{"id":1624,"date":"2019-11-11T01:52:45","date_gmt":"2019-11-11T01:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/?p=1624"},"modified":"2019-10-17T20:58:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-17T20:58:00","slug":"a-womans-voice-by-james-kelly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/2019\/11\/11\/a-womans-voice-by-james-kelly\/","title":{"rendered":"A Woman’s Voice by James Kelly"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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 \u2014 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\u2019t 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. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n


A Woman\u2019s Voice<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well realize\u2014he\u2019d already named the animals! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t really have anything to do. Yes, we did\nwalk in the garden every evening. So, I must admit maybe I was bored, but the\nserpent was an intellectual and he made me laugh, and I was laughing when I\ntasted it. I wanted to change the names of some of the animals; I must admit I\nnever asked if I could, neither of them said I couldn’t.  It just seemed like it was a bargain already\nmade. Oh, he would do anything for me! \nAnd well, I didn’t even know that he hadn’t named all the animals.\nDidn’t find that out until, well, after we were outside and some of these other\nanimals seemed to be intent on eating us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, this surprised me! This thing called fear,\nbut now I like eating meat!  But now the\nearth is hard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though now, I\u2019m not bored with him any more I\nmust admit. He protects and takes care of me, but these children, oh if I\ndidn\u2019t have him, as much as I love them, it would be impossible because he\nguides them into a place they can find as their own. Yet you know, I think\nsomeday one of them may kill the other and I cannot imagine this.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do miss those walks when it was the presence\nof His love, was as constant as breathing. Now there are only times when I look\nat him and vaguely remember. Still he can be bad. Now he growls from time to\ntime, and once after drinking he hit me. And this was not like him, and I bled,\nand now I bleed regularly and what have we done? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I killed the snake last week and afterwards I\nheard him laugh from the grove in the garden. We can\u2019t go there anymore, but\nthen again maybe it was from the forest beyond. I\u2019m afraid of that place.\nAnyway, I saw the snake again the next day, I know, I should\u2019ve known there was\nsomething wrong with a talking snake\u2014but then don\u2019t you know, I had no idea\nwhat wrong was? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I still know where there are flowers by a\nquiet pool. Perhaps I could go there and come back? If I leave him it will be\ndangerous. Perhaps tomorrow I\u2019ll go there for a short while and then come back.\nOh, my heart breaks when he screams in the middle of the night!\u201d
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2014 … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-qc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1624"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1627,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1624\/revisions\/1627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}