This is the beginning of a collection of stories I am writing for adults who are caught forever in FairyTale like myself.


Taurus’ Love Trees


Charlotte and Jessy found each other underneath the tree the neighborhood kids called Fairy Tale. They called it this because whenever the wind blew Fairy Tale’s treetop would not sway one bit. It seemed as if it halted in the deepest kind of stillness in face of the wind. In violent storms that tossed their garbage cans across the street and sometimes lifted stray cats for two seconds in the air, this tree would resist all attempts at forcing her to move, beckoning mother nature to try and make her bend. When the weather calmed, the slightest second after the air went gentle, Fairy Tale immediately began to slowly rock herself from side to side, carefully tossing her leaves like pieces of hair out of place. As the children ran home from storms and pounding winds they witnessed the elegant defiance of Fairy Tale appearing as a statue in the Coliseum of Rome, with captured debris and litter swirling all around her. It was then in her stillness that she forced them still. She would whisper to those gaping at her as the weather threatened to slap them around, “If the rocks don’t have to move then neither do I.” They slid back from the voice hoping someone had spoken behind them yet were afraid to turn around and find no one there. Their eyes were glued to the lines in the bark of the tree, where a thick mossy fuzz lie embedded, and seemed to grow each time the wind pummeled against it. Had it been from this place the voice spoke; was there a large ravenous animal inside the trunk that held it still, planning to snatch one of them as they stood in awe, they wondered. But the moss slowly curved from is vertical direction and tilted to the left, slid back up the bark, made another left turn, right, and sharp right again, until it had winded all over the tree making two lines such that once the children stepped close saw a sentence had been written, its first words reading, “Touch me.” For two weeks the request had gone unmet by their small hands until Charlotte found Jessy and Jessy found Charlotte pressing against the moss, fingering its words.
“Did you see it when it was made?” Jessy asked Charlotte, watching her mouth the words on the tree to herself.
“No, but I’ve heard it speak. Have you?”
“I heard it could speak. But I’ve never heard it. That’s why the kids call it Fairytale. Well that's what their parents say it is when they tell them they heard it talk.”
“It don’t just talk. It tell stories, ones won’t nobody believe, but they got to cuz it's coming from a tree.”
“Really? What kind of stories? Can you make it tell one now?”
“You can’t make nothing tell you something about itself. Its gotta want to.”
“How do you make it want to?” Charlotte glanced at Jessy, then looked away shaking her head.
“Come over here.” Charlotte spoke as if she were burdened by her discernment at such a young age. She pointed underneath the first line. “Do you know how to read yet?”
“Hey, you’re not the only one who has passed the first grade!”
“Could of fooled me. Wit these bunch of niggas that run around here I doubt anybody knew how to tie their own shoes yet.” Jessy’s eyes lowered as she tried to be inconspicuous about seeing whether her laces were tied.
“Come over here.” Jessy followed Charlotte kneeling down to the very foot of the tree. “You see where that puddle of black is?”
“No.”
“Oh come on girl. The light from the streetlamp is reflecting off of it.”
“The streetlights are on?! I have to get home now!”
“Aw come on now. You cant go missing hearing nature speak cause you wanna be obedient all the time.”
“Does it ever speak before nightfall!” Jessy jumped up from where the sap was gathering and turned facing the road she would run down towards home.
“Only right after it storms.”
“My momma says it's supposed to rain like it did this afternoon all week long. Meet me hear tomorrow, will ya? Right after the last drop!”
“Go on home, Lassie.”
“You should too!” Jessy runs down the street and with half of her head in sight she screams, “Backwater!”
Charlotte dips her pinky into the sap and smears it back onto the bark then strokes the gray lines of the tree.
“Tomorrow, we’ll listen,” she says, then rises from her knees to head home... (Will post part 2 soon, stay tuned! :)

I AM:

medicinal
ample
bare
moneyed
prehistoric
sooty
corrected
cranial
answerable
feasting
beleaguered
singed
shifting
exercised
removed
saturated
convalescent
straightened
Black
appropriate
peering
noised
identified
scalping
brick-layering
going
inscribing
quieting
listening

If you could choose three things from the list below to occupy the moments when the silence in your life feels like terror, which ones would you choose? Please note some of the choices below can be held, others have to be waited for, and some must be found from within.

