The church’s bells clanged in the winter air, a flock of sleeping pidgeons roused from their afternoon sleep by the toll of the hour. Rick looked toward the silhouettes of the departing flock and for a moment forgot all about Kathy and her temper. Those birds were free, small hearts rapidly thrumming in time with […]
Read MoreWhen Dawn looked at Matthais, he wouldn’t return her stare. Instead he watched the waves lose small battles against the rocky shore. Like her, the ocean would win someday, but today she was broken; cresting too early and her arguments sliding off Matthais like delicate sea foam. He didn’t want to hear about Martin, named […]
Read MoreAwake. Moonlight assaults and cold, so cold and shaking. Maybe from the air. Maybe from the sin of still caring. Carried there to here on the creaking stretcher of consciousness and delivered, sweating, breathing fast into now; horrific now, the creeping, inky unfathomable space of drowning above the surface. Hands pull, never tearing, but crushing […]
Read MoreThe feeling of slipping away wasn’t without its charms. Kevin didn’t care for the path he’d taken to now. He felt the forks he’d decided upon were the easy turns of a lazy fool guided less by his mind than by his heart. As if that throbbing tornado at the center of his chest could […]
Read MoreCarolann typically didn’t run hot like this, but Brad was drunk and she was too, so the rush of her anger came on like a train on fire after a steady build all evening. She’d listened to him talk about their love life jokingly to their friends all during their annual Cinco de Mayo excursion, […]
Read MoreCheap filth and the traded asphalt guilt of another daft claim, a swung loose spill of avarice masquerading as virtue. Deep lying. Somewhere there’s a phantom keeping track, long fingers pinching a piece of brittle bone and marking slates with each unkindness, those blistering infernos famished and taunted like starved dogs chained inches from a […]
Read MoreThere it was again. Another dusk. Gabriel was tired of beauty and miracles. He would drive by the marsh each day as the sky faded, a long nine-to-five behind him and the belt and button of his tight slacks undone for the ride home. Clouds would bloom and sway like dancers at a Renoir patio […]
Read MoreCeleste looked across the field of yellow and felt a kinship to each sunflower’s struggle for the sky. They wanted to live, she knew. And they wanted to be different. Like she did. She’d brought the gun with her and it weighed heavy in the left pocket of her blue windbreaker. The season had started […]
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