Splinters – Memoirs of Madness

Things We Don’t Ask

2026/01/28Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, Fiction, love, Short Story, short-story, Splinters, writing1 Comment

I remember the smell first.
Rain coming in low and metallic, like the sky was holding a secret it didn’t trust the ground with yet. It hovered more than it fell, daring me to move too fast. I stood outside the terminal with my hands in my jacket pockets, watching the clouds bruise darker by the minute.

She was late.

Not late in the way that makes you angry—late in the way that tightens something behind the ribs. Late in the way that invites thoughts you shouldn’t entertain. The kind of waiting where every rational explanation starts to feel hysterical if you let it linger too long.

I leaned against the truck and checked the arrivals board again. Delayed. Still delayed. The Army never seemed interested in giving anything back cleanly.

I kept my eyes on the doors instead of the board. Doors don’t lie the same way screens do.

Funny thing was, I never meant to meet her at all.

A friend introduced us. Said he needed a favor. Said his girlfriend wouldn’t leave him alone about her friend. And when a guy says that, you already know—you’re about to take one for the team. Ugly or crazy. Sometimes both. With my luck, probably both.

She wasn’t.

Unless you count the fact that she joined the military at twenty-two.

Eighteen, I get. Eighteen is impulse. Twenty-two is decision. That told me more about her than anything she said that night.

The Ford sat beside me, patient as an old dog. A ’52 F-1. Steel the color of something that had survived worse weather than this. I rested my hand on the hood, grounding myself. I’d promised I wouldn’t restore it until she was home for good. I broke that promise while she was gone. Fixing things is easier than sitting with what can’t be fixed.

We spent that first night talking. Not flirting. Talking. Crappy movies we loved anyway. Music so bad it circled back around to genius. We didn’t stop until she had to leave to report for her next assignment. No dramatic goodbye. Just a look that said this isn’t over yet.

We traded letters after that. Real ones. Paper. Ink. No emails. No texts. No late-night calls. Just envelopes crossing distance like a quiet agreement. About a year ago, the phone rang and her voice was on the other end. That surprised me. I never gave her my phone number. When I asked how she got it, she laughed and said some things were easier to find than people think.

There are things we don’t ask each other.

I can never tell her what I do for a living. She can never find out. I’ve done my best keeping my world and hers separate. It’s easy, in a way—her job teaches silence. She has her secrets about work, and I let them stay where they belong. Mine just happen to follow me home.

The sliding doors hissed open behind me, releasing small crowds in uneven waves. Families. Lovers. A kid dragging a duffel almost as big as him. Every face felt like a rehearsal for something that might go wrong.

Then she stepped through.

She didn’t rush. She never does. Her eyes swept the space before her feet committed to it. The uniform sat on her shoulders like it knew her weight. She looked sharper than I remembered. Leaner. Like something had been filed down and left harder underneath.

I caught her looking before she saw me.

That moment—right there—when her eyes were still searching. Measuring. Cataloging exits. Old habits don’t turn off just because you cross a threshold.

Then she found me.

She stopped walking.

Just for half a second. Long enough that anyone else might’ve missed it. Her gaze stayed on me a beat too long. Not suspicion. Not fear. Recognition, mixed with something else. Something she didn’t have a name for yet.

I didn’t move.

We’ve learned each other that way—through stillness. Through long looks that say more than questions ever could.

She crossed the distance and set her bag down at her feet. We stood there, rain misting between us, airport noise falling away until it sounded like it was happening underwater.

She studied my face.

Not the way lovers do when they’re memorizing. The way soldiers do when they’re checking for damage.

“You okay?” she asked.

I nodded. Too quickly.

Her eyes narrowed just a fraction. Not distrust. Instinct. She leaned in, resting her forehead against mine. Close enough that I could feel her breath slow, feel the way she grounded herself before she let go.

She pulled back slightly, still holding my arms. Her gaze flicked over my shoulder to the truck, then back to my face.

“You finish the restoration,” she said.

It wasn’t a question.

I shrugged. “Kept busy.”

She watched me another second too long. Not accusing. Curious. Like she’d felt a draft but couldn’t find the open door.

Then she smiled. Small. Careful.

“I’m home,” she said.

I pulled her into me before whatever she was about to ask had a chance to form.

The rain finally made up its mind and started to fall.

Author’s Note:
My thanks to FOWC, RDP, and Word of the Day for the prompts and challenge words that helped shape Things We Don’t Ask. Sometimes constraints don’t limit a story—they reveal where the silence lives.

Show Yourself

2026/01/27Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, fantasy, Fiction, short-story, Splinters, writingLeave a comment

She doesn’t rise from the water.
That’s the lie people keep telling.

The Lady of the Lake doesn’t emerge—she waits. She waits in the way cold waits for breath, in the way memory waits behind the eyes when you think you’ve forgotten. The lake holds her the way a confession holds a mouth shut. Half-light. Half-truth. Her face stitched into the surface, her eyes nailed open by reflection.

