Night Walk - Creative Nonfiction by Deborah Lee

                                                                         

                            

Tired of circling the same old streets? Let Deborah Lee take you a tour of her neighborhood.




Night Walk
by Deborah Lee 





Dusk.



The traffic lights turn from green to red on a silent street.

Houses with strings of white or multi-colored lights strike a whimsical mood.

A flag whips against its pole, the clanks louder than normal on this quiet boulevard.



"Oh!" I exclaim, as a bike comes silently from behind. "Sorry," as he pedals on by.



People peeking out from an upper window in a lighted room, a kitchen window in a house, an upstairs apartment.



Some keeping the front curtains open in their gently-lit house as they sit watching the rare sight of a pedestrian passing.



During recent sunny times, more hopscotch games than ever etched on the sidewalks, the chalk remaining for days and days.



Dark now.

Porch lights on.

A crooked mailbox.

A late lawnmower one street over. 

"Happy Birthday!" rings out in multiple voices from a distant house.

Another chalked etching on a sidewalk: "Welcome Home Dad."

A night breeze picks up.

A bamboo wind chime clanks its woody beats.

A Dutch Colonial so brightly lit with spans of large white lights, ala New Orleans. 

At a corner of the house's front yard, the large candytuft rosette emits its own bright white to the surrounding dimness.

A young woman on her phone, the two of us walking parallel across each other's respective sidewalk, her voice echoing words indistinguishable.

A plastic bag scuds and waves back and forth across the street, a beautiful sight just like the man in that movie said. 

Is it because the breeze is gentle and soft and lovely?



The crunch of a pinecone under my foot.

The sweet scent of daphne caresses my nostrils in a whiff.

Night-blooming tulips will be bursting with color tomorrow, yes?



There is a large white dot in the sky.

Is it Venus, Polaris? Couldn't be Arcturus!

Orion's belt is to its left.



Home now, little solar lanterns lighting up the patio with color, our own string of whimsical.

The neighbor's TV is on, actors' voices in low blurry volume. 

The air grows chilly.



Inside the house, I feel the night's rhythms around me still.

Comfort Food - Memoir by L.A.W. Fraser

L.A.W. Fraser's fragrant memory of two gardens takes us to a world of seeds and loam...and a surprise sprouting from the compost bin.


Favorite Gardens
by L.A.W. Fraser   


            Two gardens stand out in my mind. First is the one my dad created when I was a child; it was down the slope from our house on Fox Island. He plowed it with a gentle, old white Clydesdale by the name of Nellie. Above the garden, was an artisan well. After the ground was all plowed and tilled, Dad had me walk behind him to help press the seeds he was sowing down into the sandy loam. The garden area was surrounded by evergreens and madrone trees and I remember the smell of pine and warm soil with a hint of chicken manure mixed with salty seaweed from the bay. We grew beans, peas, carrots, corn, radishes, onions, pumpkins (which is what dad called squash or any pumpkin-like plant), and strawberries. The garden may have held other vegetables but I don’t remember what they might have been. Dad also helped me create my own garden, a smaller version next to his. I planted radishes, peas and nasturtiums.

            When the radishes and green onions were thumb sized, dad would pull them and eat them with lunch putting out two tablespoons, one with vinegar and one with salt. He would dip his radish or onion into the vinegar then dip it into the salt. He savored every sour bite.


            The second garden was the one my own family prepared at the back of our house in Virginia Beach. It wasn’t a large space, about 10’x10’ but Virginia had a long growing season that began in March and ended at the beginning of December. I could plant and harvest two times a year. We lived in a suburban area that had been bulldozed level, leaving the ground without any topsoil. We rented a rototiller and dug up the area, then heavily amended the soil with compost. We began our own compost bin and put grass clippings, weeds and other plant matter in it for mulch later. We planted green seedless grapes along one side while the compost bin was at the other end.

            We tried different crops until we found what grew best and in what order. The first crop would consist of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, green peppers, beans, radishes, onions and lettuce. Just as the beans were ready to harvest, bean beetles would be eating the foliage like crazy. I would gather the beans, blanch them then freeze them. We would pull up the bean plants and pile grass clippings on top of them in our compost bin to create heat in order to kill the beetles. The tomatoes would bear fruit all summer and I would can a lot of them. We would go out at night to pick cut worms off the plants. After the soil rested from the bean harvest, we would plant peas. We would also reseed more lettuce, carrots and onions as needed. We always had an abundance of zucchini squash and of course, tomatoes. We tried corn but it took up too much space in comparison to its yield but found okra did well. The okra plants had glorious white flowers although the fruit is rather slimy when cooked so the only one who ever ate it was my husband.

            One year we didn’t have time to attend to the weeding and care for our plot. I was out looking for any still edible vegetables to harvest at the end of the season when I tripped over a huge watermelon. The melon vine was coming out of the compost bin and the watermelon was laying under all sorts of old pea vines and weeds. It was the sweetest, best watermelon I had ever eaten. I had tried to grow melons before but failed to get any fruit at all. It took nature, on her own, to grow the juiciest and largest one and our family took two days to eat all of it.

Purifying Wind

What an honor to have my lyric essay "No Place Like It" included in this new anthology published by Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press. Many thanks to editor d. ellis phelps!

You can order a copy by clicking here.

Dusk - Lyric Prose by Marie S. Bates

Photo courtesy of Marie S. Bates.* 

All quarantines are not created equally.

It's one thing to be sheltering in place in the U.S. in my comfortable middle class home and quite another to be in lockdown in Valencia, Spain in an apartment with a small balcony.

Thank you to Marie Bates for sharing her experience with us in this ultimately hopeful piece.





