Bernadette Benda

1.

“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.”

December 1st. A snowstorm hits. 6:30 am the sun is still sleeping, but it’s unusually bright outside. A familiar brightness that tells of long cold nights and shorter and colder days. Wet snow has covered everything. Orange lampposts and porch lights reflect back in the snow, making the sparkling white brighter and warmer. Cars are covered inches thick, bushes toppled over.

These are the days best spent inside, while I dream of hearing sleigh bells down the street. Maybe it’s familiar voices calling me out for fun like they say in the songs, or maybe it’s the Snow Queen on her white sleigh, passing like a dream in the night. Maybe in the evening we’ll walk, and we won’t need stars, for the snow is like stars around us.

And silence. Maybe that’s why I long for an arctic tundra, where the silence is so deep your own thoughts are silenced too, and your breaths become deep and slow. There is nothing and no one about you, only mountains forever looming, and the never-melting snow.

3.

Do you ever just lay down on the kitchen floor and someone opens the fridge and all of sudden you get a whiff of troll stench and you’re like what the heck and then you start throwing Tupperware out of the fridge into the sink because guess where all the Tupperware goes? In the fridge with all the moldy vegetables and other things that you didn’t realize could even grow mold. Maybe I just lay on the kitchen floor too often. Maybe we don’t clean out the fridge enough. Maybe we all need to realize no one is going to eat those leftover green beans.

4.

I was walking my neighborhood the other day and thinking (as I usually do) about fairies and dystopias and other normal things. I was thinking that nearly all the stories I’ve written, I’ve written here. Here is the place I’ve created, the place where my imagination keep catching fire.

A nondescript suburban neighborhood. Near mundane things like strip centers and malls and busy bus stops. The most exciting thing being that we’re only ten minutes away from the lake. Yet I think we underestimate suburbs. Y’all need to watch the Burbs.

For real though, one of these days I’m writing either a dystopian/suburbia story of a suburban fantasy story. Because suburbs are WEIRD and there are secret WOODS and abandoned houses that straight up VANISH one day.

(NaNoWriMo 2021 anyone?)

5.

Logging off now. Hopefully I’ll get to doing some Christmas themed posts before the end of the year, and then in January I’m gonna do an EPIC 2020 wrap up (I’m thinking of doing a month by month thing because, let’s face it, each month was like five decades).

Have a nice weekend and eat a cookie or something.