The first time she woke up, she was in his parent’s living room. Only partially conscious, she heard his parents tell him to take her home and face the consequences.
The next time she was conscious, she was in her dad’s arms and he was picking her up from the driveway, bloody and broken.
She didn’t remember much of the week that followed. Just the painful injuries and a constant heartache. She started to recover, but even after months passed, she was not the same. Not even after years.
A lifetime passed. The girl went on to be successful professionally and personally. Something was never right. She went to the family cemetery, drawn to it as if she were being pulled. She sat down by her grandparent’s graves to figure out what was plaguing her.
Suddenly, she heard her grandfather’s voice, as clearly as if he were standing there.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “He was an abuser and showed his true colors that night. You almost didn’t survive it.”
In her thoughts, the girl replied, “I must have done something terrible. I must have been an awful person or he wouldn’t have done it. I’ve worked so hard since but never felt good enough.”
She heard her grandfather say, “My precious granddaughter, you’ve been successful in all you’ve ever done. You’ve just not been able to let that one night and a crazy man go. Let it go now and remember how much you are loved.”
Thanks to C.E. Ayer and Jenne Gray for hosting the #unicornchallenge!
When they decided to go their separate ways, she was devastated. She took a solo trip to the beach to try to reconcile herself to her new life without him.
Why were her friends and family freaking out about her trip before she went? She was trying to start healing.
She went for a swim. When her aunt came down to the beach, she was swimming underwater along the shore line.
Suddenly, there were police and an ambulance. They pulled her from the water.
Really? Over a failed relationship? They must not know her at all.
#fridayfictionwithronovanwrites Prompt Challenge #30 – Favorite Song
Song: Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones
She didn’t understand what it was about this man. It seemed that no matter what he did or said, she couldn’t find the strength to walk away from him. He was the special one, the one in a million.
She knew that he had been through a lot in his life. Many relationships. All had ended badly. Many great loves that turned out to be not so great. He was cynical, jaded, and took it out on her. She had to believe he didn’t mean to though that belief was starting to fade.
For so many years, she had loved him unconditionally, always remembering the life he had before she entered the picture. Maybe it was the life he still had. He couldn’t seem to accept anything pure or good.
Was what she offered him pure and good or was it selfish? She wasn’t objective about herself and couldn’t answer that question. There were times when she left that she was glad to be gone from him. She was more at peace when she was away from him than when she was with him. She always went back.
Wild horses couldn’t drag her away from her relationship with him.
His former life wasn’t the only problem. Her life contributed to the dysfunction in their relationship as well. She was needy and jealous. Although she tried not to be, she’d never had much positive reinforcement in her life. Then there was The Incident when she was physically abused. She couldn’t think about that.
Was it truly unconditional love that kept her with him? Was it something else, something darker? Was she afraid to step out into the world and take her chances? Was she going to stay with him, no matter what, because she was afraid something else would be worse? She was suffering abuse at his hands too. Emotional abuse.
Then, it happened. She didn’t know what “it” was, but one day, her emotions turned off as if they had been switched off. She looked at him and didn’t care anymore. She wanted to be away from him. Suddenly, she was free, but she had wasted so many years. She didn’t have much time left.
The wild horses that couldn’t drag her away were now carrying her away to her freedom. What about him? She couldn’t sacrifice herself anymore.
That was decades ago. I can’t imagine why one has popped up in our neighborhood. Who reads anymore?
People say they are visual learners now. Pictures, videos, multimedia. I wonder if many books are even published anymore. I haven’t seen one until that mobile library in many years.
I know many books, back in the day, were banned and burned. They say it was for our own protection. I do remember they were protecting us from the Others who don’t think like we do.
“Isn’t this the way you wanted it,” Emil asked Portia as she lamented her small social circle.
“I wanted to escape my previous life. Not my present life,” Portia responded to Emil.
