Marked Chapter 2 (Part Two)

“That is not a proper farthing, give me another.” I insisted, not wanting to take the shaved coin from the miller’s daughter. She held it out stubbornly.
“Here, here, here, just take 3 of my farthings and give me a penny back, will that suit? That flour looks more weevil than oats, it is not worth the 7 farthings you asked.”
I fell back into my custom of attending church morning and evening on Sunday. And I waited for the next call to the duty of my gift. When the knock came I dared to hope for a summons to a newborn, another voglie to be read, more silver for my purse. I opened my door to the heavy fisted pounding, and looked out to a beautiful evening of fiery sky after sunset across the valley. The shrouded henchmen of the Bishop could be mistaken for no one else. I suddenly felt icy underneath my cloak. They grabbed me out of my doorway. I counted four of them. I looked around for witnesses and saw that Sarah, my neighbor across the lane, was peeking out of the corner of her window, the curtain pulled ever so slightly to the side. Her eyes were wide and wild. Did she fear for herself, or for me? She let the sack cloth curtain fall into place after our eyes met. The men pushed me down on my knees into the flint shards of the garden path. I had no hope of standing let alone running, unless my captors willed it. A reeking, sticky, hood was pushed over my head. The smell of rotting vegetables and something coppery filled my nose and mouth. I struggled to keep calm. What were their plans? Why hadn’t they shackled me? The urge to run was strong. The men did not even bother to shackle me. I knew my surroundings even if I couldn’t see them, but I also knew there was nowhere to hide and none of my neighbors would take me in with the Bishop’s men after me. And it would not be fair to my neighbors to bring that sort of trouble to their door. Two of the men held me under my arms and dragged me away from my home, then threw me onto a flat surface about as high as my knees. My hands felt the damp wood. I sat up but was knocked down flat as my shoulder caught the blow of something unforgiving. There came a crashing sound around my ears. It sounded like iron on wood. I had seen carts used for transporting prisoners, first to prison, and then to gallows. I feared I was in such a cart. My shoulder throbbed as the contraption jerked forward. I heard a horse clopping at the front of the cart. I was certain those hollow sounds were the drums for the gallows. Dread fell over me. I felt a cold trickle of sweat from under my arms.
I reached up and felt the lid of the cart made from flat strips of iron, riveted at each overlapping joint into a lattice with 3 inch square openings, providing no protection from the weather. I thought for a moment of all the men who might have been taken away in this cart. I shuddered. I knew that my survival depended on keeping a cool head and gathering as much information as I could. The lattice left enough room for three fingers to grab each cold strip, which in its turn was the width of my thumb. That was the same width as the blade of the knife I often carried, but had left on the table when I answered the door. Between the iron lattice lid and the floor of the cart there was just enough room for me to turn over from my back to my belly, but I could not sit up. I breathed my gratitude to a kind God that I had my shoes and leggings on under my usual cloak and tunic. I prayed I would not be deprived of these. The hood over my face smelled vile, coppery, acrid. I knew better than to try to remove it. A few times the bile rose in my throat, but I focused on my breathing and the bile retreated.
The droning of the drumming hoofs, the creak of the wheels, the rubbing of the iron lid, sometimes felt like sleep to me. Each time the cart stopped, and the lid was lifted, I thought my time had come and I began to say my prayers, “Ave Maria, gratia plena. Dominus…” and received a sound cuff against my ear, “Be still!” commanded one of the guards. Six times the cart stopped, the iron lattice lid was lifted, and the hood pulled back just enough to throw water into my mouth. They allowed me to relieve myself so as not so soil my garments or perhaps the cart. Once someone held my head and shoved a pinch of bread between my lips with salty fingers that smelled of horse and something worse. Twice I saw daylight prying under the hood. Four times the stopping was but a few minutes, perhaps half an hour in all, but twice the cart stopped for a long enough time that is must have been night. I could hear rustling and low talk farther in front of the cart and assumed my captors were bedding down near the road. I was confused by their treatment of me, most likely I was meant to be. Nonetheless I was able to count three days travel from my home. Three days locked in a cage, with that vile hood over my face, felt like a year. But three days in a cart with one horse walking at a steady gait travels a predictable distance. My suspicions of our destination grew as strong as certainty.

