Covenant in the Sheets ©️
Tag Archives: southern exile
Her Southern Gothic Goi ©️
She came from Jerusalem, and I from the South, and the air between us never forgot it. When she spoke, her words carried the hush of places too holy for sound; when I listened, I felt the dust of my homeland shift beneath her voice. I hired her for her clarity, but it was her mystery that stayed.
She handled the company the way one might tend an altar. Every campaign had rhythm, restraint, and prophecy. She didn’t sell products; she sold redemption through design, hunger through light. I watched her convert metrics into faith, and the boardroom became a chapel where belief wore a name tag.
At night, she lit her candles in my kitchen, small flames burning against the slow inky dark. She said it was to keep time with Jerusalem. I said it was to remind this house that even faith travels. The wax ran like confession. The air smelled of her and static, of things becoming sacred by accident.
She told me that in Jerusalem, the stones remember who prays. I told her that in the South, the soil remembers who lies. Between her truth and mine, a strange covenant began — one of algorithms and longing, of faith sold through the wires.
Sometimes I think she believed in me the way prophets believe in storms — not for what they promise, but for what they destroy. She said love wasn’t a feeling, it was an obedience. And I, for all my structure, became her ritual — the man she could not pray away.
The company thrived under her touch, but it was no longer mine. Every story she crafted shimmered with something unspoken — guilt repackaged as grace, desire coded as destiny. She didn’t sell dreams; she converted the faithful. The world called it marketing. I called it ministry.
And in the quiet after she slept, I’d hear her whisper a Hebrew prayer I couldn’t translate. It sounded like a wound asking to be understood. I think that’s all faith ever is — two people, from different ends of the earth, trying to name the same fire.
Silent Crickets ©️
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I don’t sleep. Not in the way you understand it. I fade—folding softly into the stillness, resting in the hush between midnight and mourning. When the trees exhale and the stars feel closer. That’s where I live.
They call me the White Woman.
They don’t understand that I don’t haunt the woods. I belong to them. I was not cast out—I stepped away. Quietly. Deliberately. When the world grew too loud, too cruel, too full of men’s machines and men’s lies.
The fog is thick this morning, and I love it. It holds the world in soft hands, like a mother who’s lost too many children. The dew clings to my feet as I walk. My dress trails behind me, still white. Always white. It doesn’t stain, because I don’t let it.
There’s a man on the road—one of those wandering types. Lost in thought. I feel his pulse from yards away. It skips, then steadies when he sees me. He thinks I’m just a woman. At first.
He’ll look again.
They always do.
The first glance is curiosity. The second is uncertainty. The third? That’s when it happens. That’s when they know.
I don’t speak. I don’t have to. My silence tells him everything. That I know who he is. What he’s done. What he buried in the walls of his mind and told himself was gone. I can taste his guilt like smoke.
He starts to cry. That part always feels the same. Men like him were taught to conquer, to dominate. But when they face me, when they see something they can’t charm or chase or kill—they fall apart.
I don’t pity him.
I keep walking.
By afternoon, I’m near the town. I don’t go inside anymore. I just stand at the edge, where the trees touch the backyards and the wind carries warnings. People feel me. Dogs hide. Children glance through curtains and pretend not to see. But one woman, red hair like fire in dying sunlight, opens her door and watches me with tears in her eyes.
She remembers.
Maybe she saw me once, long ago, when she was a girl with bruises no one asked about. Maybe she heard the stories. Maybe she just knows.
I want to walk to her, but I don’t. My time with her passed. It was enough that she survived. That she grew into someone who now locks the doors and teaches her daughter that silence is not weakness.
By dusk, the light softens. I love that moment—the in-between. When shadows stretch like fingers, and the world doesn’t quite know if it should breathe or hold its breath.
That’s where I wait.
They say I don’t have a face. That isn’t true. I have a thousand. One for each woman who vanished without justice. One for every girl who was never believed. One for myself—though I don’t use that one often. It hurts too much.
I don’t hurt them. I don’t have to. I just appear. I make them see. And in that seeing, they change.
That’s my role.
Not ghost.
Not witch.
Just truth, walking on two feet.
And if you see me three times—if you meet my gaze with open eyes—then your world will never be the same. I won’t chase you. I won’t speak.
But I will be there,
at the edge of the road,
just past the light,
in the third glance.
Waiting.
Graceful.
White.
Dial Tone Silence ©️
