The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The High Cost of Assumptions
by Angela Yuriko Smith

We are surfing starlight, raging divinity in moon fright, drowning in the balanced chaos of the rave light and screaming to the music of the spheres. The fears that held us back disintegrate and for us, there’s no more waiting. Raw and released we run, havocing through the night, whooping large and significant and vital and utterly and wholly irreverent. We are the profane insane, unfettered and filled to overflowing with unbridled and dissatisfied youth. Send in the clowns, my mama likes to say when I drag in after dawn, bedraggled, bedazzled and spent…

… and a clown I am, locked in the walls of what constitutes a scholastic institution, scolded by those more interested in cutting off my bits until I can fit in their box, slicing off any toe that crosses the line, bludgeoning the goodness into me and then questioning why I flee. Escape is anywhere but here, between pages, rages and stages of evolution choking in my emotional pollution with the knowing that the only way to be free will be up to me when I tear off their disabling labels and own who I am.

I will be a clown

if it means keeping myself —

authenticity.

.

Fiction © Copyright Angela Yuriko Smith
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

More from Angela Yuriko Smith:

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Ryukyuan-American, award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years in newspapers. Publisher of Space and Time magazine (est. 1966), two-time Bram Stoker Awards® Winner, and HWA Mentor of the Year, she shares Authortunities, a free weekly calendar of author opportunities at authortunities.substack.com.