Dusk
by Marie S. Bates

  

On Tuesday evening, - Earth Day eve - I found myself dreaming of long walks in mossy forests, smelling wet soil, of standing beneath towering pines, and passing sparkling green ferns trembling under the weight of a recent rain shower. As I perched on an air conditioning fan box taking up half the standing room on our tiny balcony, I felt about as disconnected from anything Earth-y as one can. I stared out at the concrete apartment walls on each corner of our intersection and thought about the separate lives unfolding in those cubes stacked on top of one another. They remind me of the cardboard dioramas many of us made with our kids; a different scene arranged carefully with Elmer’s glue in each shoe box. An ant farm also comes to mind, its many chambers sandwiched between plastic walls, a transparent community for us all to goggle. Or they can also look like the stratified layers beneath the Earth’s surface, each layer comprised of something different but stuck together to function as a whole. It’s amazing what pops into your head when your life hits the pause button. I sighed deeply and tilted my head up to scan the cerulean sky at dusk. What a beautiful, clear evening. That’s when I saw the bats. BATS! I thought maybe they were swallows going in to roost or pigeons, but these were tiny and I heard them calling out to find their way as they searched for food. Swooping and flittering like tiny pieces of tumbling black paper on the breeze, they darted through the air, solo and in pairs. I heard their squeaks echoing and bouncing off the walls and over rooftops. Two of them dove so closely over my head I nearly ducked. It was surreal, and I loved every magical second. It gave me hope to see this evidence that our planet still has its wild places among us. I got lost in the moment and couldn’t say how long this went on but it was over much too soon. It was exhilarating to watch and part of me wanted to be up there with them. The weather is very mild and the skies are clear tonight, perhaps I’ll get to see them again at dusk. I’ll be looking up.

Photo courtesy of Marie S. Bates.

                              

  

*About the top photograph, Marie says, "There's a police helicopter flying over the rooftops. And that tower (Torres de Quart) at the end of the street was built in the 15th century. The pock marks were from cannon fire sustained in 1801 during the Napoleonic wars."

           

A New Anthology from Sonic Boom!

Thank you to Shloka Shankar, editor of Sonic Boom, for including my flash story "Hunter's Moon" in What I Hear When Not Listening: Best of the Poetry Shack and Fiction.

Here's a description of the book:

"Curated from Sonic Boom issues one through fifteen, this collection brings together the best pieces that were published under The Poetry Shack and Fiction sections of the journal. Embark on a journey that explores selfhood, love, and our shifting place in the world."

To order a copy, click here.

Some Thoughts on Beauty

The joke's on me:

Last month I told my classes I was going to stop giving homework assignments this spring.

Well.

We're now in the third week of writing from online prompts.

Last week, the assignment was to write about beauty. About something, someone, some place that's beautiful.

Which got me thinking about Sleeping Beauty, or Aurora, as she's called in some versions of the story.

Why is she beautiful? Is it because she's blond? Nice? A victim?

Here's a draft of what I came up with:




On Beauty



Aurora –



a princess,



beautiful, 



not because she is a princess

not because she is rescued and kissed

not because she is fair or female or rich –



beautiful because

she’s alive

and having slept for so long,



she loves everything –

from a shard of toasted almond between her teeth

to the honeyed oak of the spinning wheel against the whorls of her fingertips –



she is now moved by the rolling opulence of blue-gray clouds tinted with amber light

and the gleaming black feathers of the crow’s everyday coat

and the glistening and wriggling worm's skin, pink as a cherry’s petal, in the jeweled grass –



but mostly it’s the heart,

the beating heart

of every being,

even the hearts of those who mean her harm –

that she holds in awe –



not because

she’s a masochist or a fool

but because in this moment she sees



even Carabosse –

the “bad” fairy –

the one who stomped and spit and swore when she wasn’t welcomed –

the one with molting robes and a tongue of rotting meat

and brittle kernels for teeth –


Aurora knows this being, too, once had a newborn heart 

that wanted nothing

but to beat in peace,

like butterfly wings rising from a leaf –



oh



Aurora

the princess

awake now

but still dreaming



of massaging the knots of rage lodged between Carabosse’s shoulder blades

until her enemy sighs,

puts away her poisons and plots,

and gradually begins to roll and chirp and lick and purr and arch –



yes



Aurora dares to imagine



Carabosse in front of a mirror, delighted

with the ragged bump on the bridge of her nose

and the syllables of her name that sound

like the rustle of bamboo shielding her hut from a thrash of storms,

like the hush-a-bye swaths of pink stripes in the evening sky

and like the redolent voice of pines

singing in the star-pricked night:



Come, Beauty, come Carabosse,

for you have always been,

will always be,

one 

of us.





© 2020 Linda Ferguson

Three Sisters - Memoir by Pam Mayfield

Less really is more sometimes. Pam Mayfield paints a poignant picture of three sisters with just 121 words in this nonfiction story. Enjoy!



Three Sisters
by Pam Mayfield

In our first house I bunked in a bedroom shared with two younger sisters. We had a double bed the three of us shared, each of us always claiming the same spots: Theresa next to the wall, me on the outside, and Jeannie in the middle. Having been fed by Alfred Hitchcock the stuff of nightmares, Theresa faced the wall to look out for creatures breaking through it, while I was facing outward, ready for the fight, if needed, with any intruders. Jeannie, always protected, was in the middle.

In the morning, Theresa and I would often wake with our hair completely entwined in Jeannie's little hands, as she had wrapped our hair round and round her fingers as she slept.

About the Author:
Pam Mayfield is an animal lover who admits to not always getting enough sleep.