d felt words clinging to the ladder of my throat, I…
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10. When You Ask about Mother's Day
10. When You Ask about Mother’s Day
When you ask about Mother’s day
ask, instead, why my body is on the verge of collapse,
a searing smokestack swirling skyward.
Ask, instead, why a flurry of images ghost through me
of angry brown eyes mirroring my own
just a bit too much.
Ask, instead, of a childhood filled with
“you’re just like your father”
shrieked at times like a sudden slap,
other times…
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Coffee With Strangers
Coffee and a Stranger
Coffee and a Stranger
Dear stranger, she’d wanted to say in the silence. Thank you.
You didn’t know her, but you somehow understood her situation hidden in a glance that ghosted through tired eyes bruised with make-up. You held your warm hand out to her sitting in the grass, offered up a sad and knowing smile, and asked a gentle question.
Would you like to get some coffee?
One coffee became two, then two…
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Sky-Bound Soul
Why can’t his touch be simple? Why can’t it just be a touch? Why do his beautifully tireless and scarred hands caress the valley of my neck before turning into chipped paint peeling apart? Why do they have to turn into dead, cracked skeleton keys unlocking trapped memories wedged in my throat? Was it always going to be like this?
Why can he only unlock memories of You?
…
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Would You?
(Originally published in Leonardo Literary and Fine Arts magazine)
I think you are absolutely stunning and I would like to take you out to lunch. Maybe just text? (222) 555-3082.
I unfurled the folded index card out from its wedge in the door handle of my tiny white Nissan and felt my stomach curl into itself. Was the universe just trying to mock me?
Chris
Gino
Alex
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When the Moon Eclipsed the Sun
When the Moon Eclipsed the Sun
There are worlds inside of you that need to be seen you whispered in a voice that dripped with sugar and honey. You smiled smugly, as if proud to be the first to murmur these words to me in my lifetime. Flickering across my mind were the images of my twenty-something fourth grade teacher as she rustled my short, curly hair. You have stories to tell she’d scrawl in my margins, red ink…
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The Letter She Left
Unfurling the crinkled letter in my shaking hands, I wondered how he’d react seeing me cowering in the corner of the courtroom like this. The folded, trembling edges mirrored how I felt at that moment, like I was nothing more than a withered leaf clinging desperately to a decaying branch, afraid to fall; afraid to be carried by the harsh January wind. Hushed whispers and fleeting conversations rushed me from all sides. Tireless, electric lawyers were scattered around ornate silver coffee pots, stony-faced felons awaited their trial alongside frantic mothers…then there was me. I was the lone, frozen victim paralyzed in silence.
I uncapped my plum lipstick and applied it rhythmically, itching for anything to stay occupied. I’d rushed here thirty minutes before sentencing, terrified of seeing him in the hallway straightening his tie, smoothing back his blond hair, or waiting for the quiet ding of the elevator with his lawyer nipping at his heels. Suddenly, I knew how it felt to be a small, cornered fox dodging helplessly between the snapping teeth of two wolves.
A small tap on my shoulder shook me from my fever dream just then, pulling me back into reality. Holly shook my hand, offered up a sad smile, and sat down with her briefcase perched in her lap. “Have you done everything I told you, Bri? Get a good sleep? Eat some breakfast?”
I wanted to answer, but the words were trapped somewhere between the icy pit of my stomach and the coiled snake my esophagus became. Holly squeezed my shoulder gently, and her ginger curls bobbing as she spoke. “Just remember to breathe, hon. You won. You’re alive.”
The wolves, I decided, never left. They now faced the judge’s bench, suddenly in human form. He stood just feet away from my podium, tail tucked and hidden as he stumbled through his yes, your honor’s. While the prosecutor explained the laundry-list of charges and introduced me, I felt the fear slowly dripping from my stomach to my fingertips. Icy adrenaline snaked down my spine in its place.
Ten minutes. Just ten minutes was all I was given to declare the nine hours of my life he stole. The lawyers, judge, and advocates… they never once pronounced or spelled my name right. It rolled off their mouths in tangles without bothering to unravel it. In spite of the conversations erupting around me, I brought my shaking voice from its shriveled whisper, to a cracking waver, then to an unleashed, echoing battle cry. The courtroom, once alive with the energy of the buzzing lawyers, fell to silence in the end. My heels echoed as I walked away from Jason that final time and, after all this time, I finally realized I wasn’t just a trembling little leaf anymore. Now, I left fallen, burning leaves in my wake.
When The Snakes Came
They followed me for months, licking at my heels and slithering along my fleece blankets as I slept. But, before they came, it began as a single moment of fear lodged in my stomach. That’s what I told myself, anyway, but the nightmares were relentless as soon as I hit the pillow at night. Maybe a night on the couch wouldn’t be so bad? If it could stave off the leathery snakes spiraling seamlessly through my dreams, then maybe I could find just one night of peace.
That was six months ago. The snakes were vindictive and calculating, I realized. They’d simply drop to the floor with soft thuds and lightly caress my sleeping form. Their bites painlessly pierced my skin and paralyzed me where I slept. My voice would catch in my throat, my bloodstream trickled with ice, and the snakes would encircle me slowly. Taunting.
As the months passed, they’d slide into my mouth and cut off my oxygen. I’d choke in my sleep and wake to my own stifled groans. Tears would dot my pillow each dawn after surviving these nightmares.
Then, I could feel a quiet, small shift. It was carried on the winds through each day that passed us by in court and it followed me home as makeshift, invisible armor. Each time I confronted him and lit up the courtroom with my voice, the snakes would lose their hold on me in turn. They’d run at the sight of my narrowed, wild eyes and bared teeth. They’d run to the shadows in the nooks of our house. Their hisses, one by one, were slowly snuffed out with each new day.
Then, all at once, my dream body hovered over the porcelain lip of the toilet. I shook in cold sweats as I vomited a painstakingly steady stream of cold black. As the summer fell to calm cool nights, my nightmares would show me more dead snakes curled up in hidden crevices, cowering and weak. The last of them, one who managed to evade me time and time again, lay dead at the bottom of the attic one fall night. His body gave way to a spindle of blackened thread and snapped teeth, as if he’d been burned at the edges by the fire I’d created within me all those months ago.
I haven’t dreamed of a single black snake since.
When the Snakes Came, installment of What Came After Dark
They followed me for months, licking at my heels and slithering along my fleece blankets as I slept. But, before they came, it began as a single moment of fear lodged in my stomach. That…
