Clothed

Blood, blood red

Juxtaposed

With your crystal eyes

You reach out for things

You reach out for glory

That is not ready for you yet

You speak in song

Whisper in verse

Inhale in silence

You cry when no one listens

Just to be certain

That you are clothed

One hand concealing your face

While the other one pushes

Angels aside

A Child Dies

A somewhat depressing story, but a little more recent (around 2007).  There is hope there, really, so I hope you can enjoy it.

A Child Dies

Dribbling rain outside his window makes him dreamy.  He has forgotten the touch of humanity that once made him whole.  He has forgotten the vase stuffed with lilies atop his coffee table.  He has forgotten life in an attempt to ward off thoughts of a dying child asleep in another room.

He thinks: “Speak to me.”  No one answers.  He longs for God, longs to believe in such intangible entities. 

Still, the child lies dying, sleeping.  Tears beg to come, but he wards these off as well.  It’s not time for tears or anger.  It’s not time for sadness. 

He holds his heart as if to ensure that it remains inside, locked in his chest with the ache.  The child coughs.  He starts, is awakened from the contemplation that took him somewhere else for but brief moments. 

Her cough is something of a relief to him.  She’s alive, she’s still breathing, he thinks.  He lowers his back to the floor with a soft sigh.  Sprawled there now, on faded, stale carpeting, he breathes better and tries to forget what he is unable to.

His skin is prickling with an anxious tension.  He wishes he had the will to peel it off bit by bit until he is simply a tangled mess of bone and blood.  He seizes the arm that once held his chest and tentatively scratches it with his unkempt nails. 

Scratch, scratch, scratch.   Feel, feel, feel.

Harder he presses into his skin until it is raw and weeping.  Kill the pain, live the pain.  Focusing his energy to the task is gratifying.  He stops.  A drop of blood trickles to the floor. 

Now and only now, can he cry.  He remembers humanity, his wife, the toast he left on the counter, the lilies on the table.  His ears are wet his tears, his nose runs.  He sobs and trembles and bleeds and remembers. 

The door opens behind him.  His wife calls out to him.  A child dies.  A father cries.

A Girl and Still a Girl

Another oldie from the archives (somewhere around 2001)...

A Girl and Still a Girl

Look at me.  I’m a child and a brat, a girl and still a girl.  I stamp my feet, I challenge you.  Look at me, I’m close to you.  I reach out and stamp my foot, bound within its silvery cage in a tall high-heel shoe. 

I cry, but do my tears seem worth it?  I am not worthless.

I am reaching out to you.  My chiffon shuffles at my ankles.  I am a girl and still a girl. 

My arms envelop myself and hold there.  I hold myself where no one holds me.  My back curves upward and outward like an arching horse galloping and bucking, galloping and bucking. 

I realize my socks are falling down and don’t pull them back up.  I giggle, I laugh, I crown myself in faded glory. 

Hear me, hear me still.

A butterfly flapping its wings as I stare on, seeing it all for the first time.  Catching the butterfly only to have it die in my hands.

I am looking at you with learning eyes.  Look at me.  Look at me. 

I am covering my eyes against the stares, I am sheltering my ears against the noise, I am shaking my head against the disgrace.  I am sticking my chin out and raising my shoulders up.  I am defiant. 

     

I am a girl and still a girl.

Can you see me vulnerable?  Can you see me small?  Can you see me rising against the cold?

I’m twirling despite the wounds.  Twirling like a bird in the wind.  I am reaching out, reaching out to you, staring, staring at you. 

My hair flutters like wings at my back and at my face, my arms lay still at my sides.  I am contemplating the distance, the feeling.

I am a girl and still a girl.  I challenge you.

Shedding Light on the Blog Title

Happy Monday!
Last week was hell...not that I want to get into it, but it was a nightmare from start to finish.  Enough said.

So, I thought it apt today to explain the somewhat obscure title of my blog.  I've already blogged about my writing endeavours over the years and suffice it to say that you have a general idea of the dream I once had about becoming a published author.

Alas, sometimes we put some dreams on the back burner while focusing for the moment on those that need more immediate attention.  What other dreams you ask and why should one take precedence over the other?  Let me elaborate if you'll be patient with me.

In 2005, I acquired the first rabbit of my adult life (my first rabbit, Cripps, I had had as a teenager and she passed away quite violently due to a veterinarian that prescribed her an antibiotic frequently fatal to rabbits).  This new rabbit was a little 4 month old white and black Mini Rex I affectionately named Glorfindel.  Yes, all you fellow Tolkien fans, he was named after the Rivendell Elf of the same name.

