Petals

Everything you want will come flowing in.

If you ask for it. But be careful.

If you want love, you cannot make a list of the traits you wish a partner to have. If you want money, you cannot think that hard work or losses, much more important than money, is also on the horizon. If you want health, you got to do the work that a healthy body and mind demands.

Everything you want will come flowing in. But wishing is not a shopping list. There is a price to every gift. The price may be high if you haven't thought it through.

What do you really want? Are you willing to pay the price? Is your wish pure, devoid of pride and petty return-to-sender sidenotes

Then, and only then will everything you want come flowing in, slowly but surely like petals moving gently on the water surface.

Petals by Jeffrey M Fletcher

Travel Tales to Unknown Realities, part Three - Embalming Bodies and Restless Ghosts

Travel Tales to Unknown Realities, part Three. Listen to chapter three of the Travel Tales. You will hear chilling stories of a child forced to embalm bodies in the midst of a storm, about dead bodies sitting up and about ghosts that refuse to rest. With Halloween creeping closer, it's a great way to cozy in. Told by Michael Peter Langevin, who is the child in question. 

To Share Your Story

I have finished edited a collection of ghost stories and finally made it into a coherent story. I took some time. Writing tends to take time and editing even more so. There are so many levels to it. I also started to reach out to publishers. I think the stories are worth reading. I will find the right forum to share them well. It's the least I can do. They are not only my stories after all. They are voices from a multitude of beings in the in-between. They have voices of their own, however fictional.

To write is a joy and also immensely difficult. It's giving the world a gift, every time. It really doesn't matter if it's a story of your life for the family to read - your grandchildren will salute you and so will the great, great, great ones in hundreds of years from now - or a story that puts everything we think we know on it's head or educational or pure entertainment - entertainment is a lightness not to be taken lightly. The words reaches someone, or many, somewhere and changes their lives. They make connections, an intricate pattern in the weave. Our stories are never just our own. 

To dare to write is an act that takes courage. Are we any good? Do we have what it takes? Do we have anything to say? To share it takes even more. Fictional, autobiographic, non-fictional; there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, parts of our truest self will shine through. This is scary. But whatever the loud, insistent voices tries to convince us, they are only repetition. We have AI for that.

To tell intricate, complex stories worth telling, stories that says something about life, now that is worth it's weight in gold. You know what Galadriel says, 

"Even the smallest person can change the course of the future."

Ghosts, Mysteries, Oddities and Miracles: Falling

 This story is part of a collection, tentatively called “Ghost Whisperer: Stories from a Nordic Witch Stranded in the South.” They were mainly written during my first year in the Appalachian Mountains, having moved from Sweden, living at the end of a road, with no green card to allow me to work and my husband, Michael, working at the Monroe Institute. Being a stranger in a strange land those days, ghosts started to talk to me. And so did the ghost of Frida Kahlo. The patron of creativity.

The ghost of Frida Kahlo was my absolute favorite. As far as ghosts go. Most ghosts I had met showed up with a certain gloom, carrying regret, fear and pain as dirty veils hanging around their sloping shoulders. But Frida always showed up with colors, flowers and passion, being an ultimate manifestation of the celebration of life. Viva la Vida she painted on the flesh of watermelons while she herself was also still in flesh. And she stands true to her words, even beyond physical life. 

This day she had a monkey on her shoulder, monkey tail wrapped around her neck as a furry necklace. She wore a wide white blouse, three strands of semiprecious stones against the ruffles, and several layers of orange-colored skirts. When she sat down on the porch chair beside me, she leaned back and stretched out her legs, revealing a pair of dark red boots with patchwork of dragons. In a delicate crystal cut glass in her hand sparkled tequila. I drank rum in a not-so-delicate ceramic cup.

I was pretty sure I had figured it out. The famous people, the legends, and the icons. They are shining stars constantly infused by the dreams woven around them. This is why I could talk to Frida. Not because she singled me out, but because she is singled out. Like the demi-goddess she is, she probably sat around the world in thousands of versions at that point, talking to disenfranchised art students and grandmothers of the revolutions the same. Every graffiti painting depicting Frida, every feud about the smallest scrap of an original photo of her, radiates energy right into her multicolored soul. 

I was fascinated by the concept, but it also made me feel rather small. The shivering everyday existence of me who wanted to be so brave and reckless, but in reality, was a ball of cotton waste, a bundle of anxious thoughts slithering around the smallest challenges.

“Don’t you think I was afraid?” said Frida. 

Wiping drops of tequila from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand she looked at me we a hint of a smile,

“After all, why shouldn’t I have been afraid?”

The monkey had fallen asleep, arms wrapped around Frida’s neck, face pressed against her chin. Frida was thoughtful and still now, despite monkey fur in her face. 

“I was afraid that my children wouldn’t live,” she said. “They didn’t. I was afraid of being betrayed by the people I loved the most. I was. I was afraid I would devastate women the way that women had devastated me. I did. And more afraid of anything that I would not be able to dance. As you know, I ended up in a wheelchair. There is really no meaning for me to go on, is there?”

