Month: June 2024

The Blue Pony

by Valerie Valdez

Gifted. Zara sees more than she can speak. Feels what others can’t. She is slow when speed is needed. Or quick when it’s not. No sync. She gazed at the vast sky.

“Maybe its a place for me? Where my slow and quick make sense.”

She climbed up a tree. Higher. Higher. And still higher. The clouds pulled her inside. They praised her gifts.

“What are they? I don’t know.” The clouds replied, “You will.”

The teacher said, “All kids will paint a picture. A noble masterpiece.”

She raised her hands high in the air. Up and still up. Zara’s eyes followed the teacher’s fingers up. Past the ceiling to the clouds. Zara imagined painting a gorgeous pony with her as its rider. Other kids drew stick figures living in square boxes. Yawn. Her painting would hang at the highest spot on the classroom’s wall. The other artwork would make the teachers and parents smile.

“How nice.”

They would say in their polite teacher and parent voices. But then their eyebrows would arch at Zara’s painting, and they would sing her praise like a choir.

“What a beautiful portrait of a pony with such a lovely girl rider.” “So amazing.”

“A noble masterpiece.”

Mother surely would hug her extra tight. And still tighter. Then hang it on the family’s dining room wall beside father’s war medals.

Zara decided to paint her pony blue, like the sky, with a white mane, for the clouds. She wanted his eyes yellow, but she dipped the brush in black paint instead. Dark spots stared at her. Fail! Make it right. Clean the brush. She painted another blue pony. Clean the brush. She painted her figure in orange sitting on top of the pony it. Sitting proud. But the brush slipped. It mingled with wet green paint. The colors turned into mud.

Fail again!

Fix it.

Zara mixed more green to the dark spot. She added more orange to her figure, then more green. The lines grew fatter. The paper sagged. Make it right. Other children cleaned up. Zara asked for more paper.

The teacher said, “Sorry, I haven’t got time.” Defeat whispered to her, “You failed, again.” Everyone looked at her.

Fear tightened her throat. No words.

Paint dripped from the sagging paper. A mud puddle on the floor. But Zara refused to believe defeat’s words. She grabbed the wet brushes and painted on the wall. A large blue pony with a white mane and yellow eyes appeared.

The teacher yelled, “Stop.”

Zara still refused. Other kids laughed. She smeared orange paint over her clothes. She whistled. The pony turned its head to look at her. He jumped off the wall. The teacher and other kids gasped. Zara climbed onto its back. They trotted out of the school.

Zara clung to its white mane. The pony trotted quicker. Then slower. Yet it was her quick and slow.

Now it made sense.

Sync.

The pony jumped into the air. A huge wind lifted them. Higher. Into the vast sky. The clouds pulled them up inside. They cheered. Proud of her.

THUNDER!

Her confidence exploded.

“I painted a noble masterpiece.” The clouds replied, “First of many.”

The blue pony stayed in the clouds. It would come to her. If she needed it, again. Mother washed the orange paint off her clothes. Zara put the piece of paper on the wall next to father’s war medals.

Her parents said, “It’s blank.”

But Zara shook her head no.

“It’s a painting of me riding a blue pony.”

Because of autism, I didn’t speak until the age of five, but didn’t get diagnosed until age 42. So, I found my first friends in words. After forty years of working in business, I retired in 2023 to write full time. I consider myself a “Goat Singer”, the ancient Greek term for a storyteller. My life is multi-layered to the hilt with careers in television production, a freelance reporter, and a college professor of theater and film studies, and an office manager for architecture and engineering firms. Recently published online works include “The Venus Inn,” which received an Honorable Mention from the Northwind Writing Award sponsored by Raw Earth Ink Books, and CultureCult Press published “The Alba River” in its anthology, as well as “Sara and Sunlight Midnight” (poems), “The Watched Man and Idiots” (fiction), published in Write or Die Fiction Magazine, and another poem, “Older,” in Pure Slush Magazine.

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CNF: Not All Words Taste Like Prayer

by Lynne Jensen Lampe

Split dry pods, remove seeds. Knife their hard covering & soak overnight. Set a watch o Lord. Moonflower vines scaffold the porch beam & railing. A backyard baptism, hot tub instead of the River Jordan. Hands push me under. Words flood in—Jesus, scotch & Mama. I keep my eyes closed, afraid to see God & remember shame. I am someone whose mother twice tried to drown her.

Buds unfurl at dusk. White blossoms glow—toxic, not deadly. Set a watch o Lord. I’m twelve, maybe younger. Mama & I stop washing dishes, twirl round & round, sing nonsense & giggle. Dad can’t see my happy. A month later, I pass through locked steel doors to bright tile & fluorescent lights & Mama chain-smoking menthols on a psych ward. Set a watch o Lord. Her roommate dies & Mama sleeps next to the corpse. No one finds the body till morning.

Scents of honey & vanilla tickle the air, fragrant as my inner wrist after caress. Blooms sweeten the night, spiral shut at dawn. In college I call Mama & we laugh so long I forget sorrow. Then she asks if I have sex, if I feel she pushes me. Men rush to answer. Hips unfurl—I scaffold other bodies while scared of my own, trade my happy for good. Set a watch o Lord. I use drugs to slip borders, realize only later my mind can push me under. I am someone whose mother twice tried to drown her.

Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award winner and finalist for the 8th Annual McMath Book Award, concerns motherhood and mental illness. Her poems appear in Stone Circle Review, Rise Up Review, THRUSH, Yemassee, and elsewhere. She edits academic writing, reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and lives with her husband and two dogs in Columbia, MO. https://lynnejensenlampe.com or https://linktr.ee/lynnejensenlampe for socials.

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The Softness

by John Davies

While I’m stirring too much honey into the porridge, The Softness lulls: Don’t worry, give up, the time for senseless adventure is over. The post drops through the letterbox: mortgage interest on the rise; the bill for my father’s headstone; flyers for cut-price lawn equipment; Make your Will now and receive a free fountain pen; 3-for-2 offer on grout; Municipal Golf Course Seeks New Members: Your game won’t improve with rusty clubs.

A bumper day for The Softness. Deposit down on an Adriatic cruise – pay the balance in easy installments. The Softness coos at two hours’ free time in Venice or Trieste, souvenir opportunities, Segway rides for the thrill-seekers. Go on, The Softness urges, You only live once. Oats swell and the porridge bubbles, spitting milk.

Only believing in what they can taste, the cat and dog lick each other’s empty bowls, then sit and stare expectantly: What next? Are there enough unpainted fences and unmowed lawns to last your remaining years? A 45 minute Youtube tutorial on toilet cisterns beckons. That’s the stuff, The Softness moans. No longer feel a DIY failure – Like our channel and Subscribe.

But beneath the back garden decking, patio furniture, fire pit and netted trampoline,

the deep roots stir. An underground rumbling causes The Softness to whimper, to drop the latest Aldi brochure. Crows swivel necks to peer into the kitchen window where the porridge is beginning to burn. In their quickshot eye, you are archived with all prior residents. The crows speculate as to who will come next, change the colour of the fence to their taste, pebble-dash the walls, plant plum trees but never really make a dent.

Groggy children surface one-by-one, grumble at the ruined porridge, are bundled into uniform and pointed in the direction of school, careers, certain death. The Softness swells to room-size, restored by the numb joy of routine. Go out and make a living – Celebrity Surgical Disasters and a glass of discounted wine your reward. You’ve earned this.

Outside the living room windows, panes flickering ghost-characters of streamed box-sets, the roots of the ancient oak flex. The river has always made this sound. The standing stone in the far field absorbs the dying rays, eyes the encroaching moon, waits for the house to crumble, return to earth. As distraction, The Softness drills you for tomorrow’s job interview: What are your strengths and weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five, ten years, in millennia? Name your favourite team-building exercise. What is music for?

You’ve got this. Floss, double Windsor your tie, act confident. Practice in the mirror. Between the leaking taps and toothpaste spatter, your lips twitch, try to remember. The Softness whispers into your ear: A fake smile’s as good for you as the real thing.

The toilet still refuses to flush, but The Softness knows an excellent plumber.

Born in Birkenhead, UK, John has lived in Navan, Ireland since 2013. A former winner of the Penguin Ireland Short Story Award, and the Letheon Poetry Prize, his work appears in journals including Vastarien, Banshee, Southword, Manchester Review, Maine Review, Apex, Pseudopod and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. He co-runs The Bull’s Arse Creative Writing Group based in Navan (Twitter @Bulls_Arse).

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Pretending Not to be Dangerous

by Amanda Chiado

My husband says the crabs he catches are filled with the souls of his dead. He leaves like a ghost before dawn, and his clothes are already stained with blood. I draw him near like a homecoming, or a memory I plan to keep. I like that I still feel like I am dreaming. Recently, he has taken to rubbing my legs and feet before he says goodbye and I can see how I am too, a soft animal made of desire. He comes back smelling of the far away, yet not Peter Pan, and his ship mates are chummy and tired and manly. They catch their own transgressed souls. He can’t kill the crabs right away since they are harboring messages on their hard shells, in their fur kissed mouths, in their pinchers. He treats them fairly, but their sadness is gut punch when you open the cooler. They lay on each other and look up at the sun. They pretend, like me, that they are not dangerous. My son wants to keep them but kept is not a wishing rock. It may be the winter that makes us so desperate. The thinning of the veil between here and there. Eventually my husband eats the messages, covered in butter to smooth the salvation, and his eyes swell up with the tears of the ocean, and we brace ourselves and buoy the dog. The house fills with wet memory. We ride out the rocking waves until Easter, and then my husband rises from the water, dripping, soft and wrinkled as a newborn.

Amanda Chiado is the author of Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has most recently appeared in Rhino, The Pinch Journal, and The Offing. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart & Best of the Net. She is the Director of Arts Education at the San Benito County Arts Council, is a California Poet in the Schools, and edits for Jersey Devil Press. www.amandachiado.com/em>