The trees know her better than we do. They lean in, bare and patient, their branches scratching the sky like men who have run out of prayers. They’ve watched centuries of hands reach down—kings, fools, lovers, the desperate—all of them believing the water would give something back without taking a name in return.

She remembers every one of them.

Her eyes are not cruel. That’s the other mistake. Cruelty requires urgency. She has none. Time slides across her face like ripples, distorting her just enough to remind you that what you see is never the whole of it. She watches swords lowered into the dark, watches promises sink, watches men kneel at the edge of the world and swear they will be different tomorrow.

Tomorrow never shows.

The lake glows faintly where grief settles deepest—small embers of light trapped under the skin of the water, like regrets that refuse to die quietly. That glow isn’t magic. It’s memory. It’s every word spoken too late, every love returned damaged, every truth submerged because it was easier than holding it in daylight.

She doesn’t speak unless the water is still. And even then, what she offers is not instruction but reckoning. A mirror, tilted just enough to hurt. Look long enough and you’ll see what you came to lose.

A man comes to the edge at dusk, boots sinking into the soft ground, breath loud enough to offend the air. He has decided she owes him something. Proof, maybe. An answer. A miracle with edges.

“Show yourself.”

The word show hits the water first—splits, ripples, dissolves. The lake doesn’t flinch. It never has. Sound travels poorly here. Demands even worse.

He waits. Long enough for embarrassment to curdle into anger.

Her eyes do not change. They don’t widen or harden. They simply continue—holding the surface together. What he sees is not her rising, but himself multiplied: his face broken by light, his mouth warped into something smaller than it felt when it shouted.

This is the bargain he didn’t know he was making.

She does not appear because she is already present. In the reflection. In the silence that follows a voice with nothing left to say. The lake offers him exactly what he asked for—visibility—and nothing he wanted.

When he finally turns away, the water closes behind him without ceremony.

She remembers his voice.

Not because it mattered.

But because it tried to command what only listens.

Some say she guards a blade. Others say she is the blade—cold, patient, inevitable. What she really guards is the moment before surrender, when you still believe you’re choosing freely. When your hand trembles above the surface and you realize the lake has already learned your weight.

Her gaze never blinks.

Not because she is watching you.

But because she is watching what you’re about to become.

The Night Didn’t Ask

2026/01/262026/01/27Posted in SplintersTagged creative writing, daily exercise, Splinters, writingLeave a comment

The rain had already made its decision before any of them arrived.

It slicked the pavement until the streetlights broke apart in it, fractured and tired. The man sat with his back to the city, umbrella hunched like a bad habit he couldn’t quit. He wasn’t waiting for anyone. Waiting implies hope. This was something quieter—staying.

At his feet, the cats pressed together on a piece of cardboard that had once meant something else. They didn’t cry. They didn’t beg. They understood the economy of nights like this: warmth is borrowed, silence is safer. Their eyes tracked the world without asking it for favors.

The bench creaked once, then settled. The man didn’t turn around. He knew better than to look too closely at things he couldn’t fix. The rain stitched the distance between them, thread by thread, until they shared the same weather, if nothing else.

Cars passed. Windows glowed. Lives continued indoors.

No one crossed the space between umbrella and cardboard.
But for a while, no one left either.

And sometimes that’s the closest mercy the night allows.

Take Another Look

2026/01/25Posted in SplintersTagged 3TC, books, creative writing, daily exercise, fantasy, Fiction, FOWC, RDP, short-story, SocS, Splinters, Word of the day, writing6 Comments

She always waited until the coffee stopped steaming before she took the first sip. Not because it was too hot—she liked the burn—but because steam carried expectations. It rose too quickly, too eager, like the day already leaning in with questions. Once it thinned and vanished, the moment felt earned. Once it faded, the moment belonged to her.

The kitchen held a quiet that had weight to it, the kind only old rooms manage. Not emptiness—history. The faint smell of last night’s soap clung to the sink, mixing with the darker, grounding scent of coffee. Morning light filtered through the thin curtain by the window, a washed-out white that softened the edges of everything it touched. It made the room feel provisional, as if it could still change its mind.

Outside, a shutter slammed against the neighbor’s house, sharp enough to make her flinch. She wondered, briefly and without heat, why they never fixed the damn thing. She tightened her grip on the mug. The warmth settled into her palm, easing the dull ache there. She flexed her hand out of habit, careful. Memory surfaced uninvited—the crack of a breaking branch, the split second where she’d chosen to move instead of freeze. She’d gotten clear, but not clean. Some things never healed the way you expected.

Out there, the world was already awake and asking for things. In here, it hadn’t found her yet. That felt important, though she couldn’t have said why without breaking the spell.

She wrapped both hands around the mug again, feeling its weight, its edges. Some mornings she needed that reminder—that she still occupied space. That she wasn’t just a series of obligations moving from one room to the next, a shape filling time.

The table beneath her forearms was scarred in small, honest ways: a shallow nick from a dropped plate, a dark ring where a hot mug had once been set down without thinking. She’d considered sanding it smooth years ago. Never did. It felt wrong to erase proof