From our first day together, Glorfindel was the most special pet I had ever had.  He became part of my family and was a friend in times of need.

Knowing that rabbits were typically happiest as a pair, I acquired another rabbit named Legolas.  I was inexperienced enough at the time to be unsure of her sex, but once confirmed that she was female, I couldn't bring myself to change her name.  So, to this day, she is often known by the nickname Legolasina (insert laughter here).

Needless to say, I had fallen in love with rabbits as a species...I felt their fragility as keenly as my own and began to realize how many rabbits in our area were in need with no specialized shelter to help (our last local rabbit rescue had shut down some time ago).  A seed sprung in my mind to help those in need.  I wanted to start a rabbit specific rescue.  I endeavoured to raise money for the venture, although I have never been gifted in that area.

The following year - no money saved as of yet - my best friend and I found a little white and grey, obviously domestic rabbit, living in a cemetery.  After much effort over the course of a week, we managed to catch her and bring her home to safety.  Upon a visit to the pet store to buy some supplies to accommodate her, we found a rabbit there that had been abandoned.  She was a young siamese sable dwarf/mini rex mix and was "free to a good home."  I couldn't leave her there.  She came home to live with me and became Gypsy.

Do you believe in fate or omens?  Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, but that summer, the signs seemed there and I had to jump on it.  By September 2006, my best friend and I had founded New Moon Rabbit Rescue, had a board of directors and soon sent off the application for charitable registration.

Four years on, New Moon is a registered Canadian charity, has rescued approximately 180 rabbits, rehabilitated many of these from various illnesses and adopted most to loving forever homes.  With foster home organization, veterinary appointments, paperwork, giving media interviews, organizing events and of course, caring for ill rabbits that need our attention, the rescue is sometimes a full time job.

Perhaps it is lack of time management, stress of work and rescue related business and a propensity to procrastinate that has held me back from writing all these years.  Perhaps it was a need to put the needs of these precious animals above my own for at least a little while.

I am hoping that with my renewed love of writing, I can find a delicate balance between the rescue, work, writing and hobbies like knitting and sewing.

Maintaining that balance is key to me right now...I can put something less important on the back burner for a few days while I deal with deadlines, emergencies and the ilk, but I don't want to lose my renewed sense of self invoked by writing again.  These things in my life are all precious to me and as I have now accomplished and am living one beautiful, rewarding dream, I hope someday to fulfill a regretfully long neglected one.

Tessa's Blurb - Blog Hop!

Welcome to my new blog everyone. I have just added my blog to the Meet & Greet by Tessa's Blurb - a great way to network (list of others in the Blog Hop to follow!). I'm excited to meet other aspiring/established fantasy writers!

As I posted in my first blog entry, I am starting a new fantasy novel as we speak. I'm stoked about it, albeit a little daunted.

Here is the list. Happy hopping and I hope you enjoy my blog now and in the future when I have more posts!!

The Boxed Girl

When I posted this short story on a writing site many years back, a lot of people didn't get it. Yes, weird it is, but sometimes we have to suspend belief, especially to take in a metaphorical idea. I chose this particular story to post first partly because I am really quite fond of it despite its inherent "weirdness," but also because I am reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys at the moment and suspending my own disbelief while doing so. 'The Boxed Girl' came about while I was reading 'The Girl in the Flammable Skirt,' a collection of oddball short stories by one brilliant Aimee Bender.

Don't take it too literally, suspend your disbelief and above all, enjoy!

* * *

The Boxed Girl

The girl had become a maze of tangled parts. Her limbs were a sorrowful mutation, her neck folded at an odd angle, her spine curved in a beautiful arc. She was crinkled and crumpled and small.


But the girl knew nothing else.


She had lived in the confines of her box for many years. She had in fact grown into it as the years had passed, her body passing into puberty and then further into adulthood. Her misformed limbs were tattered and weak, but they were her own.


Her box sat on the edge of town, in the abandoned warehouse in which a clothing manufacturer once had its home. The girl lived there inside her box, breathing and eating and sleeping and doing all of the things one could never imagine doing inside the walls of a three-foot by three-foot box.


They would have melted in there, melted down. But not this girl. She knew nothing else after all and had never ventured out of her box. She never questioned the man who came each day, gave her a ration of food and left the way he had come. She never questioned him, although perhaps she should have felt like an animal imprisoned in a wooden cage.


The box was sideways and without a top, so that the boxed girl could peer out, observe the world through her eyes. Her eyes were not deformed and sad. They were bright and expectant. She was happy there, happy to see no one but the man who delivered the food.


On occasion, a blank-faced teenager would enter the abandoned warehouse with a prospective lover and the girl, staring, would catch their attention. These teenagers never stayed after seeing the girl. It was too weird, they said.


