NaPoWriMo #0 (Rory's Story Cubes)

The preceding flash fiction pieces, for national poetry month, will (almost) all be generated through using Rory's Story Cubes (given to me by Carla Blaschka for my 45th birthday), the Stranger (Savage Love), and Craigslist (personal ads, which immensely fascinate me).

March 31, 2013

Rory’s heart was locked up tight.

Rory remembered the first time he was locked in the closet. He was eight years old. He reached for the ketchup and tipped over his glass of milk. The milk flowed across the table into his stepmom's lap. She was wearing her best Easter clothes. She grabbed him by the ear and drug him down the hall and shoved him into the closet. She jammed the door shut with a chair and sat there while Rory screamed and flung himself at the door.

Rory spent several hours each week in the cramped punishment room. He prayed, on his knees, to whatever gods existed that he be delivered from this darkness. A thin filament of light filtered through the key hole. It became a constant character in his dreams.

Hidden under loose floor boards, Rory found a box of revealing lingerie, crusty valentine chocolates, and Alex Haley’s book “Roots.” Rory’s African grandfather married a Jew. Oppression existed in his genes. Every tequila sweetened breath his father breathed was an expression of it. Rory imagined the emotional torture one might feel for being forced into labor.

He hated doing the laundry, washing dishes, scrubbing the toilet with a toothbrush, and mowing the lawn.

After what seemed like days, “You can come out of the closet if you promise to be a good little boy and do the right thing,” his stepmother would intone in a firm voice.

---William James

NaPoWriMo # -1 (semi-found)

I Saw You

I was the girl with the angry birds t-shirt. You were the girl tussling with crutches.

We were on a #4 bus to downtown Vancouver. I was too shy to talk to you.

I handed you a note. In it I said, “Something precious radiates from your eyes. I feel enthralled to sit in your presence. I am a different kind of person. And I sense that you are too. That we share a kinship in this strange alien world.”

I should have gotten over you by now. It was last summer that we looked into each other’s eyes. That when you locked your eyes into mine it connected us to an alternate reality where we could be one body housing two co-mingling souls.

Please, if you happen to chance across this ad, and you are not creeped out, write me back my dear sweet friend. And let us shine our alien lights into this world so that we can find our way home, together.

I am lonely without you.

Did you happen to see me?

---William James

                          Source: CL Missed Connections, March 2013

Guest Author: Samuel Ortiz (Episode 1)

WARNING THIS IS A FAKE STORY

CHAPTER 1 - THE STRANGERS

On January 1, 1780 on port USOA a person saw a thing floating in the sky. "Oh oh," he said. He was the person looking on 12 the person on 9 asked, "What happened?"

"There's something floating in the sky." he replied. "There's three things it could be: 1) it could drop bombs; 2) it could be people that want help; and 3) it could be people coming to our country," Mr. 12 speculated. Before he could say something else, Mr. 9 said, "I'm confused, let’s ask the police and Turbo 1 about it."

Then, when they were in the city they told Turbo 1 and Turbo 1 went to the police and they said, "Why don't we go to the secret treasure chest and see what it is." So they went there and saw it was coming to their country.

Then they told the whole country to make a circle and then told Wrong Direction (which is like One Direction) to sing the National Anthem but only the verse because they were geting closer then they sang the Republic Song after all that the strangers in the plane came out of the plane politely everyone said hi to the people. The president's name was Mr. Huge and the whole town said things of their country and all the strangers said was "nice, nice, nice, very nice, nice," and when they talked about the war he said, "not nice not nice very not nice."

---By Samuel Ortiz. Edited by Ivanna Ortiz

I guess the reblog button does work???

verse-re (Nicole C. Scott) : You're What I Want: © http://original-writer.com/gettingpoetrypublished52nicole.html In my dream I went up to my employer and ques...

Now it would be nice if I had a button to cross species reblog like from word press or other places

Friday's Children by Afzal Moolla

I, alone

Plunging into my rootless heart,

with daggers and thorny dreams.

I stagger alone,

my famished thoughts sliced apart,

my senses adrift on tear-speckled streams.

