by Keathley Pinney Brown
At 2:42 am, she crept toward the stump
under a sky draped heavy with night.
The inlet hummed and rippled, the sound
of air winging down the mountains, the ocean wind
fighting its way inland to the marshy dark.
To her right, water lapped at the damp shore and
sang a seafoam song. Sand fleas slept and
she tried to wake them, stumping
in sand and rock and kelp, dark
with salt. Still they slumbered, locked in a night
more powerful than she, a night winding
stillness and secrecy into an opaque sound,
like drums pounding in the earth, shaking the Sound
until its water lapped at her bare toes, gone numb and
bloodless with a cold that left her winded.
Hearing her, a gull stirred its stumps
and took to the air, dissolving into the night.
For a moment, she wanted to run as the darkness
threatened to swallow her. Her mind reflected the dark,
caught at the doors of the unknown, where it sounded
a rumbling warning. Murmuring, the night
wove its witchcraft, blending spells and chants and
visions of hulking beasts, each whittling her heart to a stump.
She stood still as the incantations fell away to the wind,
for that’s all that they were. Soft, gentle wind
whispering welcomewelcomewelcome into the dark.
She opened her eyes and saw it. The stump,
just a stump, crouched with gnarled roots, sound
in its place among the cold stars. And
she saw it was as it always had been. Even the night
and its sorcery could not alter it, the night,
in the end, was just another shade of day, just as wind
was another shade of breath and
she, another shade of earth. She placed her hands on dark
wood, shade of seed, listening to the sound
of breath, and embraced the stump.
That morning, for she just realized it was so, she crouched on clamshells adorning the stump’s
jagged crown, heart full of something lost to the wind, its winnowing sound
carrying her, changing some and not at all, into her eleventh year as one shade among the dark.
Abstinence
by Kathy Bruce
Keathley Pinney Brown lives in the Pacific Northwest and enjoys exploring the natural world in her writing. Her work has been published in The Rubbertop Review.
Kathy Bruce is a visual artist based in Argyll & Bute, Scotland, and Upstate New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, 2 Fulbright-Hayes scholar grants, and a Ford Foundation Grant. Her work has been exhibited in the UK,US, and internationally, including Senegal, Taiwan, Denmark, Peru, France, and Canada. She is a graduate of Yale University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Bruce is a contributor to various literary journals, including: Three Rooms Press, Lunch Ticket, The Vassar Review, Alchemy Literary Magazine, Open Minds Quarterly, Yale University School of Medicine’s The Perch, The New Southern Fugitives, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Ignatian Literary Magazine, The Variant Literature, Landlocked Literary Magazine, Rutgers University’s Rejoinder, The Brooklyn Review, Twyckenham Notes, The Porter House Review, Pushing Out the Boat, National Women’s History Museum, Minding Nature, The Howler Project, and The Camas Journal.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 