Poems
- Penance
- Morphine- the second chapter, Statistical Analysis, is the edit I did for my school's literary magazine in my sophomore year, it won first place and I got $50!!
- Summer Denial
- Silence and Secrets
- Undefined
- Firefight - this is my metaphorical poem from creative writing class senior year, my teacher and I had just jointly recited 'Hope' so I had this style in my head at the time.
- This Too Shall Pass-My short story for creative writing class senior year, we had to make a character and a conflict then write a story around that, this is what came out in the end.
- A Place Steeped in Saddness -another creative writing assignment, the prompt was: 'I know a place steeped in saddness...'
- Ice Queen Review - My Contemporary Fiction final from first semester of senior year.
This Too Shall Pass
Faith blanched at the roll of thunder and bright flash of lightning. The problem wasn’t that she was scared of thunder storms, but she had thought the storm was over and she had just let some of the most expensive horses out into the field and they were all extremely skittish.
“Why can’t the weather report be right for once?” she asked herself as she grabbed her rain coat and braced herself for the cold and rain. Shivering, she sprinted out to the main field. To most the almost half mile flat out run would have been exhausting, but she was used to it. She had been in foster care for thirteen years and did every sport she could get on just so she wouldn’t need to be at ‘home.’ At seventeen, Faith oDomhnaill was already a sophomore at Stonybrook University, working towards a degree in Veterinary Science. She lived in an apartment attached to the hayloft. The only reason social services let her do it was because she worked there and went to school in South Hampton.
She grabbed two halters from the rack along the fence and slipped into the field. A few hoses were galloping along the back fence. Faith gave out an ear-piercing whistle, hoping that it would cut through the wind. Three horses broke off from their frightened stampede. She leaned over the fence and snagged two more halters, she slid them on two of the calmer horses that had come to stand by the gate. When the spooking horses made their way over, eyes rolling and nostrils flared, she haltered two and held them on the outside of the calm ones. She hoped she wouldn’t get hurt trying to bring four horses in at one time.
“Easy boys, easy. It’s alright, just some noise and wind,” Faith kept up a constant stream of comforting words, even though she couldn’t even hear herself over the wind. She got them to their stalls without incident and, wanting to save time, left their halters on, just unclipped their leads. “Why am I the only one here? Oh, yes. I said I would do storm watch, well I’m watching it, it’s making my life miserable.” Faith ran back out and saw three of the four horses left in the paddock at the gate waiting anxiously with their ears flattened and their feet never meeting the ground for more than a few seconds. “Where’s Circo? Hm, kids?” She looked nervously around the field and spotted a dark figure running along the back fence. “Let’s get you three in,” she muttered while she opened the gate. She could feel the cold seeping into her body; she made soothing noises to the horses while she fumbled the buckles on their halters. Once they were all haltered she led them to their stalls.
“Seven down, one to go.” Faith snatched the last halter while she climbed the gate, not bothering to open it, the snap was slippery and her fingers were stiff. She trudged her way up the hill and slid back down a few times on the tall grass and mud. When she finally got close to the big horse she saw that he was limping and that the usually white stocking on his hind leg was stained bright red with blood. As he started his next pass along the fence she stepped just slightly in to his path. When he saw her move he slid to a stop and reared up. Faith cringed at the sight of the bone deep gash on the inside of his leg. She took another sideways step in front of him; she put her head down and kept her hands out with her palms up, a clear sign of submission. Circo stretched his head forward and snuffled her hand. The big horse stepped into her and pressed his head to her chest. She stroked his cheek gently and slipped his halter on.
They made their slow way back to the gate. Circo fell twice and dragged Faith down with him. When they finally got to the gate, Faith’s frozen fingers fiddled with the clip and chain until she found an angle at which she could get it open. She kept in constant contact with the horse, trying vainly to sooth some of his obvious pain and fear. Circo stumbled on the step up onto the concrete of the barn aisle and spooked at another roll of thunder and the flickering stable lights. Faith tied him to the front of his stall and ran to get a bucket of hot water and a mild tranquilizer.
