"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."