The Real Rapunzel
July 25, 2006
By Cynthia Morgan
Copyright 2006 on this one. All rights reserved.
Mama traded me for a handful of greens.
Daddy fixed her a salad, and Auntie Rue took me away. Auntie Rue said she took me because of the greens. A lady who put greens ahead of her baby, she sniffed, didn’t deserve one.
But really, it was my long red hair. It grew faster than kudzu; the day after my birth it reached from my cradle five feet to the floor.
And Auntie saw a goldmine.
Webistry evolving
July 25, 2006
The thing about the Web is it evolves. Every time I hear a colleague say, “well, I’m still trying to finish the (content, design, IA, whatever) so I can launch it,” I pull out soapbox #143: “If you wait until it’s finished…well, you’ll be waiting a long, long time. Just get something out there. Make it perfect later.”
So, naturally, when I saw my website was getting long in the tooth about three years ago, I did exactly what I’ve told everyone else not to do: I let it get stale while I waited until I could really get in there and rebuild.
Transom Window
July 23, 2006
The Clever Woman of Santa Abuelita
July 23, 2006
By Cynthia Morgan
(Copyright 2006, All rights reserved on this one)
Of all the poor villages in the otherworld, Santa Abuelita was the poorest. Crouched in sere yellow hills, barely able to feed its hardworking peasants, Santa Abuelita could boast of little but its tiny chapel.
The chapel itself was unremarkable though lovingly tended. The villagers propped up its tilting walls, painted the red-gold doors each spring and carefully polished its one true glory: A magnificent colored glass window. The window depicted a beautiful, luminous Virgin Mary, fast asleep. It was so arresting that many thought it could actually grant the deepest wish of the heart…if only one could pray hard enough to awaken the sleeping Virgin.
At last! A blog of my own!
July 23, 2006
So, about three months ago I decided to implode the blogosphere a bit; instead of using blogspot I’d put a blog on my own site.
Famous last words.
Never mind that my own website, morganica.com, hadn’t really been updated in two years (hey–when you do this stuff for a living the one thing you never have time for is your own site, right?)
The lipstick
July 23, 2006
The lawyer wears her hair as some wear mink, a black pelt cascading down her back. It covers the small scar on her forehead, memento of the only time her mother ever struck her. She told me that the blow plunged her into shocked silence; protection, she now knew, from the hungry soldiers who’d come that night for her sister.
She was 12 and her parents’ money was gone to grease a headlong flight from Manila and the Marcos regime. But Papa had made a fatal mistake: he’d trusted others to pay off the watchers at the border. One bribe from freedom, they were trapped. The commander had come with a solution: He’d long admired the older daughter. If she stayed behind with him, he’d look the other way while the family escaped.
The alternative? Probable death in a stinking camp.