Where I'm From

After George Ella Lyon
by, Samantha Butterfield

I am from gardening tools,

from dirt and gorgeous flowers.

I am from the swing set,

on which I played as a small child.

      I am from the morning glories

the cherry blossom tree whose pink,

radiant glory was extinguished as

though only a nuisance.

I’m from anime posters and video games,

                  from Nanny and Aunt Lisa watching over me

while Mom is at work.

I’m from the lost loved ones

                  and old ghosts,

from Hold your horses! and Fix your plate!

I’m from Hail Marys at bedtime

                  with my favorite toy held close

                  and frequent mistakes in uttering the all-important prayer.

I’m from Nanny’s Portuguese spaghetti and Italian cookies,

                  foods I can look forward to any day of the week

                  that always taste just as amazing as the last time they were made.

I’m from the laughter and goodies on Christmas Eve each year

                  and the salty, bitter tears shed after my first break-up.

                  I cherish them all… all of those childhood memories.

                  Good and bad.

A set of brick walls and a roof never meant so much to me

                  as it did in this place. Over ten years were spent here,

                  many memories were created here,

                              and it was sad

                                          to leave them behind…

What Color Is a Dream?

A field at dusk, blanketed in translucent clouds of changing color.
Blue grass sparkles with dew,
Wet diamonds scattered all around.

The only sound, a slight rustling;
Invisible beings pass through me,
Weightless and soft
Like the feathers of birds.

Instantly, I am overwhelmed by a sense of calm; peace.
I vaguely recall my corporeal world,
Dull and murky as a great, black swamp, and think:
"This is my sanctuary. Here, I am free."

Best Friends

            It was like any other Friday night. My friend Maggie and I were having a sleepover at her house, talking about things that happened at school that week and giggling while eating movie-butter popcorn. After a while, we came to an agreement that we would play a short game of Apples to Apples before bed and she rummaged under her bed, trying to find the box.

            A confused look crossed her face and she pulled something out from under the bed, but it wasn’t Apples to Apples: it was a Barbie car. We looked at each other and smiled, a shared memory passing between us. I remembered when Maggie first got that Barbie car. We were both eight years old at the time, and I thought it was the coolest toy in the world. Since it was a new toy, she wouldn’t let me play with it, and we got into a fight. She yanked my hair; I scratched her; I’m pretty sure she actually bit me at one point. A few minutes later, he mother walked in and demanded that we stop, telling Maggie that we needed to take turns with the new Barbie car. We both grudgingly agreed, but after half an hour of taking turns with the toy, it was as though the argument never happened.

            Because of this Barbie car, our friendship had grown stronger and our ability to work past petty arguments increased. Maggie smiled and slid the Barbie car right back under her bed, and I knew at that moment that it was one toy she would never, ever get rid of. It represented the lasting friendship between us, and that was something neither of us was willing to sacrifice.

Ink Blot Flash Fiction

      Many have said they do not exist.  The doctors at this dreadful hospital are, by far, the worst.  They think I’m crazy.  They peddle me medicine every six hours and talk to me like I am a child who does not know what to do with himself.  One day, they will see; I will show them all.

      I know what I saw that final night in the Alps I can remember, hiking through the mountains on my own.  I had sworn to my friends I would not take the trip alone, but I betrayed their trust.  I suppose I have always been a stubborn fool, ever since I was a child.  I inherited that stubbornness from my father, mostly.  He, too, would commit to things that my mother always told him were bad ideas and he should let them go before he got himself hurt.

      His stubbornness is the reason he is no longer with us.

      I hike through the mountains all day, seldom resting and doing everything in my power to get to where I need to be.  At night, I would pitch my tent and stop for the evening, knowing how much more dangerous the mountains get after nightfall. “It is almost like they acquire a mind of their own once the sun goes down,” an old sheepherder told me on the way here.  It was something I would keep in mind for the entire trek.

      Well… most of it.

      Four days into my hike, I ran out of food.  I thought back to when I was packing my rucksack full of supplies, and with horror, I realized that I had taken some of the food out to make room for some other things I believed I would need.  At the time, I hadn’t thought this would be a potentially-fatal mistake.  Perhaps I’d had a stupid notion that this trip would only take a couple of days and I would somehow be out of the mountains in that amount of time.  An ideal situation, but an impossible one.

      I contemplate turning back; climbing higher and frantically waving my arms around for a rescue pick-up; trying my hand at hunting something myself.  The idea of hunting was quickly extinguished.  I had only a pocket-knife on my person, incapable of killing anything larger than a rabbit… and I had scarcely seen any rabbits on my trek.  I would not be fast enough to catch one and kill it, anyway. 

      By the fourth night, I am panicked.  Will I die here?  Will anyone ever find my frozen corpse?  These questions are constantly racing through my head, providing a buzzing background noise louder than the falling snow.  As I am setting up my tent for the night, a huge gust of wind takes it and blows it over the edge, nearly taking me with it as I stumble and fall.  I barely escape falling off the ledge; my heart is racing. 

