Pumpkin patch
Every year this pumpkin patch has many many visitors .
They come from all over the region looking for the best pumpkin around .
The kids enjoy the face paintings and balloon animals .
The adults enjoy warm apple cider and cider donuts .
Everyone enjoys the hayrides and haunted mazes .
But this pumpkin has something special.
The kids wonder the patch looking for the best Orange pumpkin it has to offer .
A very nice couple a man and wife who gladly help the youngster out .
Many have spoken of these two wonderful people Bob and Emily .
Bob helps get some of the biggest and beautiful pumpkins
Emily gets unique looking pumpkins for the children .
The only problem with this is that the pumpkin patch doesn't have a bob or Emily working there .
Each child tells of there experience no adults have ever seen any workers.
The parents just say there kids were talking to imaginary people .
So this year when you visit your pumpkin patch say hello to bob and Emily . Those imaginary friends your children are talking to might be two of the nicest spirits you meet . Boo !
for a writer, words are a saviour
for some time, i was lost
i was in a cold mess of memories, of feelings and here, everything was wrong and in pieces. i couldn’t get a grip on my thoughts, my emotions
each step forward was a thousand backwards. every turn was to emptiness. i was looking deeper, looking further something to escape this whatever this was but i couldn’t find anything. except, sharp edges and red darkness. red cold darkness that screeched in sorrow. and i was struggling against emotions i couldn’t name. it felt hollow, a bit like loneliness, parts like sad and excruciatingly familiar like home. it felt uncomfortable and my heart ached for something but I didn’t know what it was. and i kept searching –when it found me
It was a like a song drifting into the breeze, like a fading old picture
it was words
they filled the darkness in warmth and light and finally,
I could grip myself and make sense of everything
it was sunlight streaming through seams, it was words that washed like honey and I was drenched in a warmth I couldn’t describe
it was enlightening, felt beautiful and
I found power in my bones, in my myself -
and I walked and there it was
the pen and page were waiting for me and I picked the pen and like a lover,
an old friend
strangely familiar yet foreign
the words came to me
and
I
wrote
everything,
all I couldn’t say
all couldn't explain
and though pieces still didn't really make any sense
no matter how I read it,
it felt so right
for some time, I was lost and I still am but I think
I am nearly there
(whatever there is )
Dinner
China, 124 million years ago.
Spring has finally arrived. The snow is melting away. The temperatures are rising and its inhabitants are returning home after a long journey from far away and warmer lands. The pterosaurs have returned from the seas and the dinosaurs march through their homeland for the first time since winter began a few months ago. Among these dinosaurs were a group of Beipiaosaurus, an odd dinosaur species with a long neck, short tail, and prominantly the elongated foreclaws of a carnivore but had the diet of a herbivore. Then came a herd of the last stegosaurid dinosaurs, the Wuerhosaurus. And not far behind was a flock of eight-foot long, gazelle-sized, bipedal dinosaurs called Psittacosaurus, who are distant precusors to the famous North American Triceratops. Mothers, fathers, offspring, and grandparents are all travelling together as one large herd. The journey was long and difficult. Some of the members of the herd either died from sickness or from predators.
One of the Psittacosaurs spots a fresh new flowing plant sprouting from the melting snow. The colors of the flowing plant capture his eyes. He hasn’t eaten since his journey. He does not want to wander off from the herd, but the growls in his stomach urge him to feed. Giving in to his urges, he walks toward the small plant and away from the herd. What harm could this do? After all it is dinner time. He approaches the little plant and sniffs it. The microscopic pollen spores flutter into the Psittacosaurus’ small nostrils, causing him to sneeze. The plant smells good enough to eat. He observes the green leaves and the colorful flowers. It looks good enough to eat. The Psittacosaurus reaches forward and grabs a flower with his large parrot-like beak. The luscious taste of the flower leaves a great sensation in his mouth. He starts to consume more and more of the plant, forgetting about his herd.
KRAK!
