linnaly

mpdrolet: Heiner Luepke

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:29:34 -0400

mpdrolet:

Heiner Luepke

The Little Mermaid | Part 7

Fri, 03 May 2013 20:41:09 -0400

The Little Mermaid | Part 7

“Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte [inspired by mmorrow]

Fri, 03 May 2013 20:40:38 -0400

“Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte

[inspired by mmorrow]

"Alice, falling, sees on the top shelf of the open cupboard a jar bearing the label RASPBERRY JAM, a..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 02:20:58 -0400

“Alice, falling, sees on the top shelf of the open cupboard a jar bearing the label RASPBERRY JAM, a yew-wood tea caddy with brass fastenings and a design of handpainted plants and flowers on the lid, and a tin of lemon snaps: the dark green top shows in the center an oval containing a colored head of Prince Albert. On the bottom shelf Alice sees a porcelain dessert plate with a gilt border and a center panel showing a young man in a tilted tricorne, red jacket, and white breeches, standing beside an oak tree; a bread knife with an ivory handle carved to show a boy holding wheat in his arms; and a silver-plated cream jug with a garland of silver-plated leaves and berries encircling the base. So slowly is Alice falling that she has time to take in all the details, to note the pink thistles on the lid of the tea caddy and the yellow buttons on the red jacket of the man on the dessert plate, to observe the faint reflections of her face above and below the label on the jar of raspberry jam.”

- Steven Millhauser, “Alice Falling”, The Barnum Museum

mykindafairytalee: untitled by Maggie Lochtenberg on Flickr.

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:39:37 -0400

mykindafairytalee:

untitled by Maggie Lochtenberg on Flickr.

dreamycloud: From “Jack Frost’s Lover” by Kimberly...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 09:39:25 -0400

dreamycloud:

From “Jack Frost’s Lover” by Kimberly Karalius.

Read the whole story in A History of Lost Things, Issue II!

vega-ofthe-lyre: From Persephone’s Letters to Demeter by Nan...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:22:43 -0400

vega-ofthe-lyre:

From Persephone’s Letters to Demeter by Nan Fry

"A Myth of Devotion" by Louise Glück

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 02:18:18 -0400

One of my favorite poems.

“A Myth of Devotion” by Louise Glück

When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she’d find it comforting.

A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn’t everyone want love?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—

That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there’d be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn’t imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone’s Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.

"They seemed to belong to another age, an older age, and age when things spiritual were indeed to be..."

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:00:42 -0400

“They seemed to belong to another age, an older age, and age when things spiritual were indeed to be feared, when common sense was uncommon, an age when omens and witches were credible, and ghosts beyond denying.”

- From “The Red Room” by H.G. Wells. (via dreamycloud)

Photographer: Thierry Cohen Paris, without light pollution.

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 08:33:07 -0400

Photographer: Thierry Cohen

Paris, without light pollution.

lightningcake: Sarabelle’s extraordinary feet made her a lonely...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:00:43 -0400

lightningcake:

Sarabelle’s extraordinary feet made her a lonely child. Ever since she caused a small earthquake by launching herself off the swing and landing too hard on the playground gravel, the neighborhood kids had been afraid. Nobody in school much liked her either, because when she walked through the halls, things fell down: books, globes, Erlenmeyer flasks.

Stretching her legs out in front of her desk, Sarabelle stared down at her naked toes. She always went barefoot—wearing shoes with hard soles only made things worse. She wasn’t allowed to leave until everyone else had safely exited the building, and so she waited, balancing chemical equations in her head. Ftstps1 + Thndr1→SarabelleFt2

When the bell sounded the all-clear signal, Sarabelle slid out from behind her desk. The empty chairs trembled. She pretended she was full of helium. A can of Sharpies plummeted from the filing cabinet.

She hadn’t gone very far when the fluorescent lights crackled overhead. Glancing anxiously up at the flickering fixtures, she took one more step. The light directly over her head sputtered and went out, and Sarabelle flinched—making all fourteen desks jump 2.5 centimeters off the ground—before shuffling quickly out the door into the hallway. But what she saw next made her stop short.

Standing in the center of the corridor was Randy, the boy who sat at the back and never raised his hand. Now he seemed to be in detention, holding one chalkboard eraser in each hand, his sleeves rolled up to expose freckled wrists and bony fingers. His eyes met hers, and he clapped the erasers together.

A shower of silvery sparks spouted from between his palms. Sarabelle gaped as glowing electrons swam like minnows through the air, leaping from his skin and swirling into a particle cloud that glimmered like stardust. The overhead lights hummed and dimmed, and she whispered, “You have lightning.”

The boy’s face broke into a smile. “Now you,” he said.

He’s not afraid of me. So she lifted one foot and after a moment’s hesitation, ground her heel into the floor. The entire school lurched, vibrating like the insides of a timpani, but Sarabelle couldn’t look away from the grinning boy before her.

Shyly, she smiled back. A flurry of static coursed through the air between them, and outside, the first drops of rain began to fall.

.

Samantha Chaffin is a third-year Creative Writing and Theatre student at the University of Southern California. She supports Young Adult fiction, speaks in obscure references to Disney films and blogs at herinklings.wordpress.com (sometimes all at the same time).

sinandserotonin: tell me the storyabout how the sunloved the moon so muchhe died every nightto let...

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 02:48:29 -0500

sinandserotonin:

tell me the story
about how the sun
loved the moon so much
he died every night
to let her breathe

Illustrator: Lisbeth Zwerger

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 08:17:01 -0500

Illustrator: Lisbeth Zwerger

fwriction: LiAnn Yim’s song selection—to accompany her short...