Blood pooled on the floor under the horse. Faith noticed that the wound had started to clot and was relieved that there weren’t any severed arteries, though she supposed there would have been more blood if one had been. She cleaned a spot near the base of his neck with an alcohol pad and injected the tranquilizers. While she waited for it to take effect she checked on the other hoses and took off their halters and boots. She also checked that the two generators were set to tatr if the power cut and the heat was turned up.
Faith gathered sheets of cotton wool, hydroxide, more medications she might need, and the medical stapler. After she brought this all to his stall she realized that she would need clippers and possibly even a scalpel. On the way back she grabbed another bucket, medical soap and sterilized sponges.
First she sponged the mud and clumped blood out of the wound with hot water and tried to clean the area surrounding the gash. When she couldn’t get all of it off she poured hydroxide just under where the gash ended, not wanting to get it in the open wound and hurt Circo further. She pulled off his turnout boots and blanket, trading it for a dry sweat sheet.
“All right boy, let’s see what we can do about the pain,” she said filling a large needle with bute and more tranquilizers, “here we go.” She injected it straight into his thigh, he flinched away while trying not to put weight on his hurt leg. He relaxed but Faith could see a light twitching in his muscles as he fell further into shock.
Faith gave him a few small injections around the wound. She gently shaved around the area, while trying to get the vet on the phone. She was using her cell phone because the phones were down. She swabbed the area around the gash with iodine. She wrapped more cotton around his lower leg to catch any blood that dropped down while she worked.
There was a crash and the lights flicked off, the hum of the generators could just be heard over the howling wind before their world was re-lit. Faith cursed under her breath when she realized that, even if she could get a hold of a vet or clinic, the roads were flooded and she was completely isolated. In the middle of the Hamptons – with twenty horses – alone.
Her nose wrinkled while she tried to smooth a flap of skin back into place and she cringed at every pop of the stapler that caused Circo to twitch. There was a small piece of flesh that was beyond her medical capabilities and she gagged while cutting it off. When she was finished with her ‘surgery’ she sponged the leg down with fresh hot water. He taped a piece of iodine soaked cotton over the place she had to cut out, then wrapped the whole leg in more cotton and secured it all with Vet Wrap, a brightly colored cohesive bandage.
She reblanketed Circo and settled him in his stall with extra bedding. She cleaned up the bloody mess and most of the mud off of the other horses. Finally Faith just ran out of energy and sat down on a hay bale in front of Circo’s stall to nap and wait for the storm to pass until she could get off the farm…
A Place Steeped in Saddness
For me, I know a place steeped in sadness Others see it as neutral, but to me; it feels like a loss of innocence. I was young and didn’t really understand that people could hurt each other. I mean, intellectually I did, but I had never really experienced it or witnessed it. I guess that is a naïve statement. I was eleven. Of course I had witnessed unkindness, but never really violence.
I’ve never liked being touched. Never, even more so now. I don’t think I can stand to go into detail about what happened, it was six years ago. But it’s still fresh. Like an infected wound, never quite goes away. Even if you cure the infection, it takes longer to heal. And once it does, you have a new scar, shiny and pink and really just a thin layer of skin, soft it hasn’t yet turned white and thick. Rose Kennedy summed up how I feel quite well when she said “It has been said that time heals all wounds. I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.”
I don’t think I’ve even started scaring yet. Probably haven’t even cured the infection. Soon, hopefully, I’ll heal and be able to look at the memories with as close to indifference as I can get. It’s hard not to break down writing just this little about it. Definitely haven’t cured the infection.
I hope one day I can look on that place with more dislike than sorrow or terror. For now I’ll just avoid it. My parents know but avoid the subject like the plague. I let them, the house gets weird when someone brings it up… no one brings it up. I hope they’ve pushed the idea so far away they never bring it up. Maybe I want to hold onto the anger at being afraid. Maybe I just don’t want to examine the memories
Firefight
Fear is cold consuming fire,
that burns inside your mind,
that freezes thought and action,
until you have no escape to find.
Fear is a voice we listen to,
that murmurs in your ear.