Fill the silence with:
guitar strums
movies
dinner
eye contact
Grace
wombs
harmony
birth
laughter
apple pie
Sunday mornings
aroma
prayer
moonlight
now
peppermint tea
protection
an apology
running water
motivation
memories

Silence has degrees. When my silence is below a safe range of temperature, when it is without any warmth, or the humidity from the hot air of voices in my room, my silence is too cold for me to move and I begin shaking. These are my moments of terrorizing silence and for it I choose apple pie, Grace, and eye contact because all I need is to feel I am being held enough to still my shivering hands.

I have grown much quieter over the past year. It feels good to hold my words now from the time when I was letting them loose to strut and entertain. Now I hold them first and then decide whether they are ready for the world. This tiny piece below is in honor of my new handle on speech.


The cracked vocal chords of her screaming “she was right”, then screaming “she was alone” have left bits and pieces of her throat all over the ground. Her vocal chords like particles of clay from a busted sculptured voice. Now under the heat of a reprimanding sun her voice melts into puddles that slide back together forming into a speech quieted. Her new voice is a cemented, absorbed silence.

I dream about her in the form of wells I keep falling into.
She is dark and stone walled with slippery tiles meant for your spirit to slide down as it tries climbing back up to the light inside of her.
Deborah. Greek name: Ebony Colored Evil.
Her fallen children sit inside the bottom of her
chanting well songs she has echoed down to each one of them every time she opens up the beginning of her pain.
Chant:
Little girls hear whispers
Watch for the demons that prey
Little girls hear whispers
Tell them its okay.
We never learn whether she’s the little girl or the demon
But I, as a little girl,
am commissioned to serve her tall glasses of room temperature water
while she lying in a hot bath,
clinging to porcelain,
pleads to God to plunge her from this earth.
I am chosen out of three to witness her ritualized pain
because my skin is sinewy thick with plastic feelings
that keep her tears and sweat from ever saturating me.
I demonize her because it is easy.
Because in truth I want Ebony-Colored Evil to cradle me in her arms
no matter how much the soot from her past gets all over me.
And just for a second, I am up close enough to see her
sitting at a dinner table
eight years old
wanting butter on her mash potatoes and for someone to tell her “it’s okay”.
A navy blue black beginning to appear just above her brow.
Three decades later,
she is covered in abandonment,
her need to be loved depressed into the hole in which we now sit,
chanting.
We, her fallen children, just want to get out of the well and play.
Deborah. Earth name: Mother
with slippery walls your spirit can’t find a grip to.

Little girls hear whispers
and they wonder are their mothers okay
Little girls hear whispers
and tell themselves be quiet and pray.

Empty tea cups sitting on a white clothed table,
only two fingers can hold.
delicate porcelain shine
a fragile stillness.
Silence cracking through gloss
The kettle pierces silence, filled.
Warm water holds me in this tiny place.
Searching for a conversation with other piercing sounds,
soothed by the water that holds it
cups ting in a distance
clinging to kept resilience
kettle water chills from lack of touch, then tips
tiny empty tea cups, steadying to stand still
teetering to the edge
delicate enough to shatter
a melody of wind chimes grazed
warm water over a warm palm
tiny empty tea cups
quivering trepid
‘til placed in the palm of my hand.

We have been trying to understand each other below sea level.
Our foundation becoming the water dust we walk on,
particles of our history a blurry mist each time our feet touch ground.
"Make me a home."
"Give me new," are the words that spew out of her mouth whenever she breaks through waves.
Burst of water collected in her lungs since living with him at the bottom of the ocean.

They were trying to think at a level where minds combust.
Think through them.
How to build a home together underneath all this density.
She wanted him to wrap her body in the kelp he lay his head on at night.
She wanted to appear as a seaworld goddess. His.
Hoped this was the picture of her on the mantle piece in his mind.

He simply wanted to rest,
to keep the kelp as a bed for his thoughts.
Resented her suggestion that his rest be used for her adornment.
He didn’t understand that she just wanted to be the beheld.
She didn’t understand that at the bottom of the sea he couldn’t even hold himself.
Neither ever realized the other wasn't breathing anymore.
Their ignorance rising with the water dust they walked on.

