halloween

the method 

unconventional

practiced 

relentlessly within

a wave of sound

from dusk to dawn

a chorus of frogs

water.fire.earth.air

the eye of a

full moon

#katyamills

ghost. tower bridge

Minutes before midnight we were passing through letters and numbers of roads. The harvest had grown thin with the moon, and the night was lit in pockets by neon-spelled vacancies between empty lots and service stations on the main thoroughfare. The fires of hell had been subdued by the fighters, and left a tinge of smoke to permeate the valley air. I hugged my sweatshirt close and listened to the engine of the truck as you brought her to speed. The tower bridge was in sight now, outlined by spotlights facing up to the sky. The river swirled quiet below in the dark, turning and churning and yearning for sea. We could not help but seeing a figure, taller than life and draped in unknown layers of cloth, standing in the middle of the street at the entrance to the bridge.  I looked at you and you looked at me. A chill came across our engines, as we thundered on by in the lowest of gears. The figure stood perfectly still. I tried to see who it might be and found myself looking into a void with no face and no name, and no resonance of life, none whatsoever! We both knew instinctively after passing, not to look back. I looked down at the body of water and saw some reflections of light in the water. The bridge underneath spoke out against the weight of us...thus had we crossed over.

ghost story

i had gone to the back of the room and left them telling their stories one by one with seldom an interruption. the voices gave warmth to a cool autumn morning while the delta breeze slid soundlessly across the train tracks and the torn upholstery of abandoned cars to the branches of the trees tapping on the glass all around us to get in.

i poured myself a mug of hot coffee and stirred in a bit of sugar, standing there with my back to them, listening half-heartedly and somewhere between consciousness and last night's dream.

after a few hearty slugs of the black stuff my eyes woke up first and stared into a congregation of uneven framed black and white portraits from times before now. century old tired and long faces looked back at me and over my shoulder as if they were part of our gathering in this old meeting
hall, a former nondescript bar once with billiards for the truck drivers and laborers in the yards.

i felt a chill carry over the nape of my neck as i realized i had become some medium some conduit between my audience hung by nails alongside coffee mugs on the wall, and the living boisterous
true fellowship behind us. i stood perfectly still then

turned to see the speaker at the head of the table, an older gentleman with a way about him and expressions i would not forget to remember him by. as i turned slowly back my eyes getting larger to see, alighted on an old rusted peg, the visage of the living man! he was silent yearning to be free, framed right there before me... and in small white numerals in the corner of the photograph... i read in disbelief the year! it was 1923.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

To my beloved friends and fans, I want to wish you all a Happy Halloween
from the daughter of darkness...

'Roses' by Katya Mills, 2010

I took this photo in the Morcom Amphitheatre of Roses, in Oakland, where i found sanctuary from the downward spiral of my life. The years 2010-2012. Life was crazy, wild, I was experiencing a shutdown that was necessary for my re-emergence, I guess. Anyway... I believe I may use this photograph for the cover of my short story on Amazon, Everlee & Lee. I plan to change both name and cover in the coming weeks.

shadow of a ghost town

A stranger was not necessarily what the townsfolk wanted or needed, in the shadow of a ghost town. But he was welcome just the same... this man who considered himself a cowboy, for he had roped a little spirit back in the day. Held it close to him for a hot second, got to know it real good, then quickly gave it away. And kept giving it away, because giving felt right. And so he lived large in generosity, in a small part of the world. Until one day he felt a calling, and listened to it carefully. The calling was legit, he decided. So he answered. Rode out away from home, and came into a long abandoned little part of the world, way off the beaten path. Outside a rural area. Off the grid, for sure. In the shadow of a ghost town.

A gentle influence of the very nearly unplanned, played into a general vague spontaneity of the townsfolk there. If you called it a town. There would be times of half-hearted devotion toward some undefined occupation there. There was little to no preoccupation with anything. The children raised themselves. The women worked the same as men, and neither very hard or long. Mother nature was the closest thing to God. And the men all had a proclivity towards horseshoes. A pasttime which neither legend nor fact attributes them, though they doubtless invented it. After the last horse took fright and upended its last rider, and galloped free and out from under this shadow of a ghost town. No other town known to man, ever had reason to make a game out of shoes of horses, what with the abundance of horses wherever their was an abundance of man. Each of which required not one but four shoes running.

Well, one of these recently made useless arches of iron, had just lodged an impression into the soft dirt of a pit, throwing up a piece of dust into the air, when this cowboy of the spirit came riding up on them out of nowhere, there. He said nothing other than that he had a calling, and answered it, to account for his coming. They welcomed the stranger, though they would have seen him going just as fast as he came. But no one became preoccupied with that sort of monkey business. Seeing a man going, that is.

And in return, over time, the townsfolk got all the seeing and knowing, caring and showing, guiding and allowing, they could possibly want out of a spirited (or unspirited, for that matter) man. In fact, they weren't sure they wanted all that, at all. But the stranger was welcome, just the same.

All that happened was witnessed by none other than the unmapped trickle of a river that kept this unknown place alive, in an otherwise lifeless area. Which the wild children tapped with buckets every day, carrying them back to their mothers and fathers, so as to be helpful in some way that went mostly unrecognized. Which was fine by them, anyway. They would not have known what to do with good old recognition most of the world around them had become dependent upon. Like the river, they went humbly on their way.

Then this stranger among them all in the shadow of a ghost town, started to act kinda strange. He started talking to himself (which was not uncommon, in fact they knew him to do it every day) about something he called trust. He would be looking at them talking, but talking to himself. They might look at him, too, but with a blank look. For what other kinda look was he looking for? And wherefore?

These were questions they did not ask themselves.  But they were not oblivious to the man's peculiar way of affect. Sometimes he began crying spontaneously and hysterically so. Sometimes he shook out the ancestral hardly-containable anger that rose up in his bones. Times he was hopping about, jumping and hollering, full of sand and lust. The children, they caught him in their arms when he was drained. They really just happened to be there. They gave him a great and vacant stare, when he showered them with praise. They had other matters at hand. Survival, for instance. Survival somehow trumped any kind of unasked for validation. Somehow. That's not to say validation wasn't welcome.

Over time (many years in fact, but no one was counting), the stranger became a familiar sort of stranger to the inhabitants of this unincorporated, practically uninhabitable land, in the shadow of a ghost town. He finally quieted down, both verbally and in affect, and that little spirit he once had roped and given away, came back to fill him up. He never knew it to be gone, honestly. Not until he really listened with the children, who had accepted him silently into their tribe, to the whispers of the refrain echoing off the hills and highs and lows, to thrills and cathartic expression, always back home on the backs of the four winds.

the end