“No,” I answered quietly, sipping my rum in tiny, cautious sips.  

I once saw an exhibition with Frida’s art in Stockholm, together with one of my older sisters. Coming in from the serene green half island where it was situated, the pumping heart connecting the two versions of Frida in her incomparable double self-portrait hit us with two different bricks in our heads. 

“I think they are a bit uncomfortable,” said my sister.

“Do you?” I asked, adding thoughtfully, “I really don’t’”

I tried to convey a cool detachment that I didn’t possess. I did not even convince myself.

“I did all my paintings in-between trying out what life had to offer,” said Frida on the porch. “I am not as proud of my paintings, as I am off my life.”

Her life. Her legendary life.

“It wasn’t so much the parties, or the politics, or even the lovers – though I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on them.”

She lifts her chin ever so slightly.

“Was it love then?” I asked. 

That made her smile, a broad shiny smile. 

Of course, it was the love!” she exclaimed. “But not so much the love I received, though I received plenty, even from the man who tried to break my heart. It wasn’t even the love I felt for him. I was in love with life itself, and the longer I lived the deeper in love I fell.”

“That doesn’t make the fears go away though, does it?” I asked.

“No, it doesn’t. But it surely makes them feel less important.”

The monkey woke up, stared at me when sitting up, and then showed all his sharp teeth in a big yawn.

  “And now, now that you are dead?” I asked.

Frida raised an eyebrow, while rubbing the monkey on its pouty stomach.

“Oh honey,” she said. “I just keep falling.”

First published in The Echo World November/ December/ January 2021/ 2022 edition.

Blue Star

There was a blue star hanging on a thread, in the dark blue night sky. But, when he reached out to catch it, the star moved farther away, just out of his grasp. He remembered a story from his childhood about Grandmother Spider, endlessly weaving the world into existence.

           

In his childhood there had been an abundance of spider webs, dew filled and glimmering in the thin morning light, when he followed his father to the barn.

"Hard workers, those spiders," his father often said. His childhood self too filled with the glory of the moment to answer anything but, "Uh-huh."

           

They worked the land as brothers, though he himself was only eight when he was considered old enough to first tag along.

           

The dew filled spider webs. The smell of new cut hay. Him. His father. The sweat. The trust.

           

He was an old man now, lying in his bed trying to wake up, his own two children fretting around, making him dizzy. It was Christmas Eve and his daughter insisted that they have Christmas dinner as usual, only this year served with him still in his bed. The bed he seldom left these days. His daughter wasn't a very good cook. Not as his wife had been. But he endured small pieces of every dish, including a thin slice of pudding at the end. His son ate as well, sitting awkwardly on a wooden chair close to the bed in his expensive clothes, dinner plate in lap, restlessly forcing himself not to reach for the cellphone in his pocket.

           

Finally, it was over; plates cleared away, kisses on his forehead, his daughter lingering until he closed his eyes, pretending to sleep.

           

There it was again: the blue star, mystically sending out light sparks over the deeper blue sky. Different in coloring than the bright, white stars covering the velvet sky had been when they smoked fish in a barrel at the backside of the house; first his father and him, then him and his son.

           

He had never moved. His wife simply moved in with him, and adapted easily to being a farmer’s wife, in a down to earth way. She was a good woman, as they say. Never complained, steadily working by his side year after year. Only when cancer ate her from the inside and out did he, for the first time, see weakness. He could not stand the sight, nor her moans, or her spasms. So, he overdosed morphine and made her drink strong toxic, herbal remedies he mixed together in a pot on the wooden stove. When the nurse came around that day, she pretended not to understand what had happened.

"Now she won't have to suffer," she simply said, locking his eyes in her summer sky ones a short moment, and then went about practical business. As if death was just another everyday chore. Perhaps it was.

           

He never moved. He never sold off the land either, just let piece after piece fall into wildness, ignoring his sons complaints, until the only thing he could plant was the tomatoes by the stone wall; shaking paper skin hands patting the soil, picking yellow leaves off the stems, caressing the healthy, hairy green leaves.

           

The blue star gleamed. A giant spider leg took a soundless step over the sky. He himself stepped right into the dew-wet grass and the scent of new cut hay flowed over him in a wave.

           

Michael and I saw him once, on one of my very first walks since I landed in the Blue Mountains. We walked up Berry Road and I saw a shadowy figure standing in the middle of the road. Everything was so new to me then: the moist, the thick vines circling up tree trunks, the lookout for snakes on the dusty road. I was a bit jumpy I will honestly admit. So, I took a sharp breath when I saw the shadow man, but said nothing to Michael.

           

Michael stopped soon thereafter, by a small creek, water falling down on a rock, making splashing, playful sounds. Michael cocked his head to the side, as if listening to the water and started to tell me of a man who had lived close to where we were. A farmer, who didn't want to leave his home, who stayed where he felt safe. The man simply moved farther into the land. Learned the language of spider webs. And listened to the song of the blue star.

Ghost-story by Sofia Karin Axelsson, first published in the December 2019 edition of The Echo World