Storm Junked
By Rachel Orta
October 15, 2023
October 15, 2023
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Grass thick with hot rain, reeling from a night of electric heat. Green and violet hues blended into a bright blue sky. Birds cease to fly for the routine of it all. Creatures still. Warmth in the air suspended only one daylight prior. This heat had reeked up my spine like a festering mold, just beginning to air its dampened nature. Brought a chill inside me as I tracked the weather radar for the entire day, the one trait I have which reminds me that I am my father’s daughter. Until the next time my chest seizes me that each stove eye was left to blaze just as I enter the freeway. And then again when I see a child play a few feet too far from their parent and I stifle this urge in my neck to seek a thief so I can warn the mother. Or the nights when my numbed fingers reach for food to fill the hole in my belly, which gets missed as it is just above my stomach. Or when anger rises in my face that cannot be explained. I return to him in these moments like light splintering across wooden pillars of cloud. Fear creeps in like the damp day before a storm and it is revealed in my face by slices of electric light to be not pride, but solitude. This is why I must feign indulgence in the junk of a storm-torn yard, as if it was always meant as something to tear me up or give me pleasure.
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Rachel Orta (she/her) is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She gravitates towards dream-like themes, often inspired by mysteries of nature and complexities of family. Orta’s writing has recently appeared in Prose Online (prose.onl) and Livina Press. A full list of her published pieces and links to social media can be found at https://linktr.ee/RachelOrta.
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