The Pier Proposal

It wasn’t the marriage that Dawn couldn’t accept. It was the idea of being proposed to on a pier. She wasn’t the one getting married, that was Danaka, her best friend and a young, Japanese Pollyanna. She tried to explain it to her boyfriend, Mason, without using the word ‘Freud’ and instead used words he could easily digest. Words like “energy” and “vibration” and “aura” that were slowly falling into her own vernacular but when struck by the tongue, seemed to ring and then hang in the air as if unaccompanied. “I mean, what kind of energy or frequency do you think is created when you do something like that on something so, you know, phallic?” she asked Mason. He strummed a little, thought, then strummed again. “What’s her moon in?”

“I can’t remember, Pisces I think? I have her birth chart bookmarked, hold on.” She opened her laptop and pulled up the virtual list of things meant to be revisited, remembered. She found it ‘Natal Chart Report for February 16, 1994’ sitting between James Hillman’s Wikipedia page and an article on home remedies for urinary tract infections. “Her moon is in Taurus.” She looked up at Mason. Not missing a single strum he said “that’s perfect. I bet she loved the pier proposal. And honestly babe, she was probably so swept up in the moment that she didn’t care what she was standing on or how phallic it was.” He paused, pleased with himself, while Dawn left the room for a cigarette. Mason didn’t smoke. 

Stepping onto the front porch, her eyes immediately fell to the bench covered in a masterful display of Mason’s shirts and jackets. There had been a small storm the night before and he couldn’t stand the thought of their three farm cats braving it without something besides their own furry bodies to keep warm. Dawn thought about her friend Lee, who was a Taurus, for perspective but then reconsidered. Taurus was his sun sign. Mason had explained to her once that in reality a person’s sun sign mattered least because it only revealed how others saw them. Dawn wondered how Mason saw her. Dawn wondered if Mason could truly see her aura and if he could, she wondered if the hue was soft enough.

When You Know

There was talk of soul mates and it was science and I liked it that way. That night I slipped my muzzle off, “quiet” quiet. Another night, I was up late; I was up so late, oh you know the kind of late, it’s quiet like muzzle motives and dark, so very dark excuse me “buio," it is buio and there are lofty giggles and everyone calls each other “babe” over the telephone because it is that kind of late. Those are the rules, you know.

I get cravings so I wait for it, you know? It has no time and the recognition that it has arrived is slow. Once, it found me while bathing and I was coy because well, of course, you know. 

And of course you know that for a full season I was up that kind of late. The lamplight was there and the whirring of the fan and my nipples made a few appearances, they are luce e di colore rosa but my mouth was dark and my conscience was quiet. All of this you know.

You knew everything, you have your brass staff and your saxophone throat and did you know that Hades, literally, means ‘unseen’?

Right. Zeus, a spear of thunder; Poseidon, a trident of the sea; and Hades, a helmet that gave invisibility to its carrier.

I have no interest in the throne of Persephone, though you’d like to think so, I know. I want to be turned to mint, to the white poplar tree and consumed in one night by wildfire where I will be the color of ash and “full-throated as the sea”

spent but once and oh so free.

Nyoka Eden is an emerging writer and moth enthusiast temporarily residing in Northwest Arkansas in an effort to get her caca together. Her first published flash fiction piece is forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions in 2015. She was also selected to contribute to a crowdsourced poem by NPR’s Code Switch. She has a blog but it’s wimpy so please keep tabs on her via twitter @bbybardot.