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Kathleen March

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2020

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150 Stories

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Collaging Rosalía

Everyone in town was talking. They couldn’t help themselves. They couldn’t stop. They spent day and night tossing their thoughts about her around. Day and night. Waking and sleeping. They were obsessed and wouldn’t be free of their obsession until they solved the problem. Because it was a problem. It was a serious matter, very serious. So serious, in fact, that they were having trouble dealing with it. With her, with what she was doing. With what she was saying. They were convinced it was dangerous to have her in their midst, just walking ar...

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Friends For Life?

My friend once told me a story about a friend of hers. I thought you might want to hear it, too. I don’t know if it’s true or if my friend - or her friend - made it up. In any event, it’s a story worth telling, about friends worth having, real or imagined. Feel free to tell me what think, as I know you will, since you’re my friend.*****Two people met in an L.L. Bean outlet store in Freeport, Maine. Freeport isn’t a bad little town, although unfortunately it’s almost always full of visitors looking to spend money in this part of the Casco Bay...

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Can you hum that tune?

Prologue I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a good story, an important one, at least to me. It all started some years ago, although nobody knows exactly how many. Its main character is a little girl named Kat, or at least that was what they called her when the story began. When the story ended, her name was different. It was Reed, which is unusual, but that was her name, so that’s what we’ll call her. Reed put blood, sweat, and tears into pretty much everything she did, never stopping to question whether it was worth it. Until one day s...

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Speak, Stone, Speak

Rain poem Once rain had driven her away.  Now she swam in it. Tears rained inside her, diluting what was sad  or said. Ducks claimed her. Leda or thirsty Danae counted golden coins and thirsty Ardea stood watching. Tattooing drops shattered any thoughts, and rested, missing every word. Her lips were sealed. Things were in pieces. Everywhere. Xacia was her middle name.  The only one she had. The one she never understood. The one she never said aloud. Konjac, devil’s tongue, the sponge was filling her lungs. She ...

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For the Love of…

Mid-July in Maine. Different than ever before. It never got that hot in Maine, as far as she knew. The day had been long and very, very hot. Stifling. She had felt like she was melting, and maybe she had been, especially around noon. Rivers of salt and sweat, transparent rivulets furrowing her face. Swirls of auburn no longer moving in the breeze that did nothing to alleviate the mercury’s ascent. A sea of clacking leaves jostling for shade and finding none. A body struggling to remain inside its poor skin, fearing the worst. Hot, tortured h...

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I Decline

Her name was funny. It made us laugh. She taught Latin. Mrs. Isabel Patten taught Latin. You can’t make stuff like that up. Her name rhymes with the subject she taught. latin I, II, III, and IV. If you started with I, you kept going until you got to IV. You were pretty much stuck with Latin and Mrs. Patten. That was all right, because it might have been Latin - for the smart kids - but at least it wasn’t French. That meant putting up with Mrs. Rodney’s horrendously nasal voice, even in the words that had no nasal vowels. The choice was ...

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Name the Narrator

She ran her hands through her long curly hair, always a natural auburn. The gesture wasn’t one of desperation nor did it signal worry. Not at all. Not now. Not any longer. That was all in the past. Despite years of having considered it then walking away from the idea, it had finally happened. She’d finally done it.  She’d resigned, was leaving her faculty position (Professor of English Literature) after sixteen years of navigating very choppy waters. She wasn’t going to relive that period because at long last she could say she wa...

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In My Life

Oh, everything was real ~ Caitlyn Smith I’ve loved them all… Maybe in another life… I’ve loved… Loved them… In my life… All of them Loved Maybe in another life… Maybe I The bits and pieces of words that had once been a John Lennon song nobody wanted to sing because it was too sad: “In my life, I’ve loved them all.” Only the longest line wasn’t from the Beatles. Or the last one. Those words had stealthily joined the others, but it didn’t matter. We remembered the song as it was, accurately. We used to sing it, thou...

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Building Rome

I was trying to learn to play the guitar, but my progress was so slow. I thought I’d never learn. While I was practicing and looking frustrated, somebody said “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” I supposed not, and kept on practicing, hours on end, until I reached the level I wanted to achieve. The encouraging words had helped. Another time, as I recall, I was trying to write an English paper, but kept ditching my ideas and starting over. It was so hard to get ten pages of thoughts down coherently. My friends noticed how hard I was working ...

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Pots and Others

She was quite distracted right then, had a lot on her mind. She had gotten the feeling that something strange was about to happen. Strange and perhaps with bad results. Perhaps the world would finally come to an end. It was hard to be certain, when all she had to go on was the odd feeling. She shivered.Thus it was that it went completely over her head when the nearby group was in an animated exchange on the topic of DC and Congress. When she finally realized somebody nearby was commenting on some political maneuvers in the federal gover...

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One to one

Here I am again, I’ve come back to Square One. I use capital letters with the last two words in the previous sentence because it’s a proper name, not the starting point in Monopoly or whatever game the phrase came from. (In my mind, it’s Monopoly, but I haven’t played it for years. It gets pretty boring pushing fake properties around on a board, spending fake money you don’t have and never will.) But the part about returning to the spot where it all began is not fake at all: I literally have come back to Square One. This is because it...

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Thinking

I was thinking about water. Then it was cold and far, salted to a degree I couldn’t measure. I realized measuring was not required.It was not wet, but it was liquid. A grayish bluish emerald that wasn’t quite mineral and did not think much, at least in the beginning. Water is more, too.This time it was, I think, the color of tears, which if you think about it, have many invisibilities, all of them there to hold, although they want to trickle through fingers. I tried to catch the molecules, but they were nothing but formulas, all numbers stuc...

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Sea-Fever

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over. ~John Masefield, “Sea-Fever”I must go down to the Sar again, to the vagrant pilgrim life,To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;And all I ask is a funny tale from a happy traveling friend,And quiet sleep and sweet dreams when the journey’s met its end.S...

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It’s About the Flowers

May. What a lovely day. I love this month, May. Here where I live, I can’t remember that it has ever rained. Sounds unbelievable, but it’s true, I promise.I see Mom is bustling around the way she always does when we’re getting ready to go somewhere. I don’t bustle or get ready; I just wait for her to call me when she’s finished bustling so I can get in the car. Today I’m excited and don’t mind Mom’s fussing about, because it’s so warm and sunny and I am so happy going places with her. Just the two of us in our car-womb. She is my world, and ...

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In Praise of That Place

I feel alive here. As the poem says, let me count the ways…I feel alive when walking through your stones. Through, you say? Yes, through. Your stones aren’t hard and barriers for me. They are but a sparkly, fuzzy mist, tepid, icy, loofahs. Unassertive, firm, loyal to the windy legends and the water, to the years behind and ahead.Your stones are saintly masks that never fool me. They have ears for you, ears that turn away or stare. Your deafness belongs in part to Roi Xordo, a man or a king who refused to listen.You are stolid and hard-faced....

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