Ellen Wise was born and raised in Washington State and has never met and/or seen a single vampire in her life. She lives off of coffee, books, Bon Iver and almond milk while she attends Belhaven liberal arts University in Jackson, MS. She is a music major and fails fantastically in music theory because she believes music should be felt, not read. Her strong feminist views give her freedom to climb trees and spit. Writing is her hobby and her passion since she could hold a Graham cracker.

Innocents (March 20, 2011. Issue 26. The SLAM & FLASH Issue!)

She runs along the trail,
tears stream from her eyes.
The hot yellow dances on her grubby face like
warm rain on the defeated faces of farmers.
She trips on a root.
Sobbing now, blood and water pouring from her
little body as pure as Christ himself, she screams in
a rage that cannot be understood by the birds.

“Mother, they left me behind.
They left me in the dirt, they run faster than I can.”

Mother does not listen,
“The world waits for no one.” She says.

Those words break childhood,
shatter the finest of God’s creation.

Magic no longer exists.
Fairies don’t give a golden dollar for a tooth.
Dinosaurs don’t live in her neighbors back yard.
Toys do not come to life when she leaves her room.
The dark cannot shake her to her soul.

Her heart is hardened like granite, like an iceberg,
like a diamond.

She no longer plays pretend, cannot imagine fairy tales, does not
stay in the bath for hours till the water makes her shiver.
She will not sing so loud that her body aches, she does not climb trees
or catch butterflies or run bare foot in the summer.

She no longer fears the monsters under her bed, no longer fears the evil
step mother, the witch, and Hook, but the monsters in the world:
robbers, murderers, rapists, burglars, perverts, kid-nappers,
Her drunk father.

She runs from these things,

As she grows, she learns from her father’s beatings the only thing that keeps
these demons at bay is a bottle of the cheapest whisky from the corner Market.

She bears children for a man she no longer loves
and for a world who no longer loves her.

One day, her youngest boy, age five, finds her
hanging from the ceiling fan, rope wound
strong as a sentence around her tired neck.
She finally found a way to catch up to her racing siblings.

And just like that, his childhood is taken by her departing spirit
and this cycle we call “growing up” begins again.