A noise! Psittacosaurus flinches. He scans his surroundings. Whatever made that noise isn’t far away. Is it a friend or a foe? Feeling uncomfortable, the lone Psittacosaurus takes a couple small steps back and turns himself around, cautiously making his way back to the herd.
Suddenly, Psittacosaurus feels something sharp piercing into its small body. He lets out a pain curdling screech. He tries to run but it does him no good. His feet gravitate away from the ground. His attacker, Yutyrannus, the predatory king of prehistoric China and close cousin of the almighty Tyrannosaurus Rex, grasps the small herbivore within her sharp, knife-like teeth. She hoists her prey into the air as the blood of the animal seeps down from her jaws. The Psittacosaurus helplessly kicks his arms and legs in the air, wanting to escape from this torment yet unable to free himself from Yutyrannus’ grasp. He calls out for help but his herd has already moved on, not that any of them could to any good against this alpha predator. The large carnivore violently shakes the Psittacosaurus like a rag doll, rupturing the organs and breaking the bones. Once her prey finally stops kicking and screeching, Yutyrannus drops the lifeless Psittacosaurus onto the ground. The killer queen of China then roars victoriously over her fresh kill.
Out of the forest pops an infant Yutyrannus, screeching and calling for his mother. The mother bellows back to her offspring, letting him know that supper is ready. The infant uses his clawed toes to scratch off some fluff of his feathers and runs towards his mother. The infant grabs ahold of the Psittacosaur’s stomach and pulls apart the flesh with is small jaws. The mother happily watches as her infant feeding. While the Psittacosaurus met an unfortunate end, his death helped provide this hungry infant a chance to eat and give it strength to continue roaming the earth. Soon, the infant will grow to an adult length of thirty-feet and become as large as a school bus, becoming the apex predator in prehistoric China. In a world full of dinosaurs, one rule of survival seems to stand out: one dinosaur’s downfall is another dinosaur’s dinner.
#dinosaurs #paleontology #fiction
The Second Life of Umberto Burn
The funeral, like many others, had been a sad affair. Until the apparition appeared, that is. For Umberto Burn had not been a serious man in life, and he could hardly be expected to become more so in death, after having slipped his mortal coil.
The attendance was more than fair at the wake of the great magician, which was of course held in his own house, and his wife and two grown sons felt proud that so many had come to pay tribute to the man that they had so loved. The jeweler was there, his wife’s claw-like hand sparkling with rings. The doctor had come with her fair daughter, whose blush rose up her comely neck when Umberto’s older son smiled and thanked her for coming. And honor of honors, the town mayor appeared, strolling into the small, white-walled sitting room, midnight-blue waistcoat struggling to contain his not inconsiderable stomach.
Umberto’s remarkably lifelike remains were of course the focal point of the room, and his coffin was positioned against the south wall, the chairs arranged to face it. His skin was unlined in spite of his white hair, and his pencil mustache was as perfectly waxed as ever. The red bowtie he had only ever worn while performing persuaded some of the younger children that the magician was about to sit up and tell them all that his sudden and unexplained death had been yet another trick. Of course, however, this did not happen.
But Umberto’s ghost did make an appearance. Two old biddies were sitting in his plush red chairs, frizzy gray heads pushed together, talking about his body over their demitasses of punch.
“Odd to see him so quiet,” the one on his left said. “I don’t think I ever saw his mouth closed.” He stuck his head between theirs and with his famous wide smile, spoke.
“Why thank you,” he grinned, “I would consider myself a weak performer indeed if I did not always keep your attention.” The ladies jumped back, howling. The one who had spoken fell over in a dead faint, her companion moving with surprising alacrity until she was out of the house altogether, still howling.
“Ah, father,” his younger son spoke, “I was wondering if we should see you.” His wife stepped toward him.
“It is good to see you again, Umberto. I hope everything on the other side is to your liking?”
“Indeed, Marguerite, when your time comes we shall be very comfortable here. But I hear it is time for my burial. I have come to see it performed. When one gets the chance to attend one’s funeral, one does not miss it!”