"Marked" Chapter 2 (Part One)

I pulled my cloak around me, secured the hood, and pinned the woman with all my authority. Her eyes were large with fear, but she looked at my face for an answer.
“A trick of the light, nothing more.” I felt I was boring the message into her, to convince her she had seen a shadow only.
Turning to her husband I continued “Now, our business is concluded. I must return home. Immediately. I trust I do not need to remind you of the importance of discretion.” He pulled a small pouch from his vest pocket and handed it to me. The dull clink of the coins and the weight felt right enough, I did not stop to count it. I left the merchant’s great hall to mount the horse he had waiting for me. The same stable boy rode with me. I was glad for his company as I paid little attention to the way home. I was too preoccupied with concern. I worried that the wife would say what she had seen. It would be interpreted as a sign of evil. What if she told her priest in confession? Somehow the news would get back to the Bishop of Lincoln. He would not stand for it, any of it. He would charge me with heresy, and more. Anyone caught using my services would be subject to the same. And the Bishop would get more than a small pouch of silver for his trouble.
I arrived home in the dead of night. I was relieved the stable boy could be so easily persuaded to bed down with the horses in a stable closer to town. I gave him two farthings to see him on his way. As soon as he was out of sight I squared my shoulders and walked across the lane to Sarah’s cottage. I knocked on her front door as loud as I dared, not wanting to wake any other neighbors. I stood in the shadow of a shadow. After a few minutes Sarah came to the door.
“I need your help.” I whispered. She opened the door to let me in.
“Tell me.”
“I may not be safe. And it may not be safe to be seen helping me.”
“I understand.”
“I will need food, I have nowhere else to go. If the Bishop’s men do not come for me I will resume my work and no one here will be any the wiser.” I watched her as she listened, hoping that the trust we had built since her husband’s death would be enough. She looked away and bit the side of her lip.
Finally she looked back at me and said, “I will leave pottage over the embers and bread in a cloth on the table for you every evening. You may enter in secrecy. We must never talk of this again.”
As I walked out her door, Sarah gripped my arm and said, “I could never have continued my life here after John’s death had you not spoken up for me. I would not be here making my own way. I owe you a great deal. I will help you any way I can.”
I patted her hand, and managed a smile. I had been surprised too, that our village had let her stay in her house when she was widowed. It helped that the clothes she made were better than most could get in the big city. She stood out without a husband, but she belonged. And that was enough.
Over the next few days I stayed out of sight. I did not speak with anyone, not even Sarah. I went back to work making arrows, but I kept my cottage shuttered. I used my oil lamps but I was afraid to light a fire. I ate what provisions I had stored. A week passed. No one came for me. I snuck into Sarah’s cottage across the lane, at night, for pottage and ale. I left her a silver penny. Once there was a sausage in a cloth with some oat cakes left out on the table. Two furtive weeks passed and still no sign that the Bishop would send for me. I dared to go to market to sell my arrows. I began to doubt they would ever come for me.

"Marked" Chapter One (Part Two)

“You have nothing to worry about.” I reassured the mother. “I can see that you are inspired by your love of god.” Her eyes closed under heavy lids. She breathed deeply.
“I am ready to speak with your master.” I handed the baby back to her, stood, and secured my cloak around me, the hood still around my ears against the night air. The maid, holding the candle, went to unbolt the door and her shadow swallowed the three of us by the bed. A murmur and a rustle, within moments the father stood before me, his man holding an oil lamp between us. The room could barely hold the 6 of us, but no one suggested a different room. The great hall would echo our words for all to hear who might be in the house, or even perhaps standing just outside the shuttered window. No, the master bedroom was best.
I pressed my lips together, glad the father had sent his fastest horse to fetch me. Many who would not pay me would rather offer their bundle to God, at the church’s door. They were not always left at the door. And they were not always found right away. But the messenger who came for me was quite open about his master’s situation. There were no other children. This, being the first live birth, might be the only. He, though a lowly stable hand, was concerned for his master and mistress, hoped their babe was healthy, thought that no one else deserved a child more, the cook had told him how careful and pious the mistress had been, and how faithful and affectionate the master was. The cook had told the stable boy how the master and mistress took their prayers every morning together, and the stable hand, while fetching me, had repeated it proudly.
“Well?” the master asked at last, “What is the matter?”
“The matter is quite holy,” I tipped my head out of respect, “I have only seen this once before. It seems your wife has thought of nothing during her confinement but loving god. So the mark reveals her devotion.”
“Oh,” the father’s shoulders slacked, his head tilted slightly. He smiled. “She had wanted to be a nun before we married. This is a great unburdening for my soul today. We are truly blessed.”
“There is more…” I watched the father draw himself up. “The mark will fade. By the time he is 10 or 12 years of age, should you be so blessed, there may only be a shadow of what you see now.”
“That is good news indeed!” the father grabbed my arm, found my hand to shake it vigorously. The mother came from behind me to stand with her husband, brushing up against my shaking elbow, and dragging at my cloak. The hood came down and I heard her gasp. I turned to see her hand over her mouth. I knew what she had seen. Her eyes were wide, staring into mine. My own stain, my own mark, never faded, behind my ear: a round shape with two identical points on the top never failed to remind anyone who saw it of the Devil himself.

