#fern.upload

[fernhelm]

cambridge introduction to postmodern fiction - bran nichol

[fernhelm]

[fernhelm]

RAPUNZEL SHORN by Lisa Russ Spaar

I’m redeemed, head light as seed mote, as a fasting girl’s among these thorns, lips and fingers bloody with fruit. Years I dreamed of this: the green, laughing arms of old trees extended over me, my shadow lost among theirs. Where is my severed ladder, the empty tower of my hair? Let the birds fall in love with it, carry it away. Here on earth the river is in love with itself. To get there, I’ll shove sharp stones into my shoes as the saints did, lest I forget what it means to walk again upon it.

[fernhelm]

RAPUNZEL'S CLOCK by Lisa Russ Spaar

Of all the gifts he could have brought her that she would seem to have no use for in the tower—a lawnmower, badminton set, high-heeled shoes— this clock was most whimsical and harmless at first, a toy house carved with vines, flaunting a frozen bird that popped in and out, and was always whisked away at the last chime, back through clenched doors, as though to store up the intervening hour in undistracted darkness. After a night of counting every hour, they destroyed the clock’s music to keep it secret from the Crone, though at night, while he slept, she could still hear its lurching gears, the tongue-less bird shuttling its muted cuckoos inside the cupboard where she kept it hidden. It became the tight heart she tuned her body to— the crumbs of afternoons, his absences, the gaining dark. Blood days. Days of waiting. Nights of visitation and violent blooming. So that in time she grew to need the clock’s white noise beneath her own body’s story— its given loneliness, its brief, incredible eruptions of hope.

[fernhelm]

vonnegut intro to sexton's transformations

[fernhelm]

[fernhelm]

I know what you think of me tim kreider x the long and short of it richard siken

im having a bad time