Who Owns a Woman’s Shoulders? (Personal Essay About My Mama That Demonstrates Flirting and Short Skirts and High Heels or Whatever Excuse People Make Is NOT the Problem AKA Men Need to Stop Believing They Have a Right to Women’s Bodies)

About five years ago, my mother decided to train to be a lay-speaker in the United Methodist Church. Her class, taught by a male minister, included eight men and three women. At 71, my mother was the oldest woman present; another was in her early 60s, and the third was in her late 20s.

Read the rest of my essay at The Bitter Southerner here.

A Taste for It (Apocalyptic “Laugh ‘n Cry” Flash Fiction Featuring Ants That Like Oreos, Roast Chickens, and Other Things; Pigs That Like Tar-Paper Because They’re Smart but Weird-A** Animals; and People, Who Just Want to Live Their Best Prosperity-Filled Lives so Leave Them Alone With All That Environmental Sh**)

Ant hills rose by the thousands from cracks in the asphalt and concrete. The abstract granular cones, ranging from light sandy brown to dark rust, created a new miniature topography across the city. Unimpressed, unaware even as an endless march of 99 degree days claimed our attention, we ploughed through them with the steel toe of a work boot, the stiletto heel of a platform pump. ….

Read the rest at The Molotov Cocktail HERE.

My Mama Is a Demon (Or ‘Stop Being So Mean’ So-Called Christians Because Mean Ain’t a Look Approved by Jesus)

Demon possession has come a long way since the days of Linda Blair and The Exorcist. Back then, possession was a messy, visceral business rife with fluids and ejaculations of one sort or another. For average folks confronting a demon, sturdy raingear came in just as handy as a Bible and Holy Water. These days, demons do a better job of blending in. For example, on the TV show Supernatural, the demons who take over the bodies of hapless humans appear to bathe regularly between bouts of evil. Nevertheless, one constant remains for demons: They do evil. Perhaps they slit the throats of schoolchildren, or take a machine gun to a crowd of fair-goers. Whatever the specifics, they are action-oriented, full-throttle evil-doers.

Consequently, I was surprised to learn that my mother is possessed by demons. She has twice been informed of this fact by fellow church members. (She’s lost count of how many times she’s been accused of not being a Christian.) Mama first experienced the sacred when she was seven years old. No one in her family had ever taken her to church or Sunday school, but one summer day, she was lying on her back under a tree in her front yard when she looked up through the canopy of green leaves and saw glimpses of the blue sky. At that moment, she knew that God was there with her. So she hied herself off to Sunday school with a neighbor family to, as she describes it, “find out what the sacred was about.” …

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Read the rest of my essay here:

http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/confession/my-mama-is-a-demon/

 

The Woman Candidate (Flash Not Quite Fiction Because Hillary Clinton Was NOT the Problem. We as a Society Are the Problem. We Hate Seeing Women Have Power, Especially if They Don’t Kowtow to Men, so It’s Time to Step up and Change Our Ways People, Come on Now, Enough of This Nonsense)

Read the story here:

http://www.writersresist.com/2017/08/24/the-woman-candidate/

Imprinted (potentially triggery flash fiction with some knives, thumbs, and a marriage, plus it represents 6 years of my life so worth a read on that basis alone)

My husband’s thumb lies nestled among the mushrooms on the countertop. Not twitching and jumping like the body of a live fish when you cut off the head. Just resting, as the head itself would do. A small amount of blood, a soupçon in cooking terminology, fans out from the point of detachment in an irregular pool.

READ the full story here:

http://flashfictionmagazine.com/blog/2016/11/22/imprinted/

Battle Flag ( No matter how noble our intent, using Confederate imagery has no honor #takeitdown)

I’ve lived my entire life in the South, first Georgia and now North Carolina, but I’ve never paid much attention to the Confederate battle flag, the so-called stars and bars. Despite some ancestors who fought for the Confederacy and several childhood family vacations spent navigating cannons, split-rail fences, and museums filled with the tattered remnants of soldiering at Civil War battlefields, I didn’t associate the Confederate flag with my Southern heritage. However, I didn’t particularly associate it with present-day racism, which seemed more insidious and less blatant.

Read the rest of my new essay at Killing the Buddha: http://killingthebuddha.com/ktblog/battle-flag/

Religious Freedom Laws: Stoning American Style (While This Title Is a Semi-Homage to the 70s TV Show ‘Love, American Style,’ the Similarity Ends There Because Those Laws Are Light on Humor and Love–and Heavy on Mean)

I’m now a blogger at Killing the Buddha website, and my blog is “Planet Reasonable.”

My first post is about religious freedom laws. Read the post here:

http://killingthebuddha.com/ktblog/stop-casting-religious-freedom-stones/

My Mama Kissed a Cockroach (But Really She Did. Learn Why in My Personal Essay About Choices and Compassion, and Roaches, Don’t Forget Those Roaches, and I Ain’t Talking ‘60s Slang for Marijuana, This Is Actual Creepy Crawly Vermin, Y’all)

Choice is a cornerstone of American society. The songs my classmates and I learned in grade school heralded freedom of choice—room for us all—as the unifying force that made the United States stand above other countries. “Sweet land of liberty” and “This land was made for you and me” rang with conviction from our throats as we serenaded the luminaries of our constricted lives during pageants and concerts. To an extent, that freedom has always had a one-dimensional quality, with “you vs. me” more common than “you and me” outside the walls of the crepe-papered auditorium.

———

Read the rest of this fabulously intriguing essay here:

http://www.themindfulword.org/2015/freedom-choice-compassion/

Color Blind (Eco-Fiction That Covers Extinctions, Sesame Street, Apocalypse, Sekhmet, Angels, Dead Girls, My Real-life Brother’s Bands, & Cats — All in Under 1,700 Delicious Words)

The Panamanian golden frogs died first. Extinct but for a few stray specimens stored with hermetic zeal in zoo laboratories. Scientists fretted, as did some intrepid reporters from National Geographic, Smithsonian, and the New Yorker. The Panamanians were devastated. They considered the golden frog their national emblem and put its likeness on their key chains and coffee mugs. No one else cared. After all, the golden frogs were frogs, not puppies, and other things were golden: daffodils, tomato blossoms, the sun, Big Bird. …

 

Read the complete story here:

http://www.eclectica.org/v19n1/davis.html

 

PS  -Do some apocalyptic dancing with Noot d’Noot here and Purkinje Shift here.

Bunnies Bathing (aka My First-Ever Published Short Story, Called ‘Quiet’ at the Time, so Might not Be Good, but You City Folk Will Learn a Survival Skill to Prepare You for Any Coming Apocalypse, so Read on, Knowledge = Power)

How to kill a rabbit:

Step One. Put the rabbit on a flat surface and hold it behind the head.
Step Two. Hit the rabbit on the top of the head with a hammer. One sharp blow right between the ears, and the rabbit will convulse and die. There is little blood.
Step Three. Slit the rabbit’s throat.
Step Four. Hold the rabbit upside down by the feet. There is some blood, though nothing on par with a butchered hog. Let the blood drain out onto the ground or into a bucket.
Step Five. Dress the rabbit:

 

To learn how to dress the rabbit — and read the rest of this short story, go here:

http://monkeybicycle.net/bunnies-bathing/