“Portia,” Emil responded, “I’m not sure that you can be certain you have yet escaped your previous life. How can you possibly take the chance of putting yourself out there socially?”
As Portia contemplated Emil’s question, Emil thought about how he met Portia soon after she arrived in the small Portuguese town and they became fast friends.
Portia was a fun-loving, social person who had sought a way to rid herself of baggage in her life in the U.S. A drastic way, yes. Probably not a reasonable way. Portia had been desperate and had simply walked off and left her old life behind.
Emil said, “Portia, it isn’t easy to vanish in today’s world. Even though you have a fake passport and you don’t use your credit cards, he will probably find a way to trace you if he wants to.”
Portia would never go back to him or work for him again.
Ten days passed and Portia stayed in seclusion other than having Emil with her. One night, there was a knock at the door. She opened the door to find several law enforcement officers standing there. They announced that she was under arrest and would be extradited back to the U.S.
She went with the officers, crying and screaming, with Emil following. When they got to the jail, there he stood.
“Portia,” he said, “You can stay in Portugal. I don’t want you back. I do want the million dollars you embezzled from my company back. You almost bankrupted us.”
“I don’t have it now,” she said as she cried and begged for his mercy.
A bright blue fall day prompts childhood memories. The summer in Kentucky has been long and hot with at least two heat waves that were more intense than most can remember. Until yesterday, we were experiencing a heat wave where the day. time temperatures were at least 20 degrees above normal. Even the animals seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when the temperatures finally dropped to something near normal yesterday. Perhaps the rains will come and wet this forest where I live. The few leaves that have fallen are a dry, crunchy brown.
The dry weather dictates whether or not we have a fire season this fall. It seems Mother Nature is going to err on the side of fire this year. This little area of the world has had no rain for many weeks. The Daniel Boone National Forest is so dry that you can even hear the raccoons walk. Frogs populated our deck last night because they know we water our flowers there. They came in search of water. We gave them an extra spray or two of the hose and they seemed to appreciate that. It’s disconcerting for me, at this time of year, to live in these woods.
Sitting on my deck last night, I remembered fall nights as a child at a home not far from where I live now. We would sit outdoors and listen to the whippoorwills. I haven’t heard one in years, even though I live in the country. Urban development has driven them away. I’ve only seen a few fireflies. My friend was usually with me on those warm autumn nights. I remembered him with such fondness last night. Eddie passed away recently and I so miss just knowing that he’s in the world. The Eddie I knew as a boy was good and the Eddie who was a man was even better.
Since Eddie left us, I feel fundamentally changed. It’s as if the last vestiges of childhood have slipped away from me. Without Eddie in the world, without the cousins I played with as a child, without my parents, the childhood I spent on that hill down the road seems very far away. A mystical, magical time that I must have dreamed. The hills behind our houses that Eddie and I explored together….those hills that are now red and gold in their autumn glory must have just existed in my imagination.
Is this what grief dictates? Does it strip away everything and just leave a shell? What is really left when your family is gone? Eddie was my family. When your friends start to go as well? Will those warm autumn memories of baseball in the backyard, cards in front of the roaring fireplace, and a warm feeling of friends and family ever wrap around us again?
“My blog” is our #JusJoJan prompt for today and that makes me smile. Why? I never dreamed I’d be a blogger! I started this blog in April of 2016. I can’t believe it’s been that long ago. When I started it, all I knew is that I wanted a place to write. A safe place to write on a daily basis. I fully intended to write in the same vein in which I’d always written. Non-fiction. Most likely in my field of business and finance. I hadn’t written much for awhile and I was going to polish up my skills to start selling my articles again. I did, indeed, do that for awhile. A short while.
There were things that I didn’t know. I didn’t know I’d find a community of writers here on WordPress. I didn’t know I’d read other people’s really awesome blogs. I didn’t know I’d become interested in participating in writing challenges. Most of all, I didn’t knnow I’d become interested in writing fiction. Fiction? Me? I had just spent thirty years doing academic writing. Terse and restrictive academic writing. Non-fiction – big time. Writing by formula to some extent. How do you jump from academic writing to fiction? It turns out it was not easy.