      Distraught and scared, I decide to just keep walking.  Perhaps I will get lucky and find a cave that can provide some shelter for me until morning.  If I needed to spend the whole night out in the blizzard, I knew I wouldn’t survive until morning.  I would bet my life on it.

      Just when I was beginning to lose all hope of finding some type of shelter, I stumbled upon one—quite literally—by accident.  He had slipped on some ice and tumbled down the rocks, crying out with each impact of my body against the hard surface.  My whole life flashes before me, and then I finally stop rolling.  There, right in front of me, is the mouth of a large cave.  It looks empty, so I hurry in, wincing with each movement of my body.  I am certain I have broken one of my arms, and definitely a few of my ribs.

      I pull out a flashlight and turn it on, relieved that it still works, and make my way deeper into the cavern.  As I go deeper, I start to see more signs that something may have been living here: the skeletal remains of animals, and even a few remains of humans.  It makes me nervous.  Will I die in here just like all the rest? 

      I hear something: a growl, and I can tell it belongs to something big.  I stop walking when I see movement in front of my flashlight beam, my heart racing with fear as I see what it is.  It is larger than any animal I have ever seen, covered in sparkling, white scales that shine silver in the light.  Its long neck, like a snake, rises up off the ground from where it was resting and it turns its head toward me.  Those eyes seem to look right through me, blue and catlike and seeming to glow.  It bears is teeth, as long as swords and white as the purest ivory.  Framing that face that seems like a mix between a dog and some reptile are frills, which expand in warning when I make the slightest movement.  I see a ridge of black spikes lining the length of the beast’s back, starting at its head and going all the way down to the tip of its tail.  The large body shifts toward me, and I notice that it only has a pair of hind legs, a long, black talon attached to each toe.  Its front limbs are something else: wings.  Large, leathery wings.

      It is a dragon.  I scream, but it doesn’t attack me.  It just roars, shaking the walls of the cave and effectively sending me running out of the cave.

      After that, I black out, and the next thing I remember is lying in a hospital bed with doctors tending to me, giving me painkillers for my broken ribs and asking me what happened in the mountains.  I tell them repeatedly of the dragon, but they don’t believe me.

      The cave was searched later, I learned… and no one finds anything; not even old bones.

Introductory Acrostic

Sloppy, thrown-together, casual, comfortable. That is how I see myself.

Average, adorable, approachable. That is how my friends see me.

Mini Me, Sam-I-Am, Samalamadingdong: all of these, affectionate pet names from family members that I have carried with me for years and years. I like

Bite-sized candy just like anyone else, but what I find truly

Unbelievable is that people bothered to make fun of me at all growing up, like I was so different than them. They would call me names, laugh at my expense... but by high school, the only thing I wanted to say was,

Tell me more. Their childish remarks always ended up making me laugh in the end, and laughter is good for the soul.

Television, novels galore, video games, stuffed animals, empty notebooks, and more fill my life to the brim.

Extra pens, eerie books, extreme disorganization... Yeah, those are around somewhere, too. I like to

Read when I have free time. The enjoyment I derive from having my nose stuck in a book is something I inherited from Mom at a very young age. It has served me well.

Forgetting to write makes me blue, because my head is full of wonderful ideas. If I don’t write them down, all they do is flutter away like butterflies on a warm, summer breeze.

I am not good at speed-reading or background-drawing, which is something I would very much like to be. I am not perfect, you see. My

Extremely long hair annoys me, my brown eyes are unremarkable, my big nose has always been a source of teasing... Yet in spite of all that, I can be happy with who I am inside. In my dreams, I have fought

Lions, leopards, and ferocious beasts, and lost... but in spite of all adversity, I will never

Depend entirely upon others to get me where I want to be.

My Creative Autobiography

Ever since I was a little girl, I have wanted to make things.  By "make," I don't mean "invent" so much as I mean "create." As a toddler, I would get silly, little images in my mind and attempt to draw them out.  Even though I was too young to recognize some things and know how to draw them, I truly believed all of my drawings were works of art.  The first drawing I remember doing was of my family: Mom, Daddy, and myself, poorly-drawn with a house much too small for the three of us, also poorly-drawn.  My mother thought it was adorable and hung it on the fridge.

Since then, I have had much better ideas for creative endeavors, of course.  The most recent I can think of was when I first came up with the idea for the novel I am currently working on.  The thing that made it so great to me was that I had never tried to write something so long and thought-out before, and I truly believed I could turn it into the best thing I'd ever written.  That was two years ago, and I'm still working on it, but all good writings take time to write and revise, so even though I don't anticipate finishing the novel any time soon, I'm looking forward to the day I do.

In contrast, I have also had some very dumb ideas.  The dumbest idea I ever had was, honestly, thinking I would be able to finish my novel in a year.  I know it is possible to finish a project that long in a year: it has been done by other people.  However, it has been done by adults who have a lot more time on their hands than a student does, so eventually, I figured out it was too big of a goal and that I should take my time getting it all written down.  It has been two years since I started it, and I am only on chapter two right now.  It is going to take quite some time to finish the whole thing.  It was an unrealistic goal to set because since I hadn't written something so long before, it was too ambitious and I felt like I was pushing myself too hard.  The idea for the novel quite literally came out of nowhere, too.  I was just sitting in driver's education class one Saturday morning, and during our ten-minute break, it just... hit me.  I wrote the basic idea for the plot down as quickly as I could to make sure I didn't lose it, of course.