"Marked" Chapter One (Part One)

I called for the candle to be brought closer. The chambermaid held the flame beside me as her shadow lurched against the wall behind her. The woman sitting in front of me looked down into the bundled blanket she was holding. I heard a tiny whine, almost like a hinge on a rainy day, but it had not rained for weeks, and the door was soundly bolted. The bundle seemed to shift, but it could have been the flickering candle. The woman sat on a bed, a plain frame, with a mattress, most likely feathers. Her husband, a successful merchant, could afford four posts with curtains, and more. Even so, the bed frame was plain, well-oiled pine, honey under the single flame. I turned my eyes back to the bundle. I reached to move the cloth aside. The woman’s shoulders started shaking, her head hung lower. Pulling the cloth back I could see something smooth, pale pink. I touched it with the side of my finger, the pale part rolled away, revealing a dark red cloud. I touched that too, soft, silky, yielding yet firm, like a ripe berry. I pulled the cloth aside to get a better look, and a tiny fist pushed up through the folds. The baby plugged his mouth with his fingers and rolled his eyes at me, cow-like. He was not more than two days old.

Our faces turned as we heard a swish of someone on the other side of the rough wooden door. But no one knocked. The baby mewled again. One of his fists rubbed up against the mark, the voglie as I had learned to call it. The surface of the mark was downy, plump and red like a raspberry flattened on the side of his face. I touched the infant carefully, turning his head from side to side to get a good look in what light we had.

“He is fortunate.” The chambermaid jumped as I spoke, almost dropped the candle. “Hish!” I reprimanded her immediately, before continuing. “This mark will fade with time.” The woman holding him let out a long breath. She began to rock him slightly. Our work had just begun. “But there is more.” Her movement stopped. I sat on the bed next to her.

“Will you take your cloak off then, sir?” The chambermaid reached with her free hand to take my cloak, but I slapped her wrist and she drew back.

“Stand just there with the candle so. I need the light to shine here.” It would not do to let the candle get too close. I took the baby from his mother. The bundling fell away, draping across my arms. Fully exposed, his face looked like any other infant’s face, on the left, but the right side was a dark, downy, tumescent map of desires and possibly betrayal. The mark started just below his right eye, next to the soft hollow above his ear, a bright red blotch down to his jaw, across half his cheek, and stopped just at the edge of his ear. The infant’s father had hired me to interpret the mark, to help him decide. I knew all that hung in the balance. Each of us in this room knew. Not all mothers were the same. And the marks always told the story. Once, I saw a mark of pure betrayal: a baby born with what looked to me like a shadow of the face of another man on the babe’s shoulder. The young mother had offered me the pleasure of her body in exchange for a favorable reading. I have never accepted a bribe to answer speciously, not then, not ever. This mother’s eyes were pools of prayer. I took pity on her. What little I knew of this household spoke of her virtue.

Looking at the voglie, I unfocused my eyes and turned the baby this way and that, despite his weak protests. As I centered my gaze into the puffy red blotch, careful to avoid focusing on the surface, the edges seemed to recede and shapes began to reveal themselves as if rolling over within the clouded skin. I was born with this ability, but it took years to hone it, and then to make my reputation and by that a living of sorts. In this babe’s mark I could see a hint of house and field, then of kitchen and hearth, perhaps a church’s nave. This was rare. Usually I saw a face or an expression, sometimes laughing, often angry. The way most people could see shapes in clouds, or stars, or bones, or tea leaves, I could see not prophesy, but history in the marks made on babes in the womb.

10 Minute Prompt: An impactful story from your childhood...

As a child growing up in suburban Georgia my only window to urban life and values was Sesame Street. Then, in third grade, I read a book about a little boy who lived in an inner city housing project, or maybe it was a tenement in Harlem, and who found a little black and white cat in a vacant lot. This was the first sad story about a child I'd read. But also, the story as I am barely able to remember, didn't end so well for the little black and white cat. And the fate of the little boy, who had enjoyed so much emotional attachment with the cat, is lost to my selective memory.

I have often thought of that book and wondered what the name of it might be, and if anyone else read it and what they thought of it, and of course what happened to the little boy. I have heard similar stories through the years of people whose attachments to animals rivaled, surpassed, or supplanted their attachments to people. And in turn I reflect on my cat, Killer, whom I adopted before I could afford cat food. I fed him cheese and raw eggs for four days, and tore up newspaper for his litter box. I made time to sit quietly with him, 20 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening. He was old enough to spray inside the closet before found an affordable neuter clinic.