I had started writing, and getting published, as a child and then as a teenager. Then life and the 30 years of academic writing happened. My initial efforts at writing fiction here on my blog were terrible. Just awful. I started reading everything I could find about writing fiction. I started reading some of these awesome blogs. I gradually started getting more comfortable. I’m still not totally comfortable with fiction, but I’m better. I can knock out a non-fiction article very quickly. Fiction is a different deal. It takes awhile, lots of effort, and letting myself feel. Something I’m not very good at doing. Fiction involves creativity which I had not tapped into in a long time.
So, there you have my journey here with my blog. I’m not finished yet. I still have fiction skills to build. I’m even moving into different genres that I’m finding I enjoy. Magical realism anyone?
Have you ever talked to someone and, suddenly, you realized that person wasn’t really hearing you? At the very least, they didn’t understand what you were saying and were just being polite? If you’re going to talk, talk to people who hear you. Really hear you. Your words are wasted otherwise.
We all have different kinds of friends and family. Some are more casual. Some are closer. The only ones that can really be closer are those who can hear you. Hear the meaning and feeling behind your words. Otherwise, it’s a superficial relationship.
I’ll tell you what I usually do. I usually let the ones who can’t hear me talk to me. If they ever stopped to think about it, they would realize they know almost nothing about me. Nothing of any importance anyway.
If you try to talk to the ones who can’t hear you, you’ll just be frustrated and you’ll grow to resent them. It’s not their fault nor is it yours.
Welcome to the 2019 version of my blog! A new year! I”m starting this year with a challenge I particularly like. Linda’s #JusJoJan Challenge. You’ll see a post here, based on her prompts, every day of January. It will be fun. Today is just a brief rundown of 2018. In some ways, it’s a year I”d rather forget. More about that in a minute. In one very important way, it’s a year I’ll always remember. I want to share this with you.
When I was growing up, I really only knew one side of my family. I knew them and will love them always. I never had the opportunity to know the other side of my family, mostly, I think, because they were far-flung geographically from me. My dad didn’t talk very much about his family. He died young and I didn’t have the chance to ask. As I got older, I had to do some research in order to try to find my family. In 2018, I worked on my genealogy using Ancestry. About that time, coincidentally, one of my first cousins who I had really never known had been looking for me too. He found me on Facebook and we connected. It has been such a great pleasure getting to know him! Gradually, I’ve connected with most of my first cousins and then, through Ancestry, some of my second and third cousins. How fun it has been to get to know this big family I never knew I had!
Besides that, which has been the highlight of my year, it’s been a tough year and I’m glad to see 2018 end. I have some health-related challenges that are serious and just cropped up this year. Getting old is not for sissies! Because of that, I haven’t made as much writing progress as I’ve wanted to make. I have a novella and a novel in the works and only now am I starting to feel like working on them again. I am even feeling like taking a job again and may be working freelance for awhile.
At my age, you start to lose people in your life and I’ve also had deaths among my close circle of friends. It’s seemed as if there has been one funeral after another. On the upside of that, I’ve had a chance to reconnect with forever friends.
I’m ready for 2019 and am hoping that it will be a better year! Here’s hoping all of you have a wonderful year as well.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn.” That old quote popped into her head at 4 a.m. It wouldn’t be daylight soon this morning since the Earth was spinning toward the shortest day of the year. She was still awake at this ungodly hour, as she often was, yearning for the light.
She couldn’t sleep until it was daylight. The old dreams, the terrible dreams of her childhood, haunted her, and she knew she couldn’t sleep until dawn when they would subside. She remembered them when she awoke, screaming, but only for a few seconds. Only the light chased them away.
The Write Scribe 