One should never speak ill of the dead.
It really is pointless because they are beyond your anger and ability to shove an ice pick under their eye and fix what vexed them in their small, petty and wasted life.
Still, there is an exception to every rule and today I have found myself in that position.
You my friend are no longer with us.
And I am oh so very glad of it.
amm
I have always wanted to draw
I have always wanted to put lines and color together
and have them tell a story
I have always wanted to be an artist.
But one day
when I was 7 years old
my teacher took a look at a picture I was painting and she cried,
” What is the matter with you? Are you doing this on purpose? All you had to do was paint a tree. How hard is it
to paint a tree? I showed you how. ”
She pointed to the chalkboard where she had drawn a perfect tree for us to copy.
It was indeed a beautiful tree.
I stood there in my oversized shirt with flowers on it- my first and only artist’s ” smock ” and looked at my painting of a cat with fangs and devil’s horns. It wasn’t like the tree on the chalkboard or even close to the ones my classmates had painted and I was pretty sure it was not beautiful.
” It told me it wanted to be a Cat. With fangs. And horns. ” I said pointing to the obvious mistake I had created at my easel. ” Not a tree. It did NOT want to be a tree.”
She pulled the brush out of my hands, grabbed my arm and marched me back to my seat and made me sit down in it.
Hard.
” Don’t ever do that again.”
And I didn’t.
I never painted or drew my own pictures again because they never seem to want to be anything close to what I was expected to produce. They have ideas of their own.
Instead I write stories with Fangs and horns and sometimes they have a cat’s face and they can be exactly who they want to be.
Lines and colors kept safe in words on a page.
amm
Daily Addictions Prompt: Refuge
Photo by David Besh on Pexels.com
No one would ever learn her name, or where she came from or why she ended up on that trail on Fletcher’s Ranch with her head pulverized by a shotgun blast.
The Ranch hands- who were actually the Rancher’s teenage children were the ones who came across her remains.
What they told people was how quiet it was out there on that trail. It’s how they started their story and it was how they ended it.
It was quiet and it felt so peaceful that they both knew one thing for sure.
Something had been watching them.
The story about the Jane Doe would become quite famous because in the end the teenage children- the boy and girl -were tried and convicted for gunning the stranger down in cold blood.
In the end the two of them ended up with delusions so severe that they both ended up in a Supermax prisons in solitary confinement for everyone else’s protection more then their own. No wonder, the speculation went, they must have had it in them all along, that dark insanity that enabled them to strip a woman naked and then blow her head off for no reason at all.
But maybe, if anyone had been paying attention to details, instead of spending all of their time trying to prove two well to do teenagers couldn’t possible have committed such a hideous act, MAYBE someone would have wondered more about that radio collar- the one they track wolves with that was found near her body and is still sitting in the evidence locker-
in the dark where it is quiet and you would swear something is in there with you.
Watching.
Photo by luizclas on Pexels.com
Inspired By The Inktober Prompt: Tranquil