Bob Lucky
Charmed: A Family Affair
She wanted a pet snake for her birthday. Her parents tried to reason with her. Where would she keep it? What would she feed it? Who would take it for a walk? She had an answer for everything. The parents’ questions kept mutating. At the dinner table the girl started smelling her food with a flick of the tongue and then swallowing it straight off the plate, not bothering to chew. They stopped putting out silverware for her. When she began sliding off her chair and slithering to her room, they decided to take her out of school and to a psychiatrist, who admitted he couldn’t treat her if he couldn’t keep her on the couch. The local preacher was so tongue-tied he hissed the exorcism. When winter came, the parents discussed moving to Ireland, but it was too late. They bought a pungi and stuck their daughter in a basket.
Bob Lucky is the erstwhile editor of Contemporary Haibun Online, and author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019), and the e-chapbook What I Say to You (proletaria.org, 2020). He lives in northern Portugal.
Charmed: A Family Affair
She wanted a pet snake for her birthday. Her parents tried to reason with her. Where would she keep it? What would she feed it? Who would take it for a walk? She had an answer for everything. The parents’ questions kept mutating. At the dinner table the girl started smelling her food with a flick of the tongue and then swallowing it straight off the plate, not bothering to chew. They stopped putting out silverware for her. When she began sliding off her chair and slithering to her room, they decided to take her out of school and to a psychiatrist, who admitted he couldn’t treat her if he couldn’t keep her on the couch. The local preacher was so tongue-tied he hissed the exorcism. When winter came, the parents discussed moving to Ireland, but it was too late. They bought a pungi and stuck their daughter in a basket.
Bob Lucky is the erstwhile editor of Contemporary Haibun Online, and author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019), and the e-chapbook What I Say to You (proletaria.org, 2020). He lives in northern Portugal.
previous page contents next page
posted by mark young at 2:32 PM
1 Comments:
A bit of yoga wouldn't you say?
We just connected yesterday and here we are.
The work is wonderful- you have a sophisticated way of smoothly transitioning from the moribund to the supernal in a sentence.
And I enjoyed the brief but impactful choices of situations you chose in such a brief work.
Nice mythology you created here with touches of humor.
Post a Comment
<< Home