Penelope Weiss

               A Weapon of the Lord

               When we were children, my brother and I lived in the beautiful city of AH. Our parents were rich. The trees on our street were healthy and tall.
               One day, when I was 10 and my brother was 7, I told my brother he would cause the death of thousands of people in an earthquake.
               Every night I would remind my brother of this fact. Every night he would repeat my warning in his gentle voice, the voice that always annoyed me He never disputed me. Our parents knew nothing about it.
               After our parents died my brother and I lived together in the family home. I studied religious law. My brother studied the law of the universe. We would walk through the city at night under the flowering trees.
               My brother never forgot that because of him some terrible disaster would befall his city. In 2000 he moved to Iceland, far away from our beautiful AH. He lived there for ten years, perhaps happily. In 2010 a volcano erupted there, the volcano with the unpronounceable name.
               Two days after the eruption, my spies told me that my brother walked into the ash cloud and never returned.
               Now every Friday when I give my sermon and read from the holy book, I see my brother covered in ashes as he walks toward me in this holy place. I am a brave man, but I fear the moment when his gentle voice greets me as his brother and invites me to live with him in the land of the dead.



                              Even Shape Shifters Get the Blues

               I’ve been shape shifting since I was 10 years old. Last November, I was living alone in my human shape in a broken-down cabin in Vermont, dreading the winter to come. After I had finished the wine in the last bottle in my cupboard, I thought about what I should do to get through the winter. Should I make a ship in a bottle? No, not for me that slaving over small pieces of wood and canvas at the kitchen table, the hurricane lamp stuttering and the shapes of winter dancing around the cabin door.
               Then I remembered I could transform myself into a ship, and be warm and snug inside the bottle. I could sleep the whole winter and deal with reality in the spring.
               In June, when I woke up, I was horrified to realize I couldn’t release myself from the bottle or change myself back to human form. What had happened? What should I do? Thank goodness I could still do something: I conjured a spell from my childhood and flew in my bottle from my moldy cabin to the waters of Lake Champlain. But I was still in trouble. I forgot how cold the water is in that Vermont lake. To warm myself, I sang myself to sleep with an old shape-shifting lullaby, trusting in fate and the habits of inquisitive Vermonters to find and release me from my prison.
               In July, you found my bottle floating alongside your kayak. You freed me (I don’t know how) without asking anything in return. Of course, you saw a ship, not a shape-shifter. When I transformed myself back into a person, I hope my speech of thanks wasn’t too flowery for your 21^st century sensibilities.
               You say you’re a poet and live alone in your own little cabin in the woods. I don’t know anything about poets or poetry, but we have something in common: our struggle to stay alive in a world of anxiety and fear. Let me show you how to shape shift. I promise we’ll be friends.

Penelope Weiss grew up in New York City and now lives in Shrewsbury, Vermont. Storiana, her collection of stories, was published by Casa de Snapdragon Publishing and is available on Amazon.
 
 
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