The rumors began then. The stories circled about a small girl trapped inside a box on the edge of town. No one believed it but those who had seen her and raced back out again. They’d never seen a girl in a cage.


The girl was unaffected by all of this. Unaffected by the fright she bestowed upon the visitors to her warehouse, unaffected by the stories because she had never heard them. She was more satisfied with her life than anyone could have known, maybe because she knew nothing else, but also because the girl seemed destined for this life. Alone and tangled, limbs crossing and uncrossing, hair flowing over her body like waves lapping at the rocks. She carried a song inside of her and showed it to no one. The girl was comfortable there, where it was quiet and slightly dank. It smelled like the abandonment of life, of money and of people. She knew this smell like no other.


It was summer when the young man entered the warehouse. She heard the steel door scrape open and as it usually did, her heart fell. A voice called out.


“Hello?” it said loudly.


The girl stopped breathing and was so still that her fingernails dug into the wood of her box and her legs trembled under the weight of her tension. She dared say nothing.


But there, this young man appeared. He was not attractive in any sense, but there he was, staring at the boxed girl without a word, soundlessly. He was as still as she, except he didn’t tremble and didn’t dig his fingernails into his box because he had none. He stared at her as though he knew her.


“Why don’t you leave there?” he asked suddenly, breaking the boxed girl’s silenced world. He broke a lot of things in the girl’s world. A lot of things, but she didn’t know it yet. She tried to shrug but she was too tense.


“I like it in here,” she replied simply. He laughed.


“No one can like it inside a box.” He approached and slowly extended his hand to the girl inside the wooden box, clinging to it with her fragile life. She looked at his hand, then into his eyes, swimming with sympathy and perhaps a bit of pity too. The girl was ashamed.
“Come on,” he urged. “It’s only one step. No one can stay in a box forever.” The girl knew this was true. Knew it with a fierce longing.


It was her time. She nodded slowly, but didn’t come right away. Her hand first crawled out of the box, creeping along the floor, crumbling cement catching under her fingernails. She was timid and terrified and eager all at once. Her foot swept along the floor of her box until it too, was no longer a prisoner of the wooden cage. It was cold and dirty and too unfamiliar.
The girl pulled her foot back in.


“It’s okay,” the boy soothed, extending his hand further. “It’s only one step away.”
She shivered and out came the right foot again, searching for the security of the ground under it. Dusty stones and grimy pebbles pierced the tender sole of her foot. She whimpered, but the young man pretended not to notice. Now her right side was completely out.


She began to laugh, a rush of feeling surging into her. She plunged the rest of her body out and it tumbled instantly to the ancient cement floor, dank and uneven against her arced back.


But she was out now.


Freedom had once been a long word for the girl in the box, but now she knew it, knew how to say it, how to spell it, how to let it roll over her tongue in waves. She was just starting to know it and yet she felt like it had been hers forever. The girl stared at the boy with her new knowledge and feeling.


She was free. And as she put her hand to her mouth to cover up her laughter, she began to soar.

A Girl Named Salvation

Twenty-two years ago, I started to write fiction. I was nine years old. I suppose my first forays into writing could have been classified as fan fiction, but is there really a genre classification at that age?


Over the years, as we all do, I grew as a writer and of course, as a person. I was 16 when I started writing about a girl named Salvation. She was naive and beautiful and the only daughter of a rock star. I wrote every day for 3 years until my hand was cramped and at least 10 pages were filled. In the end, I believe there were 5 notebooks filled with my illegible scrawl. I can't say whether it was good or not, but at this point, that is irrelevant.


At 19, I left school to give myself time to finish the "Great Canadian Novel," deluding myself into thinking I could accomplish such a task. I took up a full time job and to make a long story short, let my writing fall by the wayside, received my G.E.D. (high school equivalency) in 1998 and forgot what creativity was in the wake of real life in Toronto.


In 2001, I moved back to my hometown outside of Ottawa and resumed writing to some degree...in the course of 5 years, I rewrote the "Salvation" story at least 4 times. It stagnated, stunted and halted me in my tracks. I barely wrote for the following 4 years.


And here I am in 2010. Finally, I have decided to lay my dear Salvation to rest and leave her behind. I have begun an undertaking that will either kill me as a writer or make me stronger. I am writing a fantasy novel, something I always wished I could do as a reader who loved fantasy, but never had enough faith in myself to do. I don't know if I yet have faith, but I do have ambition and my love and abandon as a writer is coming back in waves.


I can only hope for the best, cleanse my pallet of the stories of the past and move on...wish me luck.