'IDA' - THE ATTICUS REVIEW
My story ‘Ida’ was chosen by Carmen Maria Machado to be published in The Atticus Review, after being a runner up in the Atticus Review Flash Fiction Contest.
Ida has broad shoulders. One is three meters long, the other, stretches sixty-two miles.
Some say she resembles a giant, a craggy black nightmare. A child’s drawing of a monster; a prehistoric dinosaur, sleeping under a snow crown of ice.
She lives in fog and spray, nine miles out at sea. She feels the white horses, tickling her toes. The moon sends tides through her bones. Its rhythm is endless, glints though her rivers, swells in deep groans.
For thousands of years, men prayed to her as a Goddess. Women sang her devotions, threw wild thyme at her feet. Their boats only circled. No hands dared touch her, except on a full moon. There have always been women, desperate to conceive. And other women, those who came in the dark. These women she welcomed to her razor-sharp spine.
Women threw themselves at her, and she let them bleed.
Today, on the map, Ida is ‘Bird Island’. A tourist attraction. A 1,217-meter-tall outcrop, her shoulders cloaked in gulls.
Bees nest in her ear canals. At night she sends forth booms to clear the bats out of her head.
The full story can be read here, at the Atticus Review