To steal someone’s heart away is an awful cliché and I cannot abide it. “Break a heart,” “steal” it – all the same garbage, all the same insipid prose.
Really, cannot people be more creative and instead imagine the white-white of snow at winter’s sunset, orange horizon mocking stark shadows of the woods? Or the blackish-green of pines set against starshine, as if to inexorably draw down the night?
What of a dark winter water, that icy brook, unfrozen, sluggish, yet moving and sinister in its kleptomaniacal secrecy?
Or the abomination of a big box store, its plastic and fluorescence pretending to be meaning and substance?
I wander in, leaving the cold, and I see white sheets, blankets, trinkets, trunks and trimmings. Mine. They should be mine.
No one stole my heart. Never. Not him. I cannot abide it. But these things, these white tokens: they are mine and I will have them all, whatever will slide into this bland bag.
—–
Jane Banning lives in the woods. Her work has appeared in several online literary journals and she is working on her first novel, “Silo.”
Read more stories by Jane Banning
—–
To comment on this story, visit Fiction365’s Facebook page