Issue 14
Cold
Priscilla Rhoades
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Cold
When I was a kid I was very quiet, so quiet that teachers would often seat me next to talkers as a kind of punishment for them. But one year I sat next to a boy who was just as quiet as I was. The only thing I recall him ever saying to me, through all of fifth grade, was one curious sentence. "I'm from another planet," he confided once.
I've forgotten his name, but I remember his eyes: deep and liquid black, like obsidian, like the arrowheads in my rock collection. I searched his eyes for self-recognition then, finding my lost sibling, my tribal twin.
You can buy moon dust on the Internet now, but in 1959 there was no moon walk yet, no E.T., no public confessions of midnight visitations by aliens. There was only silence in those cold years, broken sometimes by strange children talking in code.
~Priscilla Rhoades
Priscilla Rhoades' writing has appeared recently in Lodestar Quarterly, Outsider Ink, Kudzu Monthly, and other publications. A transplanted Californian, she lives now on two acres in the mountains of western North Carolina.
© 2003 by Priscilla Rhoades. All Rights Reserved.
© Copyright 2003 by Cayuse Press. All Rights Reserved.