Jenny Knipfer–Author

I haven’t written in over a month, except for social posts and my blog. I took a much needed break, but the weird thing was that the longer the break stretched out, the more getting back in the writing saddle seemed too exhausting. This in a life where simply taking care of myself tires me out.

But yet that voice… it speaks again. Last night I wrote the opening to my second fairy tale, The Wildest Rose, my retelling of Sleeping Beauty. I‘m not sure if I will ever finish or publish this one—the way my health is going—but here’s hoping.

EXCERPT

1473 Evermoor
Rhea

In my dreams I see him, his hand held out, palm up with a rose thorn protruding from his index finger like a freakish fingernail. Though I want to, I cannot resist moving towards him. He is the moon, and I am the tides. My dark wavy hair flutters behind me in the air, as graceful as fish fins in water, and tickles my neck with each step forward.

His eyes, the color of walnut dye, are not unkind but bore into mine until I look away and fix them on the thorn again—the foretold means of my death. Sweat beads on my lip as my hand reaches towards his extended one, my fingertip only inches away from the thorn. I try to pull back, but my arm is immovable. Fated, like me.

It was foretold that I’d die today, on my twenty-first birthday. I’ve heard whisperings of it from the lips of my three aunts when they hadn’t thought I was listening, but never was there a man in this fortelling. Where has he come from? And where will he take me? Into the light or into the shadow?

He speaks, and my ears strain to hear his words, “Do not be afraid.”

But I am petrified.

My eyes shift to the thorn again. Where has it come from? All the rose bushes in Evermoor have been burned. Cut asunder. Forbidden and utterly outlawed. I have never even seen a rose other than depicted in works of art, carvings, or an illuminated text. I have imagined them, of course, and Aunt Tansy has spun me a story or two about them, despite Aunt Bella and Aunt Iris’s protests.

I sense the prick of the tip of the thorn is imminent. A cry of protest rises in my throat, but it does not come forth. My voice is trapped. Caged. Suddenly, pain bursts through my finger, and with it I succeed in screaming. Then my eyes flash open, and it takes me some seconds before I realize I am in my bed in the loft room of the cabin in the woods I share with my aunts and am still alive, for the present, at least.

Thank The Light!

The hammering of my heart becomes slower, and I roll on my side, taking in the red blush of dawn through the leaded glass windowpane.

Does the color of the sky signal my death as much as the dream I’ve just had? I hope not. I am not ready to die, but then I suppose no one is…

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading the start to my next story. Please pray for me as I continue.
Blessings, J