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:30:00 -0500

fwriction:

LiAnn Yim’s song selection—to accompany her short story, “City Girls”—for fwriction : review’s Waffle-Rocking Playlist

Go back and forward, but all is melting like the snow Taking all from us, all we thought was left to know On what we treasure falls a dusty snow Taking us backwards but where we will never know

lightningcake: Coo coo, little child, I say. I know no...

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 09:00:25 -0500

lightningcake:

Coo coo, little child, I say. I know no lullabyes. Coo-coo. Coo-coo, like a clock ticking each hour. But the clock ticks only for me. The child is always a child, always new, with the smell of powder and the opening, closing lids like the wings of grasshoppers, as translucent, and as innocent. The child has been a child, an infant with nails as big as the ball heads of pins for two hundred years, and for two hundred years, my family’s women have been its nursemaids, our breasts sore and drained of milk, and of blood. The rules are hard and fast—take care not to let it suck for more than two minutes, timed by your own breath speaking “one, one thousand, two one thousand” until you reach the mark. Pull it away with your finger in the crook of its jaw, distracting it, or its teeth, tiny teeth, will tear at you. And that does no one any good. Its cries are like that of a wildcat, and you see its teeth like bits of broken bone pushed violently through skin, the fault of an accident, not nature taking its course. If it scratches itself, as babies do, then for heaven’s sake don’t let that blood touch you, let it nowhere near your lips or your eyes. We’ve all had the temptation, though, to let it in. To taste immortality. But it’s been two hundred years without a one of us crossing that rule, and for that we must assume we were chosen. We are a stalwart line. The first of us, the grandmother whose face no one remembers, began when the child was turned in front of her very eyes. She, quick as a switch, killed the mother, she who’d turned it, with a mouthful of garlic and the broken leg of a stool. Then she took residence in her master’s house, all others run away, or dead, and stayed with the babe. We have been here, hearing no songs nor singing them. Outside this house, the town has dwindled, and we hear talk of a city far away, where the others that we could have become go off to work, and to keep small homes in tenements. But we remain here, with the babe. We keep it alive like good nursemaids, and sometimes, like other nursemaids, we marry. We bear daughters. Our husbands are invariable—they marry us to save us. They age with us in frustration. They leave us for that new city when we reveal that our daughters will not be spared. They are missed.

.

Cate Fricke holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Ohio State University. Her fiction and reviews have appeared in The Journal, The Review Review, and The Sycamore Review, where she was the 2012 recipient of the Wabash Prize for Fiction. Her first novel, published under the name C.R. Grey, is intended for publication in 2014. She blogs about folklore and children’s literature at http://somethingtoreadforthetrain.wordpress.com/.

City Girls, by LiAnn Yim

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 07:48:00 -0500

fwrictionreview:

We are all afraid of the man we have read about in the newspaper.

This city, which is all we’ve ever known, is a strange place. Chainsaw attacks in the subway. Acid thrown outside apartments; fires set inside elevators. Cranes topple off half-built buildings. But this is different, this is worse. This is the most terrible story you will ever hear.

Here is what we have learned from the newspapers: The man goes into hair salons, takes hold of a woman’s hair, usually after it’s been washed and lies lankly like an oily seal pelt, and cuts off a great hank of it. He leaves. He takes the hair with him. What does he do with this hair, we wonder. We don’t know. People guess about it at dinner parties. Late night show comedians make jokes about it on TV. What is going on here? This guy’s got some kind of hair fetish; he’s a bald guy, he’s angry at the hair. Bedbugs ate away his mattress so now he stuffs the bedding with human hair because a Chinese acupuncturist instructed him to do so, if he didn’t want to have a crooked spine. Perhaps he has in his possession an egg, white, and speckled, that must be placed in a nest of fleece and hair before it can be borne.

Read More

From "The Phantom Coach" by Amelia B. Edwards

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 05:28:26 -0500

The master of a mysterious house: “And pray, sir, by what right have you forced an entrance into my house?”
James: “The same by which I should have clung to your boat, if I were drowning. The right of self-preservation.”

"He (my captor) gave me a bisquit, which I put in my pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it..."

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 05:26:00 -0500

“He (my captor) gave me a bisquit, which I put in my pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fearing he had put something in it to make me love him.”

- From the narrative of the captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, who was taken prisoner by the Wampanoag when Lancaster, Massachusetts, was destroyed, in the year 1676 (Epigraph to “Captivity” by Louise Erdrich)

"I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how..."

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 04:48:21 -0500

“I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

- Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

lightningcake: EVERY YEAR, the river in our town runs wild with...

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:30:21 -0500

lightningcake:

EVERY YEAR, the river in our town runs wild with fish. They overhatch in gullies that burst forth in a high streaming rush, floe versus fish, fish versus fish. There’s not nearly enough room for all of them. The water thrashes with tails and gills flipped from the stream. The unlucky ones you’ll see bouncing on the rounded blue bulge of the run, again and again trying to slam themselves down.

Women with houses that border the banks lean from their windows with enormous brass pots, the day’s dinner leaping straight into their arms. Children toss bread from footbridges to see the fish torpedoing up to the sky. Dogs go temporarily mad with excess, shaking upwards of four fish in their mouths, then take off trotting with them through the streets, exhilaration eclipsing the instinct to eat.

The run lasts three days. It leaves our roads slicked with entrails and a smell that, if it catches in your hair, you cut out. We stay indoors and wait for the sun to bake the streets dry, for the breeze to stir and send the dust downstream, off with the rest.

Then we eat yeast cakes. Then spring is here.

.

Susan Anspach is an MFA student at the University of Maryland, as well as a co-editor for speculative literary journal The Golden Key. Her work has appeared in feminist zine Ladybones, and this past summer she participated in the Prague Summer Program conference, through which she was awarded the John Woods Scholarship for writing.