'Flash' writing anthology about chronic pain - submissions welcome!

Tag: invisibility (Page 4 of 5)

‘Singing Bones’, by Katarina Juvancic

 Deeply submerged in the melancholy of the dying summer with my knees telling tales of the approaching cold and winter. My bones, surrounded with tumor necrosis cytokines causing acute and debilitating inflammation are dreading it. 

 

This picture symbolises hope (sun) in the midst of winter. Trees are like bones.  

My body is a place of pain. My body is also a place of unutterable solitude, longing, and love. Love holding my cells in place. Love feeding them and helping them communicate better. I must find that place every time the system that keeps them in check collapses. I must remember it is here, all the time, ubiquitous and ever present. 
I need to embrace my disease and live with it as best as I possibly can. 
But most of all, I need to find a sustainable source of warmth and store it into my bones, so that they can sing songs of sun, warm breeze and golden evenings like this one all year round.

Slovenia

‘A Hidden Truth’, by Amy Hunter

After struggling with ear problems all my life and having two surgeries for Cholesteatoma in 2008 and 2015, a recent flare up has caused months of pain that is unexplained and has baffled my consultants. Having this on top of my original ear problems and cluster headaches sometimes the pain can make days difficult. This is just a glimpse into what happens on a daily basis. 

Me. Pain. Intertwined. 
Days. Coping. Bad days. Flare ups. 
People. Confused. Understanding Difficult. 
Hidden disease. 

Medicine. No effect. Doctors. Befuddled. 
Decisions. Hospitals. Waiting. Pain. 
Hidden disease. 

Explaining. Constant. Tiring. 
Symptoms. Unexplained. Words. Lost. 

Hidden disease. 

Tired. Exasperated. Threshold. Pushed. Sometimes. Beyond Limits.
Tired. Sore. Always. Hidden Truth. 
Tired. Battle on. 

Hidden disease. 

People. Unconditional Love. 
Caring. Trying to understand. 

Hidden disease. 

Pain. Intertwined. 
Always there.
Nothing seen. 

Hidden disease. 

This is me.

 

  • by Amy Hunter

 

United Kingdom

‘Mutation’, by Marion Michell

This image is of a small green vase, grass-green and made of thick glass which slightly tapers top to bottom. Four small tulips stand in water, three with fading orange petals, one with purple. All are in the stage just before the petals, which seem to be curling in on themselves, fall off. A few stamen are visible, like tiny black tongues.An afternoon spent, or was it an evening, or three, in a wheel clamp’s tender clasp. My dues for modernist mutation paid out in full: ribs, calves, hands, sections of skull, wrenching, arching, hardening. A homecoming of sorts, a holding; mattress won’t grumble, neither will I – if only we knew if we’re hot or cold, horsehair or hardware, flesh or fish or foil.


U.K.

‘An Everyday Battle’, by Sophie Powell

Just a little twist, a sideways step to dodge out of the path of an eyes-forward businessman on a mission. My hip twists with the sideways step, then ankle and finally, knee. It’s a searing pain, stabs straight through the joint like a missile and there’s a battle taking place in there. My face is blank, a natural reaction to sudden, unbearable pain: a state of brief shock, no matter how many times it happens. No one would know, especially not the businessman with his dead eyes and umbrella wielded like a weapon. A friend notices my misstep and grabs my arm to speed up – the knee won’t buckle, never does, so I carry on with clenched teeth and hands and eyes. Good little soldier, that knee. We walk on, the debris of dead bone – dead men – in that ordinary-looking joint waging war silently beneath my skin.

  • by Sophie Powell 

United Kingdom

‘Chime’, by Marion Michell

Lie in the car, stiff as a bell’s tongue, and just as mute. Pain in aspiration stage – still hoping I’ll hurl myself against walls, eager to chime.

After a blurry episode give looking another go. Burgess Park is not itself right now: tiny, lifeless, the green of grass and foliage moulded in the same garish tones. Clouds, birds, a plastic sun, tacked on a smudge of blue. We too minuscule and stuck mid-move in a scale-model some architect should have improved.

Bed, at long last. Limbs scattered like mikado sticks; palms so painful they seem large as cities. Must have crashed across the continent, one hand throbbing in Reykjavik, the other limp in the Aegean Sea. Each crumple in my sheet a mountain ridge or carved out canyon, nuzzling the gash of me. A chore to breathe.

Days shivering in sleety weather zones. I pine for hot. PEMalaise me not!

This image is a collage of two black and white photographs of a hand. The top half shows palm and slightly bent fingers horizontally, the bottom half vertically. The original was photographed in extreme light against white background, in order to achieve pronounced shadows. The latter appear more curved than the fingers themselves.

 

  • by Marion Michell

Blog and book: Sublimely Supinely

U.K.

‘Hagalaz’, by Ruth V. Chalkley

In Lithuanian, runoti means both “to cut (with a knife)” and “to speak”.

      Hail: Hagalaz
      Pain, loss, suffering, hardship, sickness, crisis.

       Spirit-breaker
       Faith-Taker
       Misery-Maker
       Joy-Stealer
       Dream-Breaker
       Shadow-Hound.    

       Thought-Waker
       Friend-Fooler
       Life-Dealer
       Mood-Carver
       Time-Stealer
       Life-Hider.

        Sometimes, some time,
        Signal-Saver.

 

U.K.

‘And for a long time’, by Amy Allara

Small branch with wire.And for a long time 

She wanted to tell it to someone 
place it in the visible world— 

yet nothing she could speak of 
nor anything she had been told. 

In our residences, 
the old-fashioned exile 
of unwelcome subjects 
to guard against 
the wrong arrangement of text.

How to narrate an illness 
in fairer climates and 
to fair-weather figures. 

How not to.

 

 

U.S.

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