The rest of the party stared at Umberto in various states of surprise. If there was a way to come back from the dead, they were not surprised that the renowned magician had discovered one. The butcher’s young son spoke up timidly.
“Mr. Burn, how did you do it? Come back, I mean?”
“Ah, young Jeremiah, you know I would never reveal my secrets!”
*****
They made their way to the graveyard with aplomb, Umberto’s coffin carried solemnly by his chosen pallbearers and Umberto himself leading a conga line behind it. His wife’s hands kept sinking through his shoulders when she forgot that he was no longer solid, but he hardly minded. Through the cemetery, its white tombstones glowing pink in the vivid sunset, they wound their merry way. They lowered his coffin into the ground and the priest intoned over it, Umberto making faces behind his back with every mention of “resting in peace.” And when his body was safely in the ground, Umberto Burn went home with his family.
The next morning, a pounding on his front door woke Umberto. When his wife opened it, the postman stumbled in, sweat pouring down his red face.
“You –have to –come quick. Cemetery. Not good!”
With his wife, his sons, and the postman, Umberto rushed back to the graveyard, where he stopped dead in his tracks. For a moment, he thought there was a mirror leaning against the stone wall of the graveyard. It was then that he realized he was staring at his own body, propped against the wall, mouth lolling open.
“Well,” Umberto said, “the widows were right about my never closing my mouth.”
His sons hoisted his body between them, and they followed after him into the graveyard, his wife beside him and the forgotten postman forming the caboose of their little train. They tracked their way back through the graveyard, dew sparkling in the morning light. When they reached the oak tree beside which his grave stood, they paused. For there stood the coffin, on the grass beside the gigantic hole they had just seen the night before.
With Umberto’s instruction, his sons repositioned his body in the coffin and reclosed the lid. They would see the caretaker on the way out and have the coffin resealed and reburied. No one was very troubled. It was not unexpected that the body of such an excellent magician would still be playing tricks after death.
*****
They were not worried until the process was repeated the next day. And the next. And the next. Every day, his body was found farther from its grave. Until finally, when his body was found two towns away exactly one week after his original burial, Umberto reached a conclusion. When he told his wife, she was unsurprisingly unhappy.
“Of course you can’t go back! Whyever would you go back when you can be here? With me?” As tears ran down her beautiful face, he remembered the first time he had ever seen her. She had been an orphan, seventeen to his twenty-four, when she had come to him and begged to be his assistant. And though he had had no money himself, he had known that he could not say no. Indeed, he could never deny her anything. Until now. He cradled her beloved face in his hands, though she could not feel them.
“My Marguerite. My pearl. I cannot stay here. I should never have come back. Indeed, I told Saint Peter I would be gone only for an hour, and it has been seven days. It was a mistake, my flower. We have had our time –more than our time. And one day, it will be our time again.”
“Then that day shall be tomorrow. I shall end myself the moment you leave!” He stepped away from her, horrified.
“You will do no such thing! For that would make a hell of my heaven! Besides,” he said more gently, “our sons need their mother.” She nodded sorrowfully. She had spoken in haste, and she knew he was right.
“I will be with you, though you will no longer see me. I never really left. You will see one day how you can exist in two worlds at once. I have been straddling a line, which I can no longer do. But,” he winked at her, “I will stick my head over every once in a while.”
*****
After saying his final goodbyes (again), Umberto Burn walked out of his house. He made his way to the graveyard. And this time, he, too, got into his coffin before it was lowered into the ground one final time.
*****
Marguerite Burn was the most joyous widow the town had ever known. She cradled her grandchildren and laughed with her sons. She adored the wife of her elder son, who had once been the blushing girl at his father’s funeral, and the husband of her younger son, whose circus brought as much joy to the town as Umberto himself once had.
When Marguerite died twenty years after her husband, the town was somewhat disappointed that she did not reappear as he had. But on quiet evenings during particularly spectacular sunsets, the Burn grandchildren stared out at the graveyard and marveled. For sometimes, they would swear that they could see two figures dancing in a conga line, waiting for others to join them.
