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Showing posts from August 27, 2016

Saturday's Storyteller: "The stars wheeled overhead as the light flared from..."

by Belinda Roddie The stars wheeled overhead as the light flared from seemingly all directions. The noise came from the sky. It came in growls and whispers and shrieks and groans. It whistled and croaked and whinnied and howled. It hiccuped, belched, sneezed, and sighed. But most of all, it cried. At least, I felt like it was crying for me. I don't know how long I lay there in the grass, my back braced by the curve of the drought-stricken earth, my knees bent so that my legs splayed out in crooked angles, creating a dysfunctional geometry. I knew that after what had happened, my body was now physically awry. There was no balance, no equilibrium, no sense of core or center. I had become asymmetrical. The cosmos were witness to this metamorphosis, though the darkness concealed it from anyone else who might be aimlessly wandering around in the middle of the night. There was blood still coming out of my mouth as I attempted to sit up and check for injuries - broken bones, tor

Today's OneWord: Grounded

Mister and Missus Shank grounded their daughter Abby for exactly three weeks, two days, seven hours, and thirteen minutes. The reasoning for this was simple: It would fall right on the very end of her fourteenth birthday. Their neighbors, Mister Wainsworth, was floored. What exactly had Abby done, he wondered aloud, to deserve such a long and meticulously timed punishment? "She tried to summon the devil," Missus Shank explained to him over tea.