Trigger warning: some topics described in these stories contain themes of adult nature and mentions of abuse. Please take care of yourself and don't read if you are sensitive to these topics.
The Bird’s Nest
She often felt like an intruder in her own home. A small, clumsy thief who had snuck into their family, hoping to steal just enough affection to survive. In this, she would succeed. The family was playing a board game. She hated board games with a passion. Land on this, go to jail. Pick that card, then another. Before, when she was forced to take part in these monotonous chores, she was bored beyond belief, frustrated at having to sit still for so long and reach for things that seemed out of her grasp, and cringing at the clanging sound of excited voices and her mother’s shrill laughter.
Games made her “annoyingly grumpy,” her mother had said, so she was excused from playing them. Her father, the warden, made comments and jokes about her disposition in a way that sounded like teasing but masked the smell of decaying disdain beneath. She didn’t react, but his words cut deep into her skin like sharp metal chains so tight they prevented her from moving. Not before long, she would reveal those wounds on those same wrists, this time with a shiny blade. Rubies set in silver, she would think, and how beautifully silent it would be to lie buried underground.
For now, she is curled up in the corner, reading a book. Stories stole her away from now, the bright lights burning down on the kitchen table, her father’s eyes like jagged glass. Her cellmate, one year older and smart as a whip, played the game with confidence. She thought of her sister not with jealousy, but wonder. How did her sister manage to know so much, talk so easily, be like everyone else? Where did she learn all of that, and when?
The hands holding her book twitched as she counted her fingers over and over. She started with the right thumb to pinky, then left pinky to thumb. It had been necessary to alter the small movements that pacified her so, as initially, they were outwardly obvious. Those small, awkward movements resulted in a quick smack on the head or bottom, and so she learned that yet another thing she did was unacceptable, wrong. When they were made to hold hands for prayer, she counted her toes.
Sometimes, the weight of everything around her seemed impossibly unwieldy, as if one wrong step, a step built in the dark but expected to be seen, would result in something dreadful. She was often wrongfully accused of doing things for some foreign reason she couldn’t comprehend, yet didn’t have the words to object. The punishment was brutal but somehow welcome because it gave her a reason to cry, to scream, to roar. It felt like the rope around her neck had loosened just for a few moments, enough to spit out the dark purple clots of pain in a hemorrhage of rage.
Later, because she was taught that pain leads to relief, she learned to punish herself on her own. Who said she wasn’t quick to learn? When she was sent to her room to think about what she’d done (which she never knew, not really), she would close her eyes and stick out her tongue to taste her tears. The taste took her away to a gentle sea, where tiny, colorful fish darted to and fro. She lay face down as the waves soothingly stroked her sore back. In her dreams, she could breathe underwater.
I can’t wait until I grow up so that I can escape, she thought. She fantasized that as she grew, she would be able to see as they did, and that blindly feeling her way through a condescending world of the sighted would be replaced by how everyone else knew what to say, what to do, and how to be. But she somehow knew this to be untrue. It just didn’t make sense that everything could be different, even after she had left. How could it? She was still herself, and even outside the world was filled like Russian dolls with cages, woven of expectations, each one just a little larger than the one she had just escaped.
Often, she would think about the bird’s nest she had found just outside the yard, hidden in the tall spring grass. It wasn’t made of much, just twigs, dried leaves, and downy feathers. But it was strong. The nest securely held four pink baby chicks, eyes unopened and mouths agape. They made surprisingly loud squawking sounds. The chicks jostled each other and flailed their featherless wings, bald bobbing heads bouncing this way and that.
At first, she didn’t even notice the fourth and smallest chick, as it had been hidden beneath the larger, stronger, and more agile ones. This one was almost half the size of the other birds. Its bulbous head stood on a scrawny neck, which peeked out underneath the bodies of the others. It seemed pinned down, scarcely able to move. She wanted desperately to help it, to get it out from underneath. But everyone knew that if you touched a baby bird, its parents would abandon it, so she held her breath and watched. It slowly, painstakingly squirmed to the side of the nest, using its fragile beak to pull itself up the wall of sticks. Despite the swarm that threatened suffocation, it managed to inch itself up, up, and finally over the tangled bits of twigs and feathers, landing on the soft, green shoots of grass below.