In Silver Spring, Maryland the sun is available to everyone. It is quiet enough for the self-indulgent to hear spirits whispering a plea for community, and socialites to encounter themselves in a peace that is filled with silent reflection. Suburbia is gentle. Homes are open. Pedestrians think the root of the silence in midday is because contentment has lulled everyone into an afternoon nap. Children play with poodles tied to leashes in front yards and grandmother’s watch from living room windows. It is a place I go to touch my memories. A twilight zone that is always forgiving. I transform into a nine year old on the yellow and blue monkey bars of my elementary school where I first fell flat on my back trying to reach beyond the strength of my grip.
In the evening, grandfather sips on rum and coke and the tribe of grandchildren take the fresh air that is all over their clothes and cloak the house in it, somehow warping the smell into the stench of dog tongue.
“The final analysis of life is…” My grandfather utters with the porch door open letting bits of crystals in the sky become apart of our home.
“Is what?” My grandmother intrudes, “that you are the enlightened drunk?”
“But you love me, darling." He curves his eyes towards her. "You must.”
She looks flushed with all the grief and resolve she has ever held over him and turns to the door he is holding.
“Somebody should award me.”
“Oh, I think you better open your eyes, my dear,” He speaks up into the sky. “Look at what we’ve made together.” He spreads his hands through the air as if their entire life together can be found on the green grass his hands sweeps above, as if all they've made lies outside their home. “We’ve been immensely rewarded.” He pauses at the door staring out as if he can recognize himself at a distance.
“Lonnie, come inside, its cold out.”
In the morning, the pink-red dawn spreads just above the trees and I am in the mood to pray and then eat french toast. The creek that runs for miles is where I learned that I could walk on water, with the help of bulging rocks and fallen logs. It is where I visit my nine-year-old self when I return for silence and sun. She is always waiting there under the same old gray tree trunk I sat by when I sang songs into the creek, and the quiet surrounded me. I am cupped in nature’s understanding that this is where my journey for home will always begin.

A little girl runs through my thoughts looking for other little girls to tell the stories to. She wants to sit all the children down in a circle and be their ringleader. If she gets them still, she will try to show them how to tie up all their dreams in one hand and run them through my mind like flying kites. My thoughts are blades of grass in a field she gallops through, chasing her own shadow when none of the other girls are around. She will not obey my rules. I keep telling her stay away from the doors I have closed in me. She stands in front of these same doors, hand on knob. When my eyes have dozed she gathers all the little girls and places them in front of every door. At her signal they run into every dark room, screaming, ‘Find the lights! Find the lights! The first one to find the light wins.” The only thing she and I do together is say “Good Morning”. She knows this is my one way of saying with her, yes there is light.

One night I was walking to the grocery store. It was nearing the end of winter so I felt the cold on my fingertips and tried rubbing them up against the lining of my coat pocket. I had been sleeping with a man who believes that everything that can be touched on earth was at first a thought. He is confident that if we use our minds we can loosen something in its densest form, even our sadness, and make it anew. And though later I came to realize he had no idea how to become what he believed, his words held my little girl and encouraged her to reach through my thick skin and make the ‘real world” her playing field.

As I walked down the street that night, I started to forget about the blue steak fish, sweet potato yams and fresh garlic I needed. I thought everything I want is right in front of me, all I have to do is reach out and grab it. In this moment, every light she ever turned on was lit within me. It was as if a bouquet of bulbs were being held underneath my face. I felt my glow. I felt my smile. My steps were lighter. As I approached the main street a heavy woman came near me holding grocery bags in both hands and walking slowly. The night would not allow me to see more than a small round face, a dark colored hat, and a long coat she wore. I saw her but I was still inside my own warmth, refusing to calm my glow over fear of looking like I had no context for such visible joy in public. But as she passed me, I said “Hello”. She replied with a big smile, “Good Morning.”

I paused at the corner shock-still at what I had just heard. It was passed 9pm in the evening. Not even a street light had been on the block where we walked. I decided it was true, that it was a ‘Good Morning’ in this moment, with the sky pitch black and my thoughts as brilliant as the noonday sun.