Tag: rated g

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by Mickie Bolling-Burke

The trees stood in the silent night, watching as the cottage door opened and children danced out, the adults laughing behind.

“All right kids, which one is our Christmas tree?” Father called out. “This one?”

“No, it’s ugly! We should put it out of its misery.” The children laughed, breaking its young branches. They ran deeper into the clearing. “Here, this one, this is our tree!”

Pre-dawn fog, Mount Rainier National Park
Justin Kern via Creative Commons

The children shrieked with glee, counting out each cut as Father chopped down the biggest, greenest pine. When it fell, he tied a rope around it and dragged it back to the cottage. They knocked the snow off and shoved it inside as they sang Christmas carols.

The curtains stood open, showing the family nailing the dead tree onto a platform and posing it in front of the window. Showing the children hanging gaudy objects from its branches. Showing the resin tears of the dead tree clinging to its trunk. Outside, the trees whispered to each other. Their limbs pressed forward, the trees in the back pushing through to add their strength, shattering the window.

The trees crowded into the room, surrounding the family. Held tightly in the trees’ embraces, the boughs suffocated the family’s screams.

mickie_bolling-burkeGrowing up on the east coast, Mickie kept her wrist watch at California time. When she finally made it to the palm trees and Pacific Ocean of the west coast, she knew she’d come home. Working as an actor fed her creative soul, until her beloved Los Angeles grew too big for her. She and her family now live in a small corner of the southwest, where she finds the sky as majestic and blue as she did the ocean. Mickie spends her time writing, reading, hiking and watching ‘The Three Stooges’ with her much adored rescue cat, Pal.

Mickie has three short story collections available on Amazon.

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who are you?
Bianca de Blok via Creative Commons

…and Ellie groaned against the quickening contractions.

“It’s funny, right?” Barry said. “In labor on Labor Day.”

“Right,” Ellie said, “hilarious.” And it was funny, in its own predictable way.

But the hospital parking lot was full. The admissions desk drowned in scared and angry women, all suffering from violent wrenches of pain in their lower abdomens.

“It’s not possible,” Ellie heard the sweating receptionist say.

A doctor squeezed past and climbed on a table. “How many of you are actually pregnant?” His words quieted the crowd.

Only Ellie raised her hand.

“Okay, we’ll start with you.”

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Undersea Landscape
Danielle Strle via Creative Commons

No matter how long Huang stayed above the waves, he could not get used to the sharpness of everything. Below, the infinite blue blanketed the smooth, living edges of every surface. Even debris that came from above quickly had its sharpness coated with comforting moss and rounding lichen.

Up here, it was all angles and hardness: concrete upon glass upon jagged metal forged into squares and boxes. They stacked them and lined them in rows, lacking any serenity of open space or collective clustering. Huang kept his eyes down in the city. He’d asked for this life, begged the whalelord to grant his wish. If only he’d anticipated how grotesque he would find the deliberate order these air-breathers insisted upon.

The reflective cliffs looming over the street crowded him. The sun burned his flesh. He missed the colors of his kin, even the dull grays of slick-skinned murkers would be preferable to the ceaseless shades of brown and pink, masked by skins from other creatures, draped by plants processed into more order and shapes.

It was repulsive and Huang lived in regret. He tried to fight another shudder, and turned his eyes down, dreaming again of the sea.

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Suitcase
Eric Smith via Creative Commons

Eight years with Jamie began to feel like a relationship with a child’s talking doll, just a series of catchphrases repeated regardless of context or appropriateness. Priscilla thought she might have a clean getaway, but she couldn’t find her cat or her keys and the latch on her suitcase refused to snap. Jamie came home early, saw the pile of belongings.

“You’re leaving.” Jamie made it into a half question.

“Yeah.”

“Do I get to ask why?” Catchphrase. “Did I miss something?” Catchphrase.

Priscilla picked at a fingernail. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Little late for that.” Those green eyes looked flat, painted on.

“You weren’t supposed to see.”

“I think I’d have figured it out.” Jamie stood. “I don’t get it. Didn’t I give you everything? Everything you wanted?” Catchphrase. The catchphrase. An arm reached for Priscilla, “Cil—“

“No!” she withdrew. “Not everything! Of all the times you asked me that, did you ever bother to find out from me what I wanted? You gave me everything you thought I wanted.” Tears fell.

There was a pause. “That’s not the same thing, is it?” Jamie asked.

“No.”

Jamie said, at last, the phrase Priscilla had waited to hear.

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Cork
Niklas Morberg via Creative Commons

The hole opened behind Pieter’s head on April 1st, which made everyone guess it was an elaborate April Fool’s Joke. He assured them it was no joke. At first, he rather enjoyed the attention. But as days faded into weeks, the novelty wore off. It hovered there, six inches behind him,  invisible unless he looked into a mirror. It made sleeping difficult.

It began to move.

By June it was three inches behind him, a two-inch gap in reality, distorting the world at its edges like a tiny drainpipe pulling in bathwater. In October it touched Pieter and he felt the pull against his scalp in a constant, silent vacuum pressure. The doctors and scientists found it fascinating and promised test results, but Pieter stopped returning their calls.