She realized she had been holding her breath and sighed with relief. The tiny one had escaped being crushed to death within the cruel walls of the nest. With a smile, she turned and ran home through the tall grass to be sure to arrive before she was called to dinner. A few weeks later, she went back to check on the nest. To her surprise, it was empty, just a jumble of twigs, feathers and grass. Then she looked closer. The bird that had escaped had not done so without cost. Directly below the nest, exactly where it had landed, lay the curled body and crooked, broken neck of a tiny gray skeleton.
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Ode to a Knocked-over Rack of Vials in the Science Freezer (To be read as if in olde-timey English)
Alas! Alas, have I long bespoke of the evil and imminent dangers of open and unsealed racks of experimental vials! For it is not the owner of the vials who shall be the cause of the inevitable catastrophe, but the oafish and clumsy-minded limbs of their less graceful colleagues, who, mindful only of some tedious labor before them, are unaware of the pending doom that awaits.
This unfortunate colleague, suddenly awakened to the fact that one of the appendages assigned to their torso so forgettably has abruptly, as if of its own volition, come into an unforeseen, inconveniently angled and forcefully unbridled contact with such a rack of vials, so that all manner of havoc ensued!
Forsooth! It was as if their pair of arms transformed into the devil of the sea, with eight purple and fearsome tentacles grabbing and knocking about everything within the ordered cabinet so that the vials flew high into the heavens and, upon reaching thus, fell with dull clinking sounds, bouncing and spinning, upon the metal floor within.
The slipshod cause of this very calamity most certainly did respond with such a melancholy cry of "Nooooooooooooooooooo!" that if there were ears present at that late hour to hear it, they would indeed think that some poor soul had found its way into the pit of Hades.
With great remorse and infinite sorrow, the bringer of this chaos attempted to gather the remains of their esteemed colleague's project, and did most laboriously and conscientiously endeavor to place the disordered items back inside that wretched rack.
But again, alas, failure will prove the victor. For as entropy rules our universe, it is written: "Though it may take a thousand men a thousand years to construct an ordered and perfect workspace, it takes only one dolt but a moment to rend it asunder".
(Sorry I knocked over your rack of vials. -Cheri)
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Second Hand
Judith looked like someone who stepped off of the screen from a Little House on the Prairie episode. She wore her soft, thick chestnut hair braided and wrapped around her head in the shape of a cinnamon roll. As children, my sister and I would marvel at this marvelous crown of hair and imagine what it would look like, loosely flowing around her. She wore fitted, buttoned-up blouses and ankle-length skirts that swirled around her thin ankles as if she were wading in a fast moving creek. Judith was an adult, but wore doll-like black Mary Jane shoes with actual buttons on the sides and thick white socks underneath. She did indeed look like a doll, with china-white skin, delicate features, and wide hazel eyes that often glinted with humor.
She was my mother’s best friend. On Sunday afternoons after church, they would gather at the kitchen table and could be found tittering gleefully about this and that, coffee mugs in hand. My mother’s laugh was loud and raucous, while hers was more subdued, but with a bit of wholesome wickedness underneath. I would sometimes hear my mother gasp with surprise, and almost shock, at something Judith said that was just quiet enough for only her to hear. Then, more laughter would ensue.
Once a year, when the fireweeds were just starting to bloom, Judith would bring a large, brown wicker basket filled with used clothing. We would reverently pick out each piece of clothing one at a time, admire the hand-sewn antique blouses with hand-embroidered flowers, and long flowing ladies’ skirts. They were the kind of clothing that made you want to sit up a little straighter and drink tea with your pinkies out. We would try them on over our clothing and keep what fit. One of my favorite blouses was a dark evergreen cloth with tiny yellow and blue flowers and little white doves sitting along the puffed sleeves. I would stare at the pattern and trace it with my fingers, imagining the doves alive and preening each other’s soft white feathers. Sometimes, there would be a pair of long wool-mended socks or even dainty gloves. Hand Me Down Day was like Christmas!
