Abortion – This Jolly Beggar

Lisa is today’s host at dVerse’s Prosery, and says: "Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to incorporate the quote ["I dress in their stories patterned and purple as nigh" –from “When We Sing of Might,” by Kimberly Blaeser] into a piece of prose. This can be either flash fiction, nonfiction, or creative nonfiction, but it must be prose! Not prose poetry, and not a poem. And it must be no longer than 144 words, not including the title. (It does not have to be exactly 144 words, but it can’t exceed 144 words.)

Deathbeds

Their graves are trash bins, medical refuse after each organ is harvested, the doctor careful to preserve the parts but not the whole. There is money to be had. She knew all this. She had worked as one. But the children she had aborted were not real to her.

Until the day she lay dying.

Suddenly they appeared before her eyes, smiling their forgiveness, and she relaxed. They understood! There was a God in heaven after all. Why, she didn’t even have to forgive herself!

She stretched out her hands to them but they stood out of reach midst the children she herself had decided to keep.

Her children saw her eyes widen.

“I dress in their stories patterned and purple as night,” she whispered.

What stories, Mom?

“The ones I took from them. The ones I robbed them of. Oh God! They burn!”

Update: So far this year almost 40 million children have been killed by choice. The leading cause of death is by abortion, far surpassing all other causes. According to data compiled by the Worldometer, a reference website that monitors statistics on health, the global population, the use of resources and deaths in real-time, over 40 million abortions are performed worldwide annually.

Warning: Sensitive topic broached. Björn at dVerse: MTB asks us to write a cadralor, which poetic form consists of "5, unrelated, numbered stanzaic images, each of which can stand alone as a poem, is fewer than 10 lines, and ideally constrains all stanzas to the same number of lines. Imagery is crucial to cadralore: each stanza should be a whole, imagist poem, almost like a scene from a film, or a photograph. The fifth stanza acts as the crucible, alchemically pulling the unrelated stanzas together into a love poem. By “love poem,” we mean that your fifth stanza illuminates a gleaming thread that runs obliquely through the unrelated stanzas and answers the compelling question: 'For what do you yearn?'" Click on Mr. Linky to join us.