It’s somewhere between dusk and dawn at the Light House, and every poet in the building is completely drunk.
short story
She understood, with a clarity thick as mourning, that she had been ruined. Her mouth had learned a new grammar, permanently etched onto the bone-bellies of her teeth.
It is a most peculiar feeling, being treated as an apparition when I am most apparently alive & well.
Maybe he just liked having things. But things aren’t enough, you need people too.
All they’re missing is the eyes. Eyes that remind us that we exist because the people around us tell us that we do.
When Eve was small, it seemed magical how her mother could repair nearly anything. But now, the magic had hardened into clutter.
She begs for purity. A blank slate. An escape she knows will never bless her.
I woke with sand jammed into my gills and salt drying tight across my scales. The tide had retreated like a coward.
She knows now, there is too much within her, two tongues between her teeth and a universe inside her throat.
I saw this person’s body materializing in their junk. I saw their heart, their brain, their hands, their fingers. Their eyes squeezed my chest while turning my stomach into my mouth through their gaze.
I dreamed I was back in the hall, the eyes of The Institutional Man following me everywhere I went. I begin to run, fear jolting me forward on trembling limbs. He knows! He’s found me out!
Panic rises up in Lilia’s chest, and she feels her eyes helplessly begin to burn. There’s an end coming— she can feel it in the quiet summer heat. The evening is holding its breath.
I know the look of men who believe they’ve caught something wild, and I am good at what I do.
Life in the forest was splintered into threes: men, women, and bears. It was how it had been for eternity, how it would continue to be. They were all the same anyways — they lived with the same eyes, same ears, same noses, same overwhelming bloodlust.
You could only look at her. The harpy was pretty when she allowed you to do so.
By summer, they would bear heavy fruit. Red, ripe, and gleaming like truth finally unearthed. The neighbors would marvel and say the soil here must be special.
Sometimes you feel that love is the kind of thing you have to get good at.
I began to wonder if I had been relegated to live in complete and utter isolation from any and all genuine connection.