bold women Archives · Blue Fern Press

Believing

Sunset blooms like a bruise in the wintry gray sky. Gentle night will bring snow flurries falling like stars. Kia waits on the porch to see.

The thwack of typewriter keys fills the repair shop. The owner is a beaut, like his vintage machines. Ann takes him and a Smith Corona home.

Mia whistles, not a song, but a cry like the wind. Twilight mockingjays answer. Tidying her one plate, one cup, one fork, she calls to them.

Paula grew up on a cul-de-sac. Now she lives on a dead end. She’s traversed many and many a roundabout in the interim, all leading her here.

Maeve was 84, rode a ’59 Schwinn, and ran a printing press. She left it to her bike mechanic, Sam. In his comics, she became an enchantress.

Even Mia’s bulldog learned to love the rain. They’d prowl the Oregon coast, faces upturned, whether spritz or splat. It healed Mia’s vision.

The gash in the wall exposes twelve layers of paint and wallpaper. Jill scrapes it down to raw pine boards. The past crackles to the floor.

Ann drew her God with crayons as a girl. Now an old woman, when she stills her mind to pray, she sees that same orange and red ball of fire.

The pixie cut girl flashed a smile and a sign, ‘Typewriter Troubadour.’ The French twist woman gave $5 for one manually typed word, ‘Hello.’

Plucking a harp that isn’t there is not like air guitar. It looks strange. Jillian can’t speak, but she plays murmured concertos flawlessly.

Leigh rode to the end of the line, walked the last mile, sailed to the edge of the sea, until she was off the map. And still, she was Leigh.

She wanted the languid serenity of a Gauguin, but Tia knew she was a complex Picasso: when young, a sketch; by 60, a canvas bold with color.

Bette woke just as sunset blackened the desert sky. Then she dipped her hands in bright acrylics to fingerpaint red-gold truth by moonlight.

The streetlight often blinked when Lucy passed beneath it. She made wild kinetic energy. One night she stopped a switchblade with a stare.

Vivian had an old oak cut down. The doves protested. She put up a feeder. It brought rats. She put out poison. That’s what killed the cat.

Jamie leans on a power pole. Rusted staples twice her age prickle her aching back. She’s jolted by lingering love for hundreds of lost cats.

Helen lived in a houseboat on a creek off a bay. A century-old drawbridge rose whenever Jack sailed in to see her. It made her boat shimmy.

Em packed pantyhose, pumps and lunch, but her snowy hour commute east became 2,000 miles west to a place where ruby camellias were blooming.

Linda Rose became a rose. It happened in her sleep. She dreamed the scent of an American Beauty, but she woke to the tears of a Cherokee.

At seven, Anna planted sunflower seeds to see them grow madly tall. At seventy, she starts marigolds in a windowbox to see golden God again.

Her hair, red as Georgia clay, hung longer than her blue polka dot shorts. Ed stared and gave it thought, but damned if he didn’t turn away.