James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don’t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA) and Flash Fiction and Rue Scribe have all featured one or more of his stories.
A Woman’s Voice
Well realize—he’d already named the animals!
I didn’t really have anything to do. Yes, we did walk in the garden every evening. So, I must admit maybe I was bored, but the serpent was an intellectual and he made me laugh, and I was laughing when I tasted it. I wanted to change the names of some of the animals; I must admit I never asked if I could, neither of them said I couldn’t. It just seemed like it was a bargain already made. Oh, he would do anything for me! And well, I didn’t even know that he hadn’t named all the animals. Didn’t find that out until, well, after we were outside and some of these other animals seemed to be intent on eating us.
Oh, this surprised me! This thing called fear, but now I like eating meat! But now the earth is hard.
Though now, I’m not bored with him any more I must admit. He protects and takes care of me, but these children, oh if I didn’t have him, as much as I love them, it would be impossible because he guides them into a place they can find as their own. Yet you know, I think someday one of them may kill the other and I cannot imagine this.
I do miss those walks when it was the presence of His love, was as constant as breathing. Now there are only times when I look at him and vaguely remember. Still he can be bad. Now he growls from time to time, and once after drinking he hit me. And this was not like him, and I bled, and now I bleed regularly and what have we done?
I killed the snake last week and afterwards I heard him laugh from the grove in the garden. We can’t go there anymore, but then again maybe it was from the forest beyond. I’m afraid of that place. Anyway, I saw the snake again the next day, I know, I should’ve known there was something wrong with a talking snake—but then don’t you know, I had no idea what wrong was?
Now I still know where there are flowers by a
quiet pool. Perhaps I could go there and come back? If I leave him it will be
dangerous. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll go there for a short while and then come back.
Oh, my heart breaks when he screams in the middle of the night!”