Tag: author

poetry, writer, writing

shame

Kelly Rogers

Wrapper-less candy slapped into your hand from a distance after you asked politely

Discrete looks from shaded eyes overpowering your dignity

Trumpets announcing what you wish could be announced by a muffled flute or ignored entirely

Fair? Where did fair go?

You say I took your freedom when I just asked for understanding.

You can cast it, but you can’t put it back in your pocket.

It is a fireball that will burn a hole in your leg,

the same leg with which you hope to leave the scene.

Dark magic? Is it dark magic?

No, it’s just you pretending to cast doubt, which is actually just

my truth that you wrapped in spite.

Thank you. I feel worse.

I hope you still have a good night though, like the night of an owl

who can’t find its leafy perch after it has found prey.

fiction, story, writer, writing

100 Word Ghost Stories

Kelly Rogers

NYC Midnight Microfiction Contest Prompt: Ghost story, with the word focus, and action of licking an envelope

The Toast

Mark, always the focus at their table of friends, let Anna sit in a quiet shadow beside him. He would toast her, like he always did, to make up for it.

“To Anna, a bright light lost to shadows,” Mark solemnly spoke as he raised his obligatory glass.

Anna struggled to grip her wine glass, perplexed at the toast and her last fight with Mark. When the fight ended unresolved, she licked an envelope at his insistence, still remembering the odd metallic taste.

Anna went to speak, but Claire sat down through her, grabbing Mark’s hand with a coy smile.

The Promise

“Promise me you will move on,” Wren insisted with ragged breath through the fence. Even through her mask, she could smell his intoxicating spice.

“I want to go with you,” she screamed as he walked away for the last time.

Two years later to the day, she sat at a desk in the grim flat issued to her upon surviving the final wave of illness. Her focus was lost to an apparition on the wall and the smell of spice in the air. Suddenly compelled, she licked the envelope containing her positive response to the previously unrequited love of another.

Violet in the Dark

Violet found the darkest corner of her closet, leaving a tenuous sliver of focus into her room, lit only by unicorns and stars projected onto the ceiling. Her hands were covered in a dark, oozing slime found around the necks of her parents and sister, stiff in their beds.

The apparition was here now, preceded by a telltale chill­. It picked up something off her desk. Violet swallowed her breath as it licked the barely visible flash of a white envelope, setting it down outside the closet door, palpably pausing, then leaving. The note read, “You killed them, not me.”

Maggie’s Last Stand

“Focus is what you lacked, Maggie. I’m finally done taking care of you,” he said before he licked the envelope and slammed it on the table near the stairs.

“The only thing I lacked was your love, Greg,” Maggie said, looking down at her tattooed bruises, colored sunset purple.

With narrowed eyes and clenched fists, he walked past her. Sometimes, he would walk into her, delivering a jab or push.

Greg fell to his death down the stairs that night, the startled victim of a whispered threat. Maggie’s death certificate was found in a sealed envelope near his crumpled body. 

fiction, writer, writing

The 10th Quarantine

Kelly Rogers

I remembered the day I opened my door after the last six-month quarantine of The Great Illness. I lived on a typically quiet cul-de-sac in a sleepy Midwestern town, but the sound of an amped guitar hummed through the air, and I could hear the lyrics of Here Comes the Sun carried to my doorstep like it was floating on water.

I walked onto my porch and dots of bright yellow dandelions littered my lawn. Nobody cared anymore what their lawns looked like during quarantines. We only cared about when we would be let out again. Suddenly, I heard the sound of laughter from my two favorite neighbors, the Smith twins. All of my children were now grown and sheltering elsewhere, so the Smith twins brought me the joy of youth and possibility.

The lily skinned twins with shocks of bright red hair ran to my doorstep. “Mrs. Rogers, Mrs. Rogers, we’re so happy to see you.”

“I am so happy to see you, too, my darlings. Would you like some freshly baked chocolate chip cookies?”

“Oh, yes please,” they said with crooked grins of missing teeth.

As soon as I gave them the cookies, they exchanged additional pleasantries, and jumped away like dolphins on the open ocean.

As I stood, my dress swaying in the spring breeze, watching them return home joyful, I could see my roses in bloom in my front garden. I took in a deep breath and stepped out onto my lawn. Somebody was cooking something spicy smelling of Sriracha and garlic. The Great Illness could not take my senses, my sculpture of memories, or my will to dance in life’s ballet of normal. I left the safety of my lawn and the 10th quarantine of my lifetime to visit the rest of my neighbors, with the words of the e.e. cummings’ poem “I carry your heart with me” in my head.