The Smallest of Wins
I’d held him to myself for four months. Four months of a double life where some could see parts of me while I forced another side down, down down down, until even I was starting to get confused about who I was. Four months. Imagine it, that’s literally half the time a baby needs to be developed. Four. Fucking. Months.
The process, or whatever you would define "coming out" as, started two weeks ago. Two and a half, maybe. It was one of the nights where I couldn’t feel myself. Feel myself sounds dirty, which is kind of gross, but I have held the facade of being almost purely asexual for so long that maybe I was actually starting to believe it, despite having done so much stuff with him. Although this is anonymous, although you don’t know, although there is so much that could be way worse, his name, his identity, has to stay mine. Because no one really tells you that, once you come out, once you make yourself known as “gay” and not devoid of sexual feelings, these things that were once yours start to become the world’s. A product of a consequence, a small victory of not having a secret. So if I’m going to remain sane, the only reasonable thing I can do is keep pieces of it for myself and myself only.
Wow, that entire sequence right there was a tangent. Here’s another one, a small one, though, I promise I’ll keep it brief, but tangents are what started this. Off-hand topics, uncalled-for responses, bits and pieces of the mask I painted onto my face just slowly chipping off until I couldn’t take it anymore. I need you to understand that, to know that, if I had held it for much longer, I might never have revealed it all. A double life, one of straight-but-hinted-gay-and-asexual me and gay-oh-so-gay-and-going-out-late-at-night-to-see-a-man-and-kiss-a-man-and-oh-did-I-mention-he's-gay? me, like some sort of pretty socially fucked superhero. Except, you know, my own deception was my worst villain.
It started with a story. A tangent of my own private writings, a confession on the cheap Dell laptop's screen. Sometimes, when you just write for yourself, you see the little bits of plastic you threw in your own pond, hoping they'd sink to the bottom, just casually float back up, muddier but somehow cleaner than before. This is what happens when I'm depressed, when I can't feel myself (see, told you tangents are a real thing in my life). I write. And sometimes, you get too close to comfort, even for yourself. Here's a bit of it, and the motif of the story was glasses and how they let you see, but when you lie, these glasses become cracked, smudged, until you can't even see two inches in front of your face. Hell, is your nose even there? You don't really know. Not to detract from this writing itself, but to believe it, to see the amount of thoughts bubbling up in my head, you have to see it. See it in the way that I couldn't for so long.
Now, I sit in classrooms. I text friends. Or at least, I think they’re my friends. I accidentally keep secrets, because who wants to know about that, but what if they found out? Would they hate you? Would they drop you just like you dropped your glasses into the ocean, letting them wash away so that you were nearly blind for two days straight? And what if you tell them? Will they hate you then? Will they hate the initial lie? So.
You hold it in. You let the tears build up to the brim of your lenses, misty with your heaving breath, and you just play the part. You act clueless, although you know exactly what’s happening. You act innocent, although you know the things you’ve done. You lie and hold to it, you play the part, you get in the game, you shape up your personality and your life until everyone sees you as T.J., the boy who’s clueless, who’s smart, who’s dumb, who lacks any common sense, who has to break a little bit of himself each time he reinforces the web, who is just so tired of holding it in that he lets it leak through and everyone reacts with surprise, and you know it’d be even worse. So you keep going. You keep mortaring new bricks. You keep getting new pairs of glasses. You keep seeing these things, these lines, these threads of possibility.
And you wish that you’d never gotten any glasses at all.
Look at him. T.J., the boy who was literally dammed up in his own head. That's me. That's the person I am, I let the water rise and rise, but the reason I came out at all because of him. Not T.J., that's me, "him" as in the secret I get to keep from you. My own little piece of the world. But those last two paragraphs is part of what started it.
I asked my friend Samantha if she would something for me and tell me if she hated me. To confess, to alleviate some of my guilt that really shouldn't have felt like guilt. She didn't hate me. She said she loved me and that if I needed to talk, she "is always there for" me. I cried. A lot. Not uncommon for me, but still, figured it should be mentioned. And then, after a while, she asked a question, because she knew I wasn't going to let it out without someone telling me it was okay too.
