August 2023 – Page 3 – Joan Spilman

This Textured Darkness, #28

He’d caught the eye of a buxom barmaid who asked for coin.

Below him sprawled Casoria, the stuff of which legends were made.

Did the nurse know who she was talking to? She’s not some floozy who fetches the morning paper in her nightgown!

Part 1 Char Glimmer sits on her porch in a ladder-backed chair, waiting for a familiar face to drive her to the doctor. She is wearing a… Read more “Charlotte Glimmer (a Harshbarger Mills Story)”

He was being branded; the air smelled as it did when they marked the wild horses in the spring.

“My source tells me the bark is odd. Flesh colored with specks of red. The shoots spring up, only to die.”

I don’t know why her father, who is a good man, didn’t walk fifty yards and stop a beating that ended a boy’s life.

“What if the child is already dead?”
“He is alive. Else why would Jah demand that he be rescued?”

For years and years, Iris was the wife of the town’s only mortician. She’s popped in, treating me like a source of income, unannounced and unafraid.

“Here is the message you must take. Read it before it is waxed.”