After Selling Your Soul to the Trickster God

    Sara Norja

After Selling Your Soul to the Trickster God

Tomorrow she’ll take you but on the last night
of your freedom, bury yourself in music.
Rough chords gouge your skin, your throat’s choked with song,

muscles burning, as you leap through the dance–
sweat rilling, heart stilling! You reach the apex
above the bonfire. Down you tumble, spinning

into juddering dancers. They twirl away: the god-sworn
must not be touched. You smack into unforgiving earth,
head muzzy with movement–for a moment, you forgot

the bargain that binds you.

______________

Sara Norja dreams in two languages and has a predilection for tea. Born in England and settled in Helsinki, Finland, she lives for words, dance, and moments of wonder. Her poetry has appeared in venues including Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, inkscrawl, Through the Gate and Interfictions. Her short fiction has appeared in venues such as Luna Station Quarterly and Silver Blade and is forthcoming in Fantasy Scroll Magazine, the anthology An Alphabet of Embers (ed. by Rose Lemberg), Flash Fiction Online and Strange Horizons. She blogs at http://suchwanderings.wordpress.com and can be found on Twitter as @suchwanderings.

Editor’s Notes on “After Selling Your Soul to the Trickster God”: “Old Wine” segues nicely into “After Selling Your Soul to the Trickster God” with it’s own demonic deception. The supporting image is of the Beltane Fire Festival dancers at Calton Hill, Edinburgh, Scotland (photographer Stefan Schäfer, 2012). The modern Beltane Fire Festival is inspired by the ancient Gaelic festival of Beltane, which marks the beginning of summer.