"T.J.," she texted, "Is there something you want to tell me?"
I stared at my phone for a while. A good five, six minutes. My keyboard was open on the chat, the six keys just glowing, like they knew what was meant to be said. Prophesied, predicted. Just type it, I told myself, Just tell her and it will be over.
"I'm gay."
There's moments like this, pieces of your life that feel like there should be a grand score in the background or a lack of one, just a noise-blinded scene. You wait, and you don't know what to expect, but somehow, you're certain about something.
"Okay."
I sort of paused my heart here, can't tell you how I did it. It was the same feeling I got when I was with him, when I stepped into his car at 3 am, just to drive, just to see what Greensboro held for us. And she says what needs to be said. A simple word. So simple.
"And?"
And.
This is what I was talking about, the certainty. The knowledge that you just know, and I knew what I knew. This was enough. This was enough. There's no conflict. There's no disturbing plot twist. Just the simple acceptance of who I am. That's who Samantha represented, what she represented.
Acceptance.
So before I start texting so much, before the tangent comes back, before I get lost in my own hidden glee, I made myself write something down in my Google Keep, a quick flick of my home screen onto the application.
I typed down, "This is not an uphill battle as long as you have someone on your side."
I studied it, the curves in the S's, the word "not." I listen to her dings as she tells me it'll all be okay, that no one is going to hate me and that I knew that she was right. This didn't mean I wasn't scared as hell, I absolutely still was.
Pressure, though, isn't immediately let off in things like this.
Four months, I had held him to myself. And now some of the steam has hissed out of me. And you know what?
Smaller victories mean winning the war at the end of it all. "You won this battle but you haven't won the war" is literally one of the most bullshittiest things I've ever heard. One battle is enough, enough to hold you through.
And I'm glad this battle was enough for me to finally shine through.
#lgbt #comingout #gay #nonfiction
winter
winter.
snow covers the street in front my so well known window, the street that i've never seen a single car on, and now, there's no way the wheels could handle the icy ground. winter, late evening, the fragments of white crystal glass shine so dreamlike that once again i am doubting whether i'm awake at all. whether i have ever been.
all i remember is how you left.
how you walked away and my world shattered like the white crystal glass outside of my window. and how for a second, my mind formed the absurd question of whether i was just as beautiful. maybe that's what you saw in me.
you drank coffee with me this morning. didn't say much. we were lying on the ground for hours.
then you stood up. looked at me. said, "i have to leave. i'm sorry. goodbye."
and i stayed there on the ground and heard you close the door.
you're sorry, you said. sorry for what?
my mind had an answer. a solution. i can't recall what it was, but it must have worked. i found myself at the window. with red blossoms on my arms. i never knew you were so good at drawing.
i wondered if i should have told you about the times when i put honey on my skin because you told me you loved how soft it felt. i wondered if you should have seen how i smiled for hours after you told me i was beautiful.
because your words meant more than i would ever let you know. you went away but i couldn't let you go.
you said goodbye and you must've have hoped that i'd be fine, you must have thought i'd want my life to be mine. when you said sorry, it must have been an apology, and yet your sorry was the worst you could have ever done to me.
now that you're gone, i wonder what your skin felt like.
i remember one time when it was just as cold, and you were quite drunk, and you said you loved me and asked for a smoke. so i gave you a cigarette and fire, and you sucked the smoke in deeply, and when you let it escape through your lips, i saw flowers in your breath. and you put out your cigarette on my skin and the ash left a scar but it was okay because the pain was real.
and i thought you were immortal.
autumn --
i'm still here. still waiting. you left long ago, but i'll always be here. because some day, i know, you will come back.
i'm not yet alone. there's still those faces around me. and voices. telling me what to do when i forget. you left them to look after me.
now that you've left,
and those red leaves, wet leaves on the ground, and the smell of dirty rain,
i guess we could say we never met.
