Story is marked as mature

Across a cultivated green, you can find him shambling and swaying like a drunken dotard,

surrounded by an air of wounded viciousness that a life of money had only exacerbated. Vacant eyed, he wanders confused, muttering in rambling, incoherent phrases tha…

I checked the hurt on my tongue. It was hard not to respond in kind, a struggle to not spit red-hot knives aiming for the open wound on her heart.

No.

I wouldn't do that. She's hurting enough already. Even through the internet I could feel it bleeding o…

Our words are fragile incomplete things. Stuttering, their half-shapes try to convey ideas. They fall short, as short as the silhouette of a chair falls short of being the chair itself. Even if that shadow is crisp hard edges from perfect lighting it can …

My dad has aged a lot in the past few years. It was probably as gradual as the rest of us but I'm noticing it more now. His walk has become more of a shuffle but he's strong enough or perhaps willful enough that he doesn't want any help. That's fine. It w…

I hate being a slave to my feelings. I don't know how not to feel something. Shit, feeling something on command isn't something I can do either.

Try not being angry

Try not to be sad.

Stop being depressed.

Don't like her.

Don't feel bad for him, h…

I feel like I'm trapped inside a box. It might be a coffin. The air is oppressively stuffy and it's impossible to move so I can't tell where the walls are. I appear to be laying on fabric warmed by my own body.

It occurs to me that I should be breathing.…

I'm a monster. Born of rage, that primordial scream from birth hovers at the edge of my consciousness and beats against my vision like wind-blown torrents of rain against a windshield. Some days it's all I can do to keep lips that peel away from my teeth …

Parents are experts at passive aggressive behavior. Take my job, for example. I deal with students.

One such parent is actually a grandparent. The grandmother does not approve of who the mother is dating, so she refuses to babysit the student, nor the st…

The second dream vanishes from memory the instant I wake up and stays gone for five hours. When it comes flooding back without warning, I lose all sense of place, trapped in the realization that I have dreamed about my ex again for the second time this we…

Messenger dings again, the three inside the bubble becoming a four.

She wants to talk and still I don't want to bother her. Because I love her and I know she doesn't love me. She's reaching out for the first time in years. I don't want to fail her but wh…

Yesterday I somewhat rashly read a typo as an intentionally significant respelling, a dropped letter suggesting an element missing in the story, conspicuous in its absence. I am sorry that I misunderstood, but I'm grateful because that would be an interes…