heavenly horses

so the story goes, in 1994 i was in virginia attending hollin’s university when one day i was on a walk and found a horse tangled up in barbed wire. the horse actually called me over to it & waited patiently as i untangled it. i knocked on the door of the house i assumed it belonged at, but there was no answer. i wanted to make sure someone knew this horse might need more attention, so i found the stable manager for hollin’s university and told her.
her answer was, “you will get your reward in heaven.”
over the years, i have never forgotten those words. as a pagan, i often turn them over in my mind…trying to understand what they mean.
i have actually used them on my children at times as it sounds like some weird brush off for an over-eager attention seeker…& it makes me laugh to say it.
lately i have started thinking about doing a story called riding horses in heaven loosely based on this.
now i am thinking it will be a graphic novel.
i have started doodling my heavenly horses….

honey bee

he woke up suddenly. wondering. trying to remember
the last time he had seen a honey bee.
he can remember summers as a boy when it seemed
every clover crawled with them & running barefoot
would surely result in a stinger in the arch…
between the toes.
calling out in pain to bring mother running so she
could soothe you with an ice cube and soft whispers
of how you got hurt…but the bee died.
he wanted to be a farmer all his life. he lived
for tractor rides. hide & seek in the cornfields.
the smell of fresh cut hay.

lately my stories begin with scribbled thoughts inked over with drawings. i am not sure ever if i will continue the story or if it will live out it’s life as a post on my blog…. maybe one day i will come back through my journals & collect them all.

now i get it

when i was a girl, i could not get enough of horse stories. i picked up john steinbeck’s the red pony
expecting just another heartwarming story of a boy & his horse…by the end of the book, i was
pissed off & utterly confused. i remember the book from time to time, with bitterness. however,
while proofing my upcoming collection of short stories, i found myself remembering the story
with a different reaction. my own abrupt and morose storytelling reminded me of john steinbeck &
that fucking pony. then i began to wonder how much i had internalized in those precocious early
years, reading books beyond my understanding, stephan king & edgar allan poe…now building blocks
to my own stories. men i have never met, corrupting & molding that little writer inside me….

books! books! books!

in addition to having confusion perfume & other neurotic comics available through amazon (or contact me for an autographed copy)
in its proofing stage, to be released soon this year, tangled together…a collection of flash fiction & short stories written by me over the last 30 years.

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