Killer always seemed to think something strange was going on when my roommates were on acid. He grew to enormous size, weighing nearly 20 pounds and retained his preference for lap over any other bed. He was named for a punk band, Killer Pussy From the Cult of Planet Playtex, which was written in blurring ink on his white flea collar.

10 Minute Prompt: Use a randomly selected colloquialism to write...

"Man Up!"

In the fifteen foot skiff, rising and falling a good ten feet with every swell, waiting for the top of the next swell before grabbing the rope ladder, so as to climb to the deck of the ship I had traveled all day to get to, I hesitated.

"Man up!" the skiff's skipper stood beside me, a jolly laugh on his lips, hands on his hips, one foot against the gunnel like it weren't nothing. Resentment at his command balled a fist in my gut. The skiff rose, peaked and time slowed as I grabbed the closest rung of the rope ladder. In the next moment I was standing on the deck of the ship with no memory of climbing up two stories of swinging ladder.

"Woman on deck," I muttered to myself. The three men on deck nearby ignored me. Turning a circle I saw a woman coming toward me from a wall of indistinguishable metal features of pipes, valves, screw seals, and ladders. She held her arms open, smiled broadly and warmly, and said, "Go right through that hatch to the galley. There's hot chocolate and coffee to warm you up." I looked in the direction she gestured: all pipes, valves, and portholes.

"What hatch?"

Keep by your Bed

Keep a glass of water by your bed.
I do this, though I rarely drink
and days later I find dust and cat hair
settling in, or I catch my cat dipping
a paw, as if the glass is by his bed.

Keep a book you read by your bed.
I have a stack of half-read books:
I know how the biography ends;
I never want the mystery to be solved;
I hope the lovers never find or fuck each other.

Keep an extra blanket by your bed.
Near the end of winter nights are piled
high with every extra blanket, sleeping
is a tropical vacation.
Then Spring pushes Winter aside.
I fold the blankets one by one,
reach them onto the top shelf,
extra again.

Seafair

The second hand ticked up to the 12 as I poured another soda. I tried not to look at my watch too often, adult customers noticed and scowled resentfully. The minute hand dragged. 14 minutes before the end of my shift. I poured another soda for a sweaty eight-year-old in blue jeans and a striped tee-shirt. His crew-cut glistened in the mid-afternoon sun. I was grateful for the awning over the snack booth. In late August that sun would light the sky for hours after it sank behind the Olympic Mountains. I reached out, bending over the counter to hand the kid his drink and caught something dark out of the corner of my eye.

He leaned in his crackerjack uniform against the high fence enclosing the roller coaster. A car full of screaming teens flew by behind him. His white neckerchief ruffled briefly. His right leg was crossed over his left, right foot balanced on the toe edge of his spit polished black shoes. I sucked a breath in through my teeth. His wide bell bottoms lightly grazed the midway pavement. Each hip bone sported its own short vertical row of anchor-embossed buttons which were joined at the top by a horizontal row just below his waist. Crisp, clean lines of his uniform curved to his casual balance.

Sweat dripped a cool track down my back. His arms crossed, hands flat under his biceps, the flaring collar lay flat across his shoulders. The round sailor's hat, tipped forward on his head, looked almost ready to fall over his face. He was my height, and wiry. Under the dixie-cup cap his face was stone and his eyes burned into me hotter than the pitched pavement. He was staring so hard I couldn't tell what color his eyes were. Despite his relaxed pose, I expected him to pounce. I looked down at my plush flesh pushed up in a ping and red polka dot sweetheart neckline.

....

I can't remember the prompt that spawned these words...

They had long hair, but even at 75 mph I could tell they were men. They were dressed in bright red, yellow, blue, green, and purple baggy tee-shirts and cutoff shorts. And leather sandals. In as much time as it took to whiz past them on the freeway I saw them. Three men stood on the concrete rail at the edge of the freeway. One lept into the air and pulled one knee up to his chest and disappeared beyond the rail. Past them I could see the coffee waters of the cypress steeped Echeconee Creek. "What about the sharp stumps?" my mind screamed, "There are cotton mouths hiding in there!" My mouth hung open, my eyes bulged. By the time we passed the VW Microbus I asked my dad "Who are those people?"
We were driving along I75 in our Rambler station wagon. As usual I was in the back, flat, surrounded by windows.
"Those," drawled my father, "are hippies."

