Author’s Note: So this probably isn’t anything close to what would come to someone else’s mind for this quote, but I am weird that way. I thought of Anokii and Gekin and the oppression of the Nebkasha, and this is what happened after I asked for prompts.

Liana Mir gave this one:

“What the gods can digest will not sour in the belly of a slave.” — Moses, The Ten Commandments

“Eat.”

“That meal is not for us.”

Gekin grunted, reaching for a fruit from the tray. He lifted it and held it out to her. “If I told you that your cousin said to eat it, would your response be different?”

Anokii sighed, sitting down at the table. The meal did belong to the queen, but in the heat, the food would spoil before she was able to return. She would be with the king all day, and they had been foolish to send anything for her to eat, but then the servants trapped in the kitchen would not have been told of the king’s decrees. Whatever they might have been, the cooks had not been informed of them, so they had prepared the queen’s meal according to the schedule that she had kept before the king’s return.

“It would go to waste if we did not eat it, and yet doing so could mean our lives if they realize that we ate something reserved for her.”

“The queen is not like the king. If this fruit belonged to him, yes, it would mean death, but she is supposed to be our ally.”

Anokii nodded. She had seen more of that in the woman of late, and though she still had her reasons to doubt the queen, she was more inclined to agree with the conclusion the others had drawn—the queen could be of assistance to their cause.

“Of course, there is still a possibility that this could mean death,” Gekin said, turning the odeyaise in his fingers. “If someone sent this to her to end her life, then consuming it would mean ours.”

Anokii took the fruit from his fingers. “Then we shall leave it to spoil. There is no reason for either of us to risk our lives for a piece of forbidden fruit.”

He laughed. “Perhaps not, but when you think about it, you and I have long indulged in the forbidden.”

“Oh, you. One would never believe that you have been married for more as long as you have been, and not to the same woman, not with that sort of grin up on your face. You look like the rotten boy I caught watching me when I was only just past the beginning of adolescence.”

“That is your fault for being more beautiful today than you were when we were children.”

She lowered her head. “Shameless. That is what you are. That, and a fool.”

Gekin knelt next to her, brushing back her hood. She should have objected. Here in the light of the two suns, even inside the castle was a dangerous place for them and their skin that burned with such ease. He placed his hand upon her cheek. “There is no shame in what we feel for each other, and there never has been. The king’s edicts make our love forbidden, our marriage a crime, but we have never felt that they were wrong. The Nebkasha have a right to live same as the Biskane.”

“Show me a Biskane that knows what love is anymore. He and his ancestors have bred that out of them the same as they have attempted to force us out of existence by not allowing us to breed.”

Gekin lowered his head, and she was forced to lift it. She knew the pain that prompted his actions—they had no children of their own, not after many years, and she did not know what had left them barren, though she suspected the fault lay with her. “You have brought freedom to so many other families. We must count their children as ours, for in a way we have helped them come into this world.”

“Perhaps we should not have encouraged that. What life are those children coming into?”

“We will not be oppressed forever. Things have changed, and we have sent most of the children across the border. They, at least, can have the darkness we are usually denied.”

Gekin took her hands. “I love your strength. I always have.”

She smiled, leaning forward to kiss his forehead. She adored so many things about him, and she did not have time to list them all. “You should go, niniamant. Even if the queen is our ally, this is not your place, and we cannot indulge ourselves any longer.”

“I wish you were not so dutiful. That you would forget the cause and come across the border with me. I know you won’t. I know I don’t truly want that, but every time we part, I feel the same. I hate to leave you.”

“That was why we chose to marry so long ago.” She smiled as she rose, pulling the cloak back over her head. “We will still be married when this ends, and I will still love you. I will see you later in the catacombs. You will wait for me there?”

“Always.”

Author’s Note: So, having unexpectedly concluded the story I thought would be my Three Word Wednesday piece, I had to find something new this week.

I actually decided to explain part of how and what I write and why I am the way I am, channeled through someone else, of course, but this is me and poetry, I swear.

Also, I couldn’t help thinking of this song as I did it, since this always comes to mind.

I am not a poet, living is the poem
I am not a singer, I am in the song
And I’ve got a story that I cannot write down
And I’m with you but I’ll always be alone
I may not be right, but I don’t think I am wrong

        ~ Melanie Safka, “I Am Not a Poet (Night Song)”

Today’s words: cooperate, lame, and terse.

“Lame. Seriously, that had to be the lamest poem ever.”

Bridie tried not to pay attention to her classmate’s words. She’d been against the idea of an oral recitation for her poetry from the beginning, but the professor insisted that they were going to do it whether they liked it. She could either cooperate or fail the class.