My current creative ambition, other than finishing the novel at some point, is to get a few short stories published somewhere, either in a magazine or online.  I have already had one of my horror short stories published on the website for TeenInk magazine, but I would like to get a few more published, too, if I can.  The only obstacles I can see myself running into when it comes to getting stories published in any sort of book are cost, time, and my own ability to write something that is worth reading to different audiences.  The vital steps to accomplishing my goal are to plot ideas for any stories I write very carefully and make sure the writing is fluid enough and makes enough sense to catch a prospective agent's attention over all other stories that get submitted to them by other writers.

In regards to my everyday life, I start my day just like a lot of college students: I wake up when my alarm starts ringing, resist the urge to throw the clock out the window and keep sleeping, quite literally roll out of my bed, get dressed, grab some toast for breakfast, and head to school.  I don't hate school; I really don't.  It's just hard to motivate me to leave my nice, warm bed on cold, winter mornings on most days.  As for habits, well... I don't really have many.  The ones I do have are boring and mundane, such as playing with my hair and bouncing my knee up and down when I have nothing better to do.  Like anyone else, I also have different attitudes toward certain things.  For example, in regard to money, I like it and wish I had more of it.  Power: I could do without it.  Praise: I love it and strive for as much as I can get.  Rivals: they motivate me to do better than they can.  Work: it annoys me, but unfortunately, it is a necessity.  And, finally, in regards to playtime, I wish I could have more of it and not suffer for it.

I am nineteen years old.  In that nineteen years of life that I have been blessed with, I have pursued many creative things, such as writing and drawing.  My first truly successful creative act, though, was when I painted a watercolor rose in my eleventh-grade art class and it got included in a district-wide art show.  My second successful, creative act was, of course, getting the first chapter of my novel down on paper.  The only way I can compare both feats effectively is by mentioning the sense of accomplishment that the two gave me. 

All creative people have an artist of sorts that they admire, and for me, that artist is Leonardo Da Vinci.  He is a role model for me because when he was alive, his creative pursuits went above and beyond what was acceptable or even possible during the era in which he lived, and he didn't let others' opinions of him stop him from doing what he wanted to do.  He was very ambitious, and that is something we both have in common.  The main source of regular inspiration for me, though, is my mother.  She gave birth to me, and ever since I was little, she has always supported everything (okay, almost everything) that I set my mind to, and she constantly encourages me to keep up the good work. 

The formal definition of a muse according to Dictionary.com is this: "the goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like." My muse is an author named Laurell K. Hamilton.  She has written many best-selling adult-romance novels, such as the Anita Blake series and the Merry Gentry series.  Ever since I first started reading her work, I fell in love with her writing style and how she has her characters engage in conversations with each other.  The dialogue in all of her novels is always very believable, and when I write, I try to give my characters their own voices as much as I possibly can.  That being said, my ideal creative activity is writing short stories.  I feel that my best writing comes through in short stories because I have to sum up a lot of events in fewer pages, so my descriptions tend to be better and more to-the-point.

Unfortunately, in any creative field of study, there is always a lot of competition to be the best at writing any genre, and that always means there will be someone better than myself.  I know this, yet when I know someone whose writing supersedes my own, I feel genuinely threatened and strive to get even better than they are.  It is childish, I know... but it is how I am.  Perhaps it is simply part of my personality.  Another thing about my personality--which I really can't stand about myself--is how I get irritated and moody whenever I am faced with hostility, indifference, or stupidity.  I know other people are like that, too, but it gets annoying sometimes.

As a student, I thrive off of success.  When the prospect of success arises, I get so excited I can hardly contain it.  On the other hand, if there is any possibility of failure, I panic and, sometimes, I even cry.  That has caused people to pick on me in the past, so I try not to let failure bother me so much anymore, but it is difficult.  If I ever work really hard on something only to do poorly on it in the end, it hurts.  After all, when I work, I enjoy the result more than the process it takes to get there, and if the result is awful, it means I did poorly during the process, too.  That being said, there are times when I think I can accomplish things that I simply don't have the means to do.  My reach exceeds my grasp, so to speak.  For example, if I ever get a good idea for something to draw, it looks great in my mind's eye, but when I get down to drawing it, I can never let it to look as good as it looks in my mind because I simply don't have the skill to do so yet. 

Just like every other person on this planet, there are things I am afraid of.  What I am most afraid of in this world is being alone.  My family and friends are my life, and I ever needed to get by without any of them, I don't think I would be able to take it.  I fear failure, too, which is why I always try my hardest at everything I do.  I strive to master everything I enjoy doing, whether it be art or writing, in an attempt to keep failure at bay for as long as I can.  My idea of mastery is being as perfect at something as I can possibly be, and I never aim for anything less.  I have fears, yes, but I also have dreams.  My greatest dream is publishing my novel with one of the top publishing companies in the United States and becoming a bestselling author.  This is a dream I absolutely want to come true, no matter what it takes.