Early one morning, as dawn broke the blackness in two, I was three sheets to the wind and the sky was four shades of pink. Five minutes later, my sixth sense warned me of the angels who flew in from seventh heaven. Eight of them, not enough to fit on the head of a pin, were bound for the nine circles of hell.
“The ten commandments have been ignored,” said Zacheus, eleventh Malakim to God. “Twelve nights and thirteen days of darkness will be your punishment.”
He struck me fourteen times with his clawed hand and disappeared. Fifteen feathers floated to the ground in his wake. I took a sixteen-beat breath and counted my prayers–seventeen in all–before remembering where it all began.
I was eighteen the first time I knew with certainty that our dimension was nineteenth in an infinite number of realities. My ignorance killed twenty people that day, twenty-one if you counted the death of my own innocence. Twenty-two years later, I still could not shake the angels.
My case of Coors had twenty-three empty cans. I popped the top on the twenty-fourth, thinking that I would need more beer to get through the next twenty-five days.
Though fantasy is her first love, Kim McDougall writes anything from children’s picture books to horror fiction. She believes that genres are crippling literature. A story takes on what ever form it needs. She doesn’t set out to write a fantasy or a romance. Rather, she writes a story as it demands to be written and then tries to fit it into a category only for the sake of convenience. Needless to say, some of her stories fall through the genre cracks. So she has created her own genre. Read Between the Cracks fiction at www.kimmcdougall.com.
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15 Responses to “TWENTY-FIVE PRAYERS • by Kim McDougall”
Comments
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May 21st, 2008 at 1:56 am
Although this seems more like poetry…whatever it is its freaking fantastic…clever…fun…well written, it all flows so well.
great job Kim!
May 21st, 2008 at 3:29 am
Couldn’t disagree more. Take away the numbers and it’s just nonsense. With the numbers it has a gimmick but the prose is squeezed to fit an arbitrary pattern.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:06 am
Clever gimmick and just the right length for this kind of tale. Loved the shades of the book of Revelation. I wondered about the math–12 days and 13 nights didn’t add up to 25 days for me–but math has never been my thing.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:17 am
Clever and fun. Loved it.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:56 am
I love this line:
My ignorance killed twenty people that day, twenty-one if you counted the death of my own innocence.
This piece feels dream-like & fluid…I think the upward progression of numbers lends to this.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:43 am
Couldn’t disagree with you more. The numerology made it fun–not gimmicky.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:44 am
Liked the number-thing, Kim. Good work.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
very cute. I like the counting scheme. It has kind of a dream world quality to it.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I liked it. Clever, fun. Numbers and words. Two of my favourite things.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:09 pm
you might be joking…but i cant quite tell so here it is anyway.
10+10 =20
2+3=5
20+5 is 25
tadaa
May 21st, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Thank you everyone for the comments! This was my first story with Everyday Fiction and not my usual fare. A bit of an experiment.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:15 pm
fun experiment, nice
May 21st, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I’m with Greta on the math. When you book a 13-day/12-night vacation, I can guarantee you’ll be home in two weeks.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Kim, you can count on my support for this story.
May 24th, 2008 at 6:40 am
Didn’t make much sense to me, except for the experimenting of the numbers. Maybe I’m too ignorant of the myth/history involved.