I’ve started re-attending my writer’s group now that the school year’s over. Here’s a scribble I made from our last meeting:
It was her lips and tongue that bled first and not from gashes cleft and gaping nor even from the sores that soon appeared, but the crimson droplets arriving like an annunciation, like a stigmata, the kiss of Christ blessing the holy crusade of the United States of America. She didn’t know, of course, that it was from the war time effort until half a decade later, as the other girls in her line fell sick with her, passing each other in wheelchairs in hospital hallways — the old gang, the Wildcats of Westbrook, the fountain clique, and the Spirit committee — now a nunnery effacing in their sublimated loves. A venomous glowworm that dug into their marrow and hollowed their bones, slithered down their gullets with a little slip of spit and paint, neon-green — a color that seemed otherworldly, as if it came from behind a far-off star through the slipstream of pulpy fiction. The girls were told to keep their brushes sharp and wet as they painted on the numbers on their dials, the hand-lettered timepieces to their boyfriends, husbands, lovers in future perfect, shining, twinkling, winking even in the blackest of nights by their licks of radium.
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