Courage comes and swats it down
And whispers softly near,
Helps you squelch that inner fire,
until it burns no more.
And in this newfound firefight,
That warms you to your core,
You find that you can see.
Your thoughts are yours once more.
And you are able to be
Who you truly wished you were before.
;">Ice Queen Book Review
The protagonist seems, not obsessed, but infatuated with death. In the first few pages of the novel, in an eight-year-old temper tantrum, she wishes her mother dead over not being included in a birthday party. A few hours later, her mother is killed in a car accident on an icy road. As she gets older, she envisions herself as a creature of ice -- untouchable, repelling any attempt at human contact -- and her emotional life is limited to emotionless, back-seat rendezvous with a local policeman. "Then one night Jack brought me flowers…. That was the end; that was how he ruined everything. … As soon as there was the possibility he might actually care for me, I stopped seeing him."
Years later, when her grandmother is painfully dying, she again exercises her spooky power of life and death. Finally, she moves to Florida to be near her brother, Ned, a meteorologist at Orlon College. There she makes her third death wish – her own, to be struck by lightning, something she has a mild infatuation with; "Magic makes sense. Lightning does not, even to the experts. Lightning is random, unpredictable. It can be as small as a bean or as large as a house. Noisy or silent, ashy or clear. It can be any color --- red or white, blue or smoky black --- and it seems to have a mind of its own.". That comes true as well, but she survives.
She has damage to her heart, there is a constant clicking in her head, her hair falls out and she can no longer see the color red, which bothers her a little more that the other effects of her accident; "Whatever had once been red was now cloudy and pale. All I saw was ice; all I felt was the cold of my own ruined self. …In my world, a cherry was no different from a stone."
She becomes part of a research project at Orlon and finds her way to another survivor known as Lazarus Jones, named this because he was clinically dead for forty minutes, then came back to life, who can burn paper with his breath and burns what he touches, and they begin an fanatical love affair: ice woman meets fire man.
The narrator of the story is often seen leaping to hysterical conclusions as shown when she spies on her sister-in-law late one night returning library books, or why her lover only wants to make love in the dark and doesn’t want her to see him naked in full light, or even the cause of her mother's death. The narrator's failure to see beyond her own self-contempt distorts her perception of events – no one likes her, she has no friends, she causes death. Astonishingly she does have friends and those who care for her, but she cannot see it because of her own self-loathing. Because of this she is very cynical; “Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They burn your tongue the moment they're spoken and you can never take them back. They bruise and bake and come back to haunt you.”
The whole story is a bit contrived. Most of Hoffman’s works deal with some form of the supernatural, for lack of a better word; in fact seventeen of them do. Given her experience with this genre, it is both surprising and disappointing that most of the characters are either too shallowly developed, or overly detailed. They are really nice ideas, portrayed without substance. Having an anonymous main character and narrator threw me when I first started reading. In fact, I think that might be why I feel like that is the least developed character. As a reader, that is very annoying, having a recurring character that is forever nameless; a little like going to class everyday and never knowing the name of the kid next to you.
A lot of research was obviously put into the scientific aspect; there is lightning research in abundance. But the reading aspect feels under-developed, as if the book was rushed. Not rushed in writing, just rushed in general. The author seems to be suggesting that while stories of the supernatural might seem the opposite of rational attempts to explain wind and weather, life and death, in a sense they are surveying the same territory. The book is well structured and the writing flows and is easy to read, but is really just a surface story and feels as if it needs more depth.
Despite all that, this is really a feel-good book camouflaged as a dark and dreary story, Andersen dressed up as Grimm. Even though death is a constant theme, it is a story about dealing with life and getting back up every time life throws a monkey wrench into your system. Despite her mother’s, grandmother’s and her own near death and her loss she is still living but not really going on with her life. She insulates herself within this ‘Ice Queen’ outer shell so that she doesn’t have to feel and be touched or affected by other people’s feelings. She has convinced herself so well that she is alone; she doesn’t want to even entertain the thought that she could actually have people who care. In essence, she is not really living at all.
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