The Shine Journal

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The World Is Falling Down

by

Dawn A. Green



Her mother is going to kill her.  There is too much mingled love and crazy in her eyes for her to do it like the new generation of moms do.  She won’t drown the child or put a pillow over her face at night.  She’s a mother that has spent too many of the last thirteen years of her life micro-managing the level of the child’s bath and ensuring  a smother-free sleep environment for either to wind up on the news.  But the child is discovering a slow and silent kill that spans the entire course of her life.  She sipped poison from the breast as an infant, sweet milk tainted by the acid paranoia that courses the woman’s veins.  And now her mother feeds her thoughts with that same bitter mix of truth and insanity. 


It started when she’d outgrown the satin-dress and cream tights of Sunday School days, and she’d rather sleep in than wake to the monotony of the Sabbath.  Her mother began writing verses on her binder cover, reminders that the all-seeing-eye of God misses nothing.  The child tore away the plastic to rid the three-ringed monstrosity of scribbles, and then, when her mother used the same wide-tipped marker to scrawl the words, “For God so loved the world…” she scrapped the entire cover.


Then her mother came in the guise of friendship.  They sat side by side on the computer and watched music videos.  The child thought, “My music is not so unlike hers, surely she was once like me.”  She noticed the stiletto shoes and two-toned lip gloss, her mother; the esoteric occult meanings behind every lyric.  Humoring her mother, the two listened to back-masked versions of popular songs until her lids were too heavy to stave off sleep.  That night she dreamed of demons shaped like vultures.


The sun rose on a world in which everything was trying to devour her.  At breakfast her mother smiled with crocodile teeth and said that it was a glorious morning. She nodded silently and left for school with her coverless binder.


The bus driver smiled knowingly at her though she did not know him.  Her teachers winked when she noticed in silence that the American flag was draped in such a way that the stars looked like goat heads.  She thought, “There is no way to escape this nasty, ugly force that is my mother, the world … me.”


She left the campus at lunch to walk the streets and sort her thoughts.  Seeing the arcane symbols her mother had spoken of in every window and in the patterns of shop floors, it was by chance that she noticed the smiling face of the man who walked beside her.  It was handsome, inviting.


“What’s a pretty girl like you on the lookout for?” he asked, growing more handsome with each glowing syllable.


Exhausted, mesmerized, she licked her lips before replying.


“Something sinful,” she said, letting her broken binder fall to the floor and taking his offered hand.


Dawn Green is the single mother of four girls.  Publishing credits include: Demons, Knights & Angels, amphibi.us, EOTU, and the anthology Color Him Father, as well as in several other online and print publications.  "I currently write ad copy while I hunt for a publisher for my first novel."

Motivation: My oldest daughter and I have spent the first half of the summer researching secret organizations.  The theories we have come across have been a bit overwhelming for both of us.  This story detail information overload that borders on psychological abuse.



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Editor: Pamela Tyree Griffin

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