No matter how pretty the clothes were, my mother held them at a distance with a scrunched-up nose because of the smell. They always smelled of acrid cigarette smoke, so much so that she usually washed them twice or more. Judith’s husband, a logger, “smoked like a chimney”, my mother said, but Judith herself never touched the things. My sister and I didn’t mind the smell. We were grateful for the beautiful clothes and in awe of the delicate Judith, who looked like she belonged in an old-fashioned ladies’ magazine and smiled like the midnight sun. Her hugs were fierce and gentle all at the same time, and we couldn’t imagine a Sunday without her.
Sadly, however, one day there came to be one. One Sunday, my mother said that Judith couldn’t be there because she had developed a cough. We weren’t worried; we children had colds now and again and always recovered quickly. But that Sunday turned into two, and then three. A few weeks went by, and then mother took us to visit her.
She lay in her bed, surrounded by homemade pillow shams and a humidifier. I saw her face, grabbed my sister’s hand and started to cry. She looked as if she were made of glass. Her body was so thin that it looked as if she could break at any moment, and her face was white and shiny. She breathed slowly, painfully, but managed a smile. My mother ushered us out of the room and I could hear her apologizing for my crying. They spoke in whispers and then in silence.
Judith went to stay in the big town hospital after that, and my mother visited her several times. Each time she came home, my mother’s face looked more solemn, and sometimes I would see tears in her eyes. It was her lungs, Mother said; they had smoke in them, and they couldn’t get it out. It was called cancer.
Another season passed, and then so did Judith. They had a beautiful ceremony in the church, filled with wildflowers and a picture of her that looked like a painting. Her casket was closed, but I had picked a handful of forget-me-nots, a scrubby bouquet with some of the roots and dirt still attached. I put them by her picture and touched it, just slightly. I knew she was in heaven, but I was confused. How could someone die from a cold caused by smoke? Why did God take her from us? Why didn’t he take her husband instead? Did she get to wear her long hair down in heaven?
Judith’s husband never returned to church. Rumors spread like summer vines about him: that he had started to show up in the town’s only pub, and that he would stay until closing time. We heard whispers between our mother and father, that she had run into him at the grocery store, and that he was filthy and stank of whiskey. “Tsk, tsk”, mother murmured, and then said a prayer for him. When he stopped showing up at the pub and at the store, gossip rose like the tides, washing dirty and rotting idle chatter along the town’s judgmental shore. No one went to visit him. Unlike the church did with other widowers, no one stopped by to offer a pie, an ear to listen, or a caring word. After a while, I never heard anyone talk of him again. Years went by, and I grew old enough to finally learn why. A year after Judith’s death, her husband had tilted his rocking chair back on the porch, took one last long and clear breath into his lungs, cocked his shotgun, and pulled the trigger. When I heard of this, I wondered if the smoke from the blast coming out of his head was the same color as the smoke in her lungs that killed her, and how long it took to dissipate into the clean country air.
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Home
There is a place in the woods that is spun with webs of magic that hold the sunlight just at the right angle to illuminate the emerald moss against the trunks of the willow and pine trees. Where fallen logs create luxurious sitting furniture, and little streams and birds, a background of fanciful music. Surrounding this insulated world are enormous, pale blue-grey mountains with their tops perpetually sprinkled in white, and an unencumbered sky. The sky is ice blue in the short months of summer, with large sheep-like cumulus clouds and visited by tittering bald eagles in the summer. The same skies are black as pitch in the winter so that they show the sparkling constellations and brilliant pendant of the Milky Way. Frequently, the dark skies would become fierce, and scream green and red shouts across the sky, which danced and teased like fairies on the wind, so concrete looking yet so untouchable, the yearning for them might make you cry.
This is the land in which I was raised. A hard land, a cold and formidable place in the winter, in which my sister and I built igloos and hauled wood for the hearth on steel-rail sleds. In the summer, we played in the woods with Bryer horses and rode bikes and skinned our knees, ate blueberries off the bush, and chased moose down their own moose trails. Of course, this was forbidden, as were many things we did. We usually paid the price, if not in skinned knees, with willow switch marks on our buttocks and thighs. But it was worth it, those things we were not supposed to do or say, and got punished for. Without small rebellions, I felt as if I would burst, as if all the colors of me holding on so tightly packed inside would suddenly explode and splat like a wounded rainbow all over the walls and floor.So I did them anyway.
