Bel Beeson
Bio
I decided to be a librarian because I'd be surrounded by books and stories. This was one of my greatest ideas.
Stories (5)
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No Miracle Comes in Twos
“Identical Twins!” the doctor cried at the inky black-white sonograph. We all sighed through deep belly-waters. I hope she remembers, even after the foot-long scar above her hips, exchanged bite-marks on the extremities of her babies, the endless combat of teenagers, the double-tuitions, and a tummy-tuck 20 years later, was there was a moment that she called it a miracle? Did she think all the pressure would make us gems? It’s 35 years later. No phone calls, only voicemails saved. We talk about how we hope she imagines we are versions of her, made into perfect form from her sacrifice.
By Bel Beeson3 years ago in Fiction
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis
The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. March would disappear onto the freeway to the cabin she and her twin sister owned, but hadn’t been to in years, in order to really get away that night. During her shift at the hospital that day, she had texted Joey that the morning had been “unfathomable.” For Joey, at the other end of the message, there was something about the language, the brevity, and the timing of this message that seemed peculiar.
By Bel Beeson4 years ago in Fiction
Loud and Quiet at the Same Time
Shelving library books, and blending color into forms with acrylics can’t productively exist at the same time, but for me, they feed each other and allow me to recover from what each one conjures into being. They take turns passing the baton back and forth, in order to keep me in peaceful, buoyant motion as I travel through the sometimes insipid interim world to get from one to the other. I spend my days as a librarian and my nights as a painter. At night, I mix acrylics together in wild combinations to see what they might have to say as they emerge from paint layers and water. In the morning, I am lassoed away from the haze of the previous night’s creative venture, and away from my tangled bedsheets, into a library where its order is the life source of its function. The erratic waves of letting my mind fly through color is resolved as I walk into a world of structure. I find it funny that I was one of the messiest kids in the world, and I decided to become a professional organizer.
By Bel Beeson4 years ago in Journal
The Last Time I Checked
My name is Forest and I live between sidewalks, on a corner, in a city that I shouldn’t disclose. But it could be any city in the country. There is one of me everywhere you go. You’ve probably learned tricks to avert your eyes and keep your attention ahead. I used to be like that too. But now I’m just the man on the corner, amongst lipstick red and McDonalds yellow fast food wrappers and silver studded trash. I don’t do tricks like the chrome-colored San Francisco bush man, nor am I a spectacle like the New York man with waterfall dreadlocks. I’m easy to miss, but I do hold a secret.
By Bel Beeson4 years ago in Fiction
The Cats are from the Future
The cats used mornings to cuddle our crescent-moon Plutonian frames, and to hide small gifts beneath our cerulean sheets from their midnight hunts. I once found a dismembered Barbie head under my knee that had a face covered in crayon-spread rainbow with four uneven pigtails sticking out of its head in mini, neon rubber bands. We also found bottle caps from kombucha, glittery green plastic streamers from a child’s bicycle, and as the days got further away from the final protest–rocks. Before we let them go back outside, the cats brought us balls of lint, ruffled paper, coffee filters, and pieces of the carpet.
By Bel Beeson5 years ago in Fiction
