Written August 7, 2020 Day One The darkness sat heavy upon them like the bulk of a gargantuan beast. It was a particularly humid evening, which only made the oppressiveness worse. Light from the candles situated in various places around their living room cast distorted shadows on the walls and their somber expressions. It could have been a painting. Or at least the younger boy thought so as his eyes moved across the faces of his family—his mother, Carrol; his…
Written August 3, 2020 There is no question that the rose is the most dangerous flower. Its petals, which make silk seem fibrous and coarse, spiral outward from the delicate center in a hypnotic pattern. The depth of their color makes one lost in admiration until the pressure becomes too much to bear. They reach out in desperation only to look down at their hand and see that familiar intense crimson spilling from their palm. The next time they see…
Written July 22, 2020 Norton watched bubbles rise up in streams through the amber liquid sitting before him on the counter. The entire bar seemed to have this slowness, this viscosity. It did not only serve beer. It was drenched in beer. Honeyed light filled every corner of the stuffy room. There was always a vague haze that lensed one’s eyes like smoke, but no one could determine exactly where it came from. People spoke in low tones, their faces…
Written June 15, 2020 Nothing and everything changed there, where the wind lamented in whispering melodies isolated and harmonizing in the canyon’s jagged corridors. The desert was expansive—pockmarked here and there by dusty shrubs resembling stationary tumbleweeds. There was a tree on the edge of the canyon. Its bare branches were stiff and brittle, the thin bark slowly being sloughed away into the rapids below by the stinging wind. Spindly roots gripped weakly at the sand, which slid between or…
Written May 2, 2020 Jack Gould yielded to time and space. That was all he could do. Allow himself to be absorbed into insignificance, irrelevance, a void of meaninglessness. He stared at his thumbs. There was nothing spectacular about them. They were attached to his hands, which were intertwined and resting on the table at which he sat, the heat and clamminess creating a thin film of condensation on the cold surface. Why he stared at his thumbs, he did…
Written March 12, 2020 Ivan ran his fingers over the scraped varnish of the wooden bench. There were two sentences carved in small, clumsy capital letters in two different handwritings. One was a question, and the other an answer. “What are you most afraid of?” “Living.” The former was a strange inquiry for someone to have in their minds for a number of reasons. For one thing, it could not be responded to directly by another person. Additionally, the cause…
Written January 1, 2020 The air was filled with sterile fluorescent lighting, the smell of hamburgers, and the incoherent murmur of people going about their lives. Each of them were in their own little universe, unaware of the eternal connections they had with each other. At times, James could catch fragments of conversations as they walked by. “Honey, I told you that I turned it off! Why in the world—” “I don’t know about that, Jeff. We already took a…
Written December 29, 2019 The sun and moon were in accord to be absent that day. The tides were churning aimlessly around themselves. Waves did not seem to know where to go, much like the wind that grew more intense and confused as the morning progressed. Clouds huddled close enough to each other that it became impossible to tell them apart. It was easier not to think about them being individual at all, but instead as a second layer of…
Written August 23, 2019 In an instant, he was reborn. Clank. Voices. Or at least he could only guess that was what voices sounded like. He used his nose as his eyes. His lids were too heavy to unglue. The air burned. It was full of chemicals that gave him a sour taste in his mouth. Or maybe the taste was part of being reborn. Swish. Was that the sound of water? He smiled. He heard. Yes, he was indeed…
Written January 26, 2019 And so there it was that the gates of life gaped open before her. The chair Eva sat on was cold and hard. Her long, thin fingers were clasped in a clammy wad on her lap. She stared into the distance. There was a woman next to her with wispy blond hair that she seemed to perpetually run her fingers through. The hand in which she held the play script was quivering uncontrollably. Eva felt she…