At church, the children would sit in Sunday school gingerly on our often freshly marked bottoms. Afterward, we would go into the girls’ bathroom and compare stripes and bruises. If you had particularly bright or bad ones, you were considered brave, and some sort of twisted honorific was bestowed on you for that week. The marks were always under our clothes, so we had to partially undress to show them off.
This is when I noticed that, compared to most, my young body was different than the others. I was rather stout. Instead of the thin, graceful limbs of my sisters (we called each other sister even though I only had one real one), mine were not long nor graceful, but a bit chubby and short. My stomach did not sit flat as theirs did, but pooched out slightly. I was embarrassed and tried to hold it in, but it was too tiring to do for long. My tall, thin best friend had golden hair that was smooth and straight, lying like a frozen yellow waterfall down her back. My hair was brown-orange colored and frizzy. It was thick and unruly, sticking out at odd places and always seemed to be in the way. I yearned to be small and tidy like my friend, like a doll that could wear pretty clothes and fit neatly wherever it was placed. But I knew I was not that type of person, and would never be.In fact, I felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere at all, except in the woods that embraced me with their charms.
In this wilderness, I would grow. The elegance of the land would soothe my soul, unlike inside the house, where my body was beaten and my spirit gasped for breath. I was a weed betwixt two rocky crags that had caught just enough dirt to develop, and just enough rain of affection to not wither completely. The seasons would oversee the sprouting of that tiny weed, and through the storms would witness the roots becoming stronger, more rebellious, so that eventually they would crack through the stone and take furious hold.
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The Jump Rope
I adjusted my bulky bag filled with my students’ assignments and uneaten lunch and stood at the crowded bus stop. I was hungry and grumpy, and it was late afternoon on a Friday. I wiped my hand across my sweaty forehead, and that’s when I saw her.
On the edge of the school playground, just across the street, stood a young girl I didn’t recognize, skipping rope on the cracked asphalt. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old and wore a faded and too large school uniform.
The bus arrived and the small crowd plodded onto it, but I held back, concerned. The girl didn’t get on the bus. She struggled with the old blue and yellow jump rope, her small hands tightly grasping the plastic ends. Somehow, the cord had become tangled. It wrapped behind one leg and around the other and ended in a knot around her wrist.
The girl opened her mouth and let out a plaintive, quiet sob. Her cry knocked at my heart. Did she cry because she was left alone to play on the sidewalk? Did she cry because she feared the oncoming night, where the windows and doors were shut and dark? I could only guess that she cried because she was stuck in her jump rope and could not get free.
I left my place at the bus stop and crossed the street. I approached the child slowly, and kneeled in front of her.
“What’s the matter, sweetie? Are you stuck?” I gently asked. She stopped crying and looked up at me with deep brown eyes.
I reached toward her, and she stood still as I took the rope and unwound it, and she was free. “You’re all right now, dear,” I softly said. She didn’t answer, but extended a skinny arm to accept the untangled rope. “Don’t you want to go home?” I asked. “It’s getting late.” The girl shook her head. “Do you know how to get home?” She nodded and pointed to one of the apartment buildings down the block. “Is anyone home?” She shook her head again, then reached under her collar and produced a key tied around her neck with a thin black string. Latchkey kid, I thought, and understood. “You’d better get along, dear.” I urged.
She picked up her worn backpack and started walking slowly toward the apartment building. I watched her hesitate by the door and turn the key. I waited until she was inside, then turned toward the empty bus stop and sat. Suddenly, I felt an ache in my throat, and tears pricked at my eyes. Why was I crying? Was I crying because of the sad girl trapped in her jump rope? Was I crying because she was left to play in the late afternoon on a dirty sidewalk? Or, just maybe, it was because I, too, was on my way toward an empty home, alone, where all of the windows and doors were shut and dark.