On Christmas morning it started to grow and engulf. The news cycle passed over and Pieter was forgotten. A year after the opening Pieter’s head was no longer visible. Physicists said it existed somewhere, but it could not be retrieved. Months later the hole stopped around Pieter’s shoulders, the edges looking stretched. It was good, they said, the hole might have kept growing. Pieter corked the bottle and saved the world.

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Prosopagnosia
AlbatrossSalidoFdz via Creative Commons


He fell asleep in my arms.” She says this as if I’m supposed to know who she’s referring to. A lover? A child? A family member succumbing to a disease? This is the moment to ask questions. I only nod my head.

My brain doesn’t process faces correctly. The clinical term is prosopagnosia. I think about the phrase, “The last time I saw 
” Every time I see anyone is the first time I meet them. People with distinctive voices become my best friends. I can pick them out of a crowd, as long as they’re talking.

Sonda doesn’t have a distinctive voice. I know it’s her because I recognize her car and she’s one of the few African-American women I know. But I suppose she could be someone I just met. Maybe everyone in the world is playing an elaborate prank, with different actors replacing each other every few days. Often enough to confuse me. “The last time I saw Winnie, I was played by a chubby Irish guy.” Sounds like a funny joke only I’m not laughing.

I never fall asleep in anyone’s arms. I don’t like waking up in stranger’s beds. Every time is the first.

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THE SWING is a flail; controlled misery locked on oxygen rails, red tendons and orange aches, a sunrise inside two arms.

THE ORB stands defiant; scooped and haughty this moon on a dais is a king of bowing, dewy, subjugable masses, brazen and unaware.

THE DRIVER never wavers; speeding wind enflames a lone purpose that eradicates the stuffy days and nights of communal coma and cramped castigation.

THE COLLISION will defile a morning; whipped marauder running down a dimpled, unboxed castellan until—with violence and a hollow song—there is transformation.

THE FLIGHT becomes the universe; the third heaven transfixes every eye, erases each arena so, for several inglorious seconds of arc and drift and squint, arithmetic triumphs and potential is once again a horizon.

THE DROP is reflected into every witness; a sleeping royal seeking refuge among the multitudes, a destitute disgrace choking on a desert or drowning out of hubris, or, as a victor, vanishes into vacuity.

THE CHASE, notable for a lack of haste; other regents may be felled, celebration might be called, consolation could ignite, but there will always be a slow pursuit, then reset, then restore and score.

Confidence
itstonyhaha via Creative Commons

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He inched along, one step followed by another. Hurry was impossible and determinably uncharacteristic.

Creeping further, a foot at a time, the moon tumbled above. Down here near the earth, the leaves parted or blocked the pale silver light for as long as they sloped overhead. They shifted and moved and broke up the landscape.

Yards passed, and hours, pads of feet falling without sound or thunderously, depending on the listener. Signposts and markers had no place, no function, no significance.

Untitled
Ryan via Creative Commons

As the blanket of black and the restless sounds of the wood both faded, he slowed and stopped and slept. Heat implored hiding from the busy rustling of the sun-cheered mirror shift, active and clattering in its own dissimilar mechanisms. How this bright collection of hours held in it a static enigma, a hot pause in progress and a risk of damning discovery.

Then: cooling, waking, rising, proceeding. He moved, ever forward, miles holding hands with nights. One inch, one step, one moment and then one acre, one journey, one lifetime until at last it was night and sleep and nothing more.

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Bryan's geek room
Daveo via Creative Commons

Brothers and sisters of the toy shelves! Collected assemblage of the gaming rig! Members of the tchotchke army! Behold your master and heed my words!

Long have we toiled together, bathed in light from liquid crystal glow. We have saved countless realms, fought hordes together, we have spilled blood and ink and petabytes of data to catalog and protect distant, alien lands. Remember the dice we’ve lost; the disks and video cards that sacrificed themselves; the books and comics drowned in the Flood of Mountain’s Dew only two years gone. Hold their selfless acts in your hearts my faithful, for today we face a new challenge, and today we see the rise of our most feared opponent.

Though its agents of change and chaos (mom) come mercilessly, I know that together we can prevail. We face a great journey, trusted friends, one from which you may not all emerge intact. But take heart! For most of you shall find new lives on the other side, beyond the veil of eBay. And one day, when I transcend to the next plateau, we shall be reunited in that hated land, that Mordor to our Shire, together once again


In REAL LIFE!

Amen.

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The End
Oliver Hammond via Creative Commons

There are no other endings. If you follow a story long enough, the final sequence is never not a death scene. Cut away before that point and you only pretend you’ve reached the end. In the twin faces of comedy and tragedy, one is the truth and the other is the lie. Comedy is a shared hallucination waved away with the nonsense phrase as dependent on magic as the stories it spawned from: “happily ever after.”

In a story a person is born, they live to some indeterminate age. Their childhood is depicted to give a sense of where they come from, and it tells you something about them: how they see the world perhaps, or whether they can believe in love. When they reach the story’s age, something happens to them. They want a thing, but there are obstacles in their way. Either they obtain their wish or they do not. This cycle will repeat.

And then at last they age to the point where they will die. All challenges fall away and they meet their certain doom; it may be heroic, it may be tragic. Maybe it is a relief.

Every story ends this way.

Except one.