Riding A Ghost of the Queen

The re-emergence of madrona trees...
Madrona--arbutus--peeling trees
Their roots reach across the inlet and delve into my mind.
It has probably been a decade since I have seen them...but it has probably been a decade since I have seen a lot of things.

I am on the ferry, and it passes a beach, creating waves that disrupt the quiet shoreline.
With its great mass, it is unfathomable as to how a ferry could be lost to the sea, as one was a year before.
Seagulls scream at passengers, and the cove creates its own echo of silence.
Scattered homes face the water along the ferry's route, prompting to wonder why we all can't live like that.

Why couldn't we have stayed in little huts by the sea, and let the land be?

Spring

Without spring, one would forget how glorious the cold of Winter really is.

LK

Short Story Review

Sleeping with the Dead by Kaitlin Fontana: Unfortunately Not Necrophilia Erotica
A Short Reflection By Laura Kelsey


Death is always a traumatic event for anyone, at any stage in life; but trauma also makes for excellent story fodder, and in Sleeping with the Dead, Kaitlin Fontana has taken her father’s publicly discussed fatal accident and examined her own mixed reaction to her family’s loss. But Kaitlin cannot seem to decide whether she is to grieve, or fear, the death of her father, and she comes across as a paranoid wreck throughout most of the story.

This personal narrative tale, set in first person-present tense, gets off to a jumpy start. The author’s uneasiness is conveyed through the sketchy use of short, to the point, sentences when she describes an experience with her doctor. “He doesn’t ask questions, just prescribes pills.” “He knows.” “He doesn’t write it down.” Her paranoia is stated frequently in the first paragraph, beginning with the second sentence. “…I have told him that my father is dead and I can’t sleep at night for fear his ghost will come and try and talk to me.” Again in the paragraph she recognizes her paranoia, now regarding her health, by stating to her doctor that she “seem(s) like a hypochondriac.”

Her paranoia continues as the story, which begins to come across as a set of jumpy snapshots into her jumbled life, changes setting from her doctor’s office to her mother’s home. She states again that she is not sleeping, and that she is frightened easily at some moving bushes in her mother’s back yard. Before, she feared her father’s ghost, but now some of her paranoia is transferred to worries of a “crazy native man” that is sneaking into unlocked homes.

But then the story gets confusing. The next paragraph has her in English class. There is a break in between the paragraphs, so I am expecting a different time or setting, but the new setting is given without any explanation, and this confuses the reader. The author states that she is in a class, but does not mention whether she is a student or teacher. This causes the reader to wonder about her age, and distracts from the story.

The next paragraph sees the story jump again, but backtracks to her mother’s home, and includes a meditation on her father’s publicly broadcasted demise. This passage had me momentarily feeling rising guilt, since I remember reading about the goring of this hunter and laughing over the irony of his passing. But this is the only part of the story that had me feeling anything besides confusion, and it is only a fleeting pang before my bewilderment resumes.

The author again abruptly departs to another setting, but this time we go back in time an unknown number of years to her childhood. She describes a moment when her father brings a bear carcass into her family’s kitchen and guts it, right on the tiles in front of her. It seems obvious that she is not looking for any pity for her dead father after describing his actions with the bear, but I did begin to feel as though she is grasping for sympathy for herself from the reader.

The story then catapults back to the present with no warning. The author is back at the doctor, and then the reader is treated to a pointless paragraph about her sister staying with her in Vancouver. As a reader, I am completely oblivious as to the time frame of the exchange between the siblings. But I do not get a lot of time to think about it, because the story jumps again to a new setting and time.

The story continues like an episode of Quantum Leap throughout its duration, and disrupts any feelings that the author is trying to evoke from the reader. Even if I did want to feel sympathy for the writer and her situation, my compassion gets lost in the confusion of the ever-changing settings and times. But I think the confusion brought out through the story is a reflection of her own uncertainty toward her father’s death. She also succeeds at tarnishing any good image that her father had left by admitting that he had “…cut his knuckle open on (her) mother’s face.” (That line made me want to shake that water buffalo’s hoof.)

The author obviously had a rocky and distant relationship with her father, but this story did not make me care about it at all. It actually made me feel a slight disdain for the author, as she came across as a spoiled girl who blamed all her problems on her father. Could this story be her post-mortem revenge on him? Well if it is, it is hard to tell, because the tale is too confusing.

The Ring!

...okay....this may even be scarier than The Ring!

Ocean

Logo

Past the Pane

I left the window open again…



…and snow blew through its wooden-framed void.
It brought with it whispers
on icy winds of times long past.
This was white wind that seemed to sense that my ears had been ringing with audible memories.
“What do you think I did?”
I invaded the whispers with my harsh tone.
“You expect nothing of me, and yet you hope for everything!”
The wind continued to invite its way in, with no hint of its flustering intention.
Then all at once the snow became thicker,
hurdling through the gap at a greater speed.

And all I had to do was close the window.

But I stood frozen, not from the cold flurries that teased around me, and nor was it fear that ceased my steps.
The wind continued to push through the open window, past the pane, causing the walls to shudder.
It continued,

because I let it.

It was a simple fix.
Closing the window would stop the ice, the wind and the whispers,
but if I closed it, then I would be stricken with silence.
“Give me the companionship of an element without the frozen pain it whispers through my window.”
The ice did not subside, and the wish was lost to the wind.
“Then why does it burn when you embrace my body with your frozen fingers? The ice should numb me, not cause me further torment.”
Frozen flakes upon frozen flesh
should no longer burn.
Ice upon ice should not scald.
I stood facing the window, embracing the wind’s might,
yet still pelted with unfettered stings,
each alternately arousing desire, then pain.
“Torturous torrent of frosted gust, I have power against you…and yet I do not use it.”
Whispers slid through my earlobes,
lapping with their icy tongues.
The wind forced air into me,
my lungs raped so forcefully that breath soon became laboured,
bordering impossible.
I took a step towards the window.

The wind lessened, its white glare softening to sheen and glow.
Breathing became pleasant, and the whispers had soft mouths now.
Although the harsh gale could return at any time…
I would close the window another day.

The Fish!!

The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless. Nicolas de Chamfort

Can I Play with Magnus?

I Sing

...and show off my crotch...!!

Reflection Down by the River

I always feel more alive
when running in the forest.
It helps me
to think; it helps me not to think.

Jogging down by the river, through the forest,
is the most refreshing
-ly beautiful place.
Down the crumbling path, off the path—
each step an invasion—
if not for the parting of the foliage upon my arrival.
I regard the cedar discards on the forest floor,
a welcome mat of sweet smelling decay,
an invitation to run amongst the armoured soldiers of trees.
My eyes thirst to take in as much of this
scenery
as possible.
Every inch of the woods is probed by my vision.
I yearn to have the ability
to take a photo with my eyesight,
and keep the beauty with me.

Who knows when it will be the last time
I will see the glory of the forest?
Just as how darkness is a nothingness that yields so much more,
the woods hold a danger that I have yet to encounter.
The river I love
has held women’s bodies,
living, swimming
and floating, bloating…and dead.
The abstract fractals of the branching trees
have been witness to darker things
than the night…

…yet warnings have not kept me away.

Because even when I lay drowning
in a pool of my own blood,
as I intake breath into my gurgling lungs,
it will somehow be beautiful
and even then, I will be more alive

because I will be dying in the forest.