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Stirling S Newberry's avatar

Brash Ambitions

There was a wind flowing through my black hair. It came from high in the hills of Nebraska and hit my paperback book by Kinsey. I look up at the tall, wizened willow with glaze high up. With the clouds blotting the sun and rain far away against the knothole nearby. My dress bloomed in the fall day’s air.

Oh, how I wish to be swept away from this earth and gaze at the celestial heavens, where the secrets of love were held in a locket clasped with a brooch.

Twisting and turning the tree said what I only whispered.

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Stephanie Loomis's avatar

At my roots there is a hole and from it rises a scar, put there by a lightning strike decades ago.

I was young then, barely five feet tall. No child had climbed my branches yet; no young lovers had carved their initials in my trunk; no old men had leaned into me for support.

A day of sunshine erupted in black clouds dropping hail and torrential rain. Wind twisted my trunk just at the moment the electric arc seared through me, leaving me for dead. But I lived. I healed and grew around the wound, becoming stronger than before.

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