I don't feel as though I've contributed much during my time here (it would have been nice, for example, had I remembered when I agreed to guest-blog for Helen that I was going to be out of town without internet access for a couple of days during the same time she was absent), but luckily this is the internet and so I found a couple of pieces by others that you might like to read.

They are stories, haunting and somewhat melancholy stories, but beautifully crafted ones, and I don't think either will leave you too bummed out.

The Pond, by Chris Clarke at Creek Running North:

Gregory lived in the tall grass now, but Leah could not find him. She peered between the clumps of big bluestem, called him out into the rocky clearing at the pondÂ’s edge, but he did not answer her. Her right arm buzzed bright with pain, pink and fiery, concentric arcs where red metal had branded her the day before.

She looked for him among the cattails, their fat seed heads burst open and bleeding down. He wasnÂ’t there. There were only the cattail shoots and sedges between them, their stems bespattered with drying duckweed blown up onto them in last nightÂ’s storm.

Emerging Bones, by Theriomorph:

I was dizzy all the time and kept having this problem with all the oxygen in the world disappearing very suddenly and the concomitant sensation of a vacuum around me that imploded my chest and then I couldnÂ’t breathe and everything would go dim and fuzzy except the jagged violence of my own heartbeat which would grow deafening, aggressive, a crashing of horror and rage that dragged my vision down some long tunnel into tiny pinpricks of red, throbbing in irregular beat.

They call these panic attacks, of the Post Traumatic Stress variety.

This happened when I woke up from the dreams of pushing his dirt-encrusted tongue back into his mouth, or giant animals made out of metal crushing him at forestÂ’s edge, or searching for his killer on high hills and because I wasnÂ’t succeeding Shalom was fading from my sight and from the world.

Pop over, see if you like them. Both authors write rings around me, and yet it's impossible for me to hate them, because I am not really a writer; I am a blogger, and a reader, and oh, how I love to read a good story or two.

Posted by: Ilyka at 07:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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