Well, maybe it wouldn’t have meant failing, but it would have hurt her grade one way or another. She wanted to disappear under her chair and make this day fade forever. Her father was an editor, her mother a journalist, and they’d named her after the Celtic goddess of poetry, but maybe all that conspired to make it so that she was anything but a poet.

She didn’t think that she was a terrible writer. Her teachers had always liked her essays, and people seemed to enjoy her stories, but when it came to her poetry, there was this horrible silence. She could fill it in with all the things that they didn’t say, and it wasn’t like she didn’t know that the poem was bad before she got up to the podium.

She had. She’d known it was terrible, but that was the best that she’d come up with in the time they’d had to do the assignment. In fact, she’d cheated and pulled out one of her old ones, one that was better than the crap that she’d churned out over the past two weeks.

She let her hair fall over her face and sighed. Her brain just didn’t get poetry. She failed to see the beauty in the ones done to form—haikus had to be the bane of her existence because they never seemed to make sense—and she didn’t like the epics. Classics like Beowulf and Jabberwocky and many, many others were things that made her want to drink.

She tried to like poetry. She did. She’d enjoyed a few simple, silly rhymes when she was younger. Shel Silverstein remained a favorite of hers, but she had sat through all her classmates’ offerings and failed to understand a single one of them. They had gotten ovations and applause, enough to make the auditorium seem too small for their group, but she sat there frowning, wondering what the point had been. She did better with the ones that told stories as opposed to the ones with fantastic imagery. She couldn’t picture the images, not most of the time, but even with the stories… They seemed to end just when she started to comprehend them.

She hated poetry.

She was coming to loathe poetry.

After today’s humiliation, she didn’t think anyone could blame her. Not that she hadn’t had her reasons before, but she was never taking another creative writing class again. She’d thought it was just what she wanted and needed—but this professor was all about the poetry, and she was failing miserably because her brain just didn’t seem capable of processing anything that claimed to be poetry.

She liked lyrics. She did. She loved music, loved singing along, and she found such beautiful stories in the lyrics, ones dying to be told in full novel length.

She didn’t get that from poetry. She just stared at the words and made her head ache over and over again. She picked up her bag and started for the back doors, ready to get out of this room before she got stuck hearing another anthem of beauty that she couldn’t process or more comments about her own failure.

“Where do you think you’re going? Just because you’ve given your presentation doesn’t mean class is over,” the professor said, and she winced, having forgotten that he liked to sit in the back whenever possible, listening to the comments and making sure that everyone was paying attention.

“It is for me.”

“Is it now?” His terse words were an accusation, and she knew what she was about to do would mean that she was going to fail the class, but she no longer cared.

“Yeah. There’s no point in me being here. There never was. I’m not a poet.”

“You are a writer.”

She shrugged. “People expect writing to be poetry. It’ll be lyrical and beautiful and full of wondrous description that takes you right to where everything is and immerses you in a world that’s not your own. That’s not what I do. My stuff is as realistic as I can make it. It’s simple. It’s plain. Understated and sure as hell not poetic.”

“You miss the point of the class.”

“It’s supposed to be about growing and challenging myself and furthering my creativity, and I get that. Maybe I’m not ready to be challenged. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll never grow. There’s this circuit in my brain that shorts itself every time I read a poem. I don’t get them. I don’t like them because I don’t get them. That’s the way it is. I’m not a poet, and I never will be.”

She turned and walked out the door, feeling a bit of weight fall off her shoulders. She could accept it now; she had made peace with it. Poetry and her, they’d never be friends, they’d never get along, but then again, they didn’t have to. She could still write her kinds of stories—for fun, since she doubted anyone would buy them—and she could still read. She’d just stick to prose.

That was for the best, really.

Author’s Note: So… I found the words from Three Word Wednesday not that inspiring today. Well, no, I take that back, they were inspiring, but not in a way that made me at all comfortable.

There was no way I was using them for any of my serials today. Some of my characters have dark pasts, but that is not a place I want to dwell.

Today’s words: grope, brutal, and transfer.

In the darkness, her hand groped in vain, searching the bed for something—someone—that wasn’t there. Not even a bit of lingering heat remained to transfer from the sheets to her hand, no cooling presence left behind from someone who had been there and gone. Nothing. She pulled her hand back, curling up against herself. She couldn’t avoid it, not here, not in the middle of the night with the house as silent as a mausoleum, without the sound of a clock ticking away the seconds that passed in a relentless agony, never willing to let her forget that brutal truth. He was gone, gone forever.