10 Minute Prompt: What is on your walls?

Every event in my life now is memorialized by a photograph. This was not always so. Before digital photography I spent many years between cameras, unwilling to spend money on film and developing. During those years other people would come up to me during Gay Pride or at the Wild Rose on a crowded night, or on Broadway on a Sunday afternoon, and say to me, "I have this picture of you in your fringe jacket!" or "I have this picture of me leaning back on you at Denny Blaine, my crew cut head between your bare breasts. I'll sell it when you run for office." Then they wink.
In the photographed days I always imagined I would fill a wall with the images, the faces, the fancies, the places I had lived. Those photos are still in stacks, zipped in a portfolio. One photo made it into a frame and onto a wall. One poem, a gift from a much older, lascivious step-poet. A 4"x6" black and white photo of my father's family taken when my Aunt Corene was away in the city. A framed piece of wrapping paper adorned with the snow queen and her fire snorting stallions spraying snow and winter ptarmigan at the runners of her sled.

10 Minute Prompt: Rewrite a story that was influential early in your life.

"Fiddle dee dee!" Scarlet flipped her ringlets in the hallway mirror before running upstairs to Melanie.
In her room, as always, Melanie reclined on the chaise, her forearm shading her eyes, hands hanging listlessly. "Do you think Ashley will write me today?"
"Well I do declare," Scarlet hitched her hoop skirts as she walked across to sit on the embroidered foot stool next to Melanie's chaise. "I don't know what you see in him." Scarlet leaned against the chaise so that her arm touched, elbow to wrist, Melanie's hip.
"He is so handsome and gentle..." Melanie started
"Milquetoast!" interjected Scarlet. "Melanie," Scarlet pouted, "Let's go for a walk in the cherry orchard. Come along, it will invigorate you."
"But I don't want to be invigorated." And what if a letter arrives from Ashley? I don't want to miss it!"
"It will wait. I want to walk with you in the evening light. It's so nice this time of day."
"That does sound nice," Melanie lifted her arm to look at Scarlet whose lashes batted prettily in front of her sparkling eyes. Melanie felt her heart flop ever so gently.

10 Minute Prompt: side effects

I often use things for their side effect. Benadryl for sleep, cheese for comfort, drinks for camaraderie. Knowing that the thing itself does something I don't care about. Every now and then I drive to feel the steering wheel under my hand, the G-force of getting there, the rough road loud under the wheels. But those times are very rare. Usually I drive to get there, using the time to relax or to laugh, or to get into the mood with some music. Behind the wheel, driving to visit a friend, I get in the car before I have spoken a word to another person that day. My thoughts are crammed in my head, jostling for attention. They start to bicker. I can let them bicker, I can let their conflict set the tone of the day. Or I can listen to music, a throbbing beat with a weaving brook of gentle melody trickling over rocks of tympani, bringing the hum in my mind to a sine wave of harmony. Finally, we are all going to the same place, no one is pulling the other way.

10 Minute Prompt: Wishful Lie

Her green eyes look at me, blink, look, blink. Droplets of water in her hair glitter in the quintuplet bathroom light. Her skin, ripening with fine lines, shifting pores, and eroded chicken pox scars, glows after the scrubbing in the shower. Her clavicles are drifted between shoulder and breast. I look away. She looks away. A Q-tip smooths and coaxes the wax from her ears. Another Q-tip disappears down the lint trap belly button, deeper than any she’s encountered. She brushes her teeth, always, before applying and spreading a dollop of lotion to her face. With the clean and tidy of this wiping routine she steps out of biology for a few minutes. If she does it right she can go a half day without looking like a living, growing, aging, sloughing, flowing, excreting creature.

The start of something good (I hope)

Her yellow hair held itself in tight curls against her head. No ash fell as Jen tapped her cigarette for the third time. She rolled her eyes slightly at the cries of a lost child echoing in the vaulted ceiling, On the bench in the bus station Jen tucked her legs under her. She pulled her skirt down over her knees with one hand while taking a long drag off her cigarette with the other. Her eyes swiveled left under lowered lashes and caught sight of Toolie just coming through the double doors. Toolie held her stetson with both hands in front of her rodeo buckle. As she looked around the station waiting area her right hand flattened the little curl behind her ear. She wiped the pomade off on her stiff new jeans. Jen raised her hand with the cigarette between her first and second fingers and bent her hot-pink nails forward, catching Toolie’s eye. Toolie stifled a grin that beamed in her eyes, tilted her head back in greeting and stepped to stand in front of Jen.



Uncurling her legs Jen shrugged toward the floor and said “Make yourself useful, grab my bags.” She took Toolie’s hand to stand and Toolie stooped slightly to get Jen’s kiss on the cheek before leveling her hat on her head and gathering the three pink and orange paisley suitcases under her arms.