Squirming through pockets of tattered hope,

each laboured smile a convincing fake.

I slip alone,

in futile freefall on a sand-paper slope,

to be mutedly impaled on memory's stake.

Diving deeper into the darkness that I fear,

surrendering the will to feel,

I crumble alone,

though I cannot shed a solitary tear,

and I refuse to ever cower or to kneel.

Emerging from under the murky grime,

clasping the frayed fibres within,

I crawl alone,

out of the anguish of today's slime,

banishing a million tragedies before they begin.

Rising up into the scarred night,

cocooned in the warmth of an imminent dawn,

I, alone,

know the battles that I must fight,

in the coming tomorrows yet to be born.

Copyright © 2013 by Afzal Moolla

Friday's Children by Afzal Moolla

Someone always told me this with tears in her eyes

A wife left South Africa in the 1960’s to join her husband

who was in exile at the time...

In 1970, the husband was sent by the African National Congress to India to be its representative there...

The husband and wife spent two years in Bombay...

One afternoon the husband fell and broke his leg...

The wife knocked on their neighbour’s door, in an apartment complex in Bombay

The neighbour was an old Punjabi lady...

The wife asked the neighbour for a doctor to see to the injured husband...

A Parsi ‘Bone-Setter’ was promptly summoned...

The husband still recalls his anxiety of seeing ‘Bone-Setter’ written on the Parsi gentleman’s bag...

By the way, the ‘Bone-Setter’ worked his ancient craft and surprisingly for the husband, his broken leg healed quite soon...

But still on that day, while the ‘Bone-Setter’ was seeing to the husband...

The wife and the old Punjabi lady from next door got to talking about this and that and where these new Indian-looking wife and husband were from as their accents were clearly not local...

The wife told the elderly Punjabi lady that the husband worked for the African National Congress of South Africa and had left to serve the ANC from exile...

And that they had left their two children behind in South Africa and that they were now essentially political refugees...

The Punjabi lady broke down and wept uncontrollably...

She told the foreign woman that she too had had to leave her home in Lahore in 1947 and flee to India with only the clothes on her back when the partition of the subcontinent took place and Pakistan was formed and at a time when Hindus from Pakistan fled to India and vice versa...

The Punjabi lady then asked the foreign woman her name...

‘Zubeida’, but you can call me ‘Zubie’...

The Punjabi woman hugged Zubie some more, and the two women, seperated by age and geography, wept, sharing a shared pain...

The Punjabi woman told Zubie that she was her ‘sister’ from that day on, and that she felt that pain of exile and forced migration and what being a refugee felt like...

Zubie and her husband Mosie became the closest of friends with the Hindu Punjabi neighbours who were kicked out of Pakistan by Muslims...

Then came the time for Mosie and Zubie to leave for Delhi where the African National Congress office was based...

The elderly Punjabi lady and Mosie and Zubie said their goodbyes...

A year or two later, the elderly Punjabi lady’s daughter Lata married Ravi Sethi and the couple moved to Delhi...

The elderly Punjabi lady called Zubie and told her that her daughter was coming to Delhi to live and that she had told Lata, her daughter that she had a ‘sister’ in Delhi...

Lata and Ravi Sethi then moved to Delhi...

This was in the mid-1970’s...

Lata and Zubie became the closest of friends and that bond stayed true, and stays true till today, though Zubie is no more, and the elderly Punjabi lady is no more...

The son and the husband still have a bond with Lata and Ravi Sethi...

A bond that was forged between Hindu and Muslim and between two continents across the barriers of creed and time...

A bond strong and resilient, forged by the pain and trauma of a shared experience...

And that is why, and I shall never stop believing this, that hope shines still, for with all the talk of this and of that, and of that and of this, there will always be a simple woman, somewhere, anywhere, who would take the ‘other’ in as a sister, a fellow human...

And that is why there will always be hope...

Hope in the midst of this and of that and of that and of this...

hope...

(for Lata Sethi's late-mother, who was my mother’s ‘sister’ and who took us all into her heart, and for Lata and Ravi Sethi of Defence Colony, New Delhi)

Copyright © 2013 by Afzal Moolla