A snippet of description: The Tree

I am in college and I don’t always have time to work on anything outside of school, so it may take a while for me to really get into the groove of blogging regularly.  I am taking a creative writing course, and we’ll be writing one short story and a handful of poems this semester, so I will probably post those at some point.  Meanwhile, so you know I haven’t forgotten about you, I’m sharing a short description I wrote as part of another story I’m working on. Enjoy!

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Behind the old clergyman’s modest home, and out beyond a ramshackle gardening shed, stood a peculiar tree.  It canted away from the chain-link fence constructed along the back boundary of the yard, and reached its twisting, interweaving branches to the midnight sky.  Its cavernous mouth, carved into its trunk by the voracious appetites of a thousand termites, bellowed to an absent audience, and the tree’s rotted, biting skin glimmered in the light of the full moon.  There was no good reason for a wretched plant like this to continue to live in such a miserable condition, but it did.  Every spring it would sprout new leaves; every fall the leaves would turn and fall to earth.  and so on.  Had someone taken a moment to regard the tree with anything more than a passing interest before the events which follow occurred, he or she may have wondered what cruel force kept it alive.

Silent

They come in the night,
Carrying deceit in one hand and corruption in the other
Violation is their goal
They reach inside your throat,
the acid from their fingers melts away your voice
They watch you try to scream,
laugh at your pathetic attempt.

To see the anguish in your eyes is their pleasure
Where they touch you, your skin rots and your flesh becomes putrid
They might stop if only you could tell them to
Tell them no and they might go away forever,
Just say no, but everything is silent.

They make you their toy, their doll
Make you pretty, make you serve
All you can do is let them ruin you,
make you less, make you one of them.
Replace your skin with porcelain, and
shatter you on the floor.
Reach their hands inside you,
take out what they want,
put in what they want,

No choice.

Pain is all you know
You’d beg for death
if only you could speak.
Do as they say, don’t fight
Don’t make it worse.

and when they leave
they’re never really gone.
They lie in wait and watch
ready to punish
for the smallest misstep,
Gleeful for the excuse
to play with their doll.

Why Wraith Weaver

Why Wraith Weaver?*

It’s an odd name for a blog.  Even if you know what my plans are for this blog- as a place to post my fiction and poetry and thoughts and opinions and whatever else catches my fancy- it still doesn’t explain itself, does it?

What is a Wraith?  Some define it as a ghost or apparition.  A wisp or vestige of something which was but no longer is.  Sometimes I think of writing in these terms.  Someone tells you a story: if it’s factual, no words will ever make an event repeat in front of you, no matter how good the writer is. If it’s fictional, then he or she is trying to express something which they can only find a close approximation for.

When I write, it is not the flesh of the thing I’m giving you; it is only a trace of that which was or is, because that is the best I can do. When I write, I am weaving a ghostly cloth from threads of experience and imagination.

That is why this blog is named Wraith Weaver.**

* (because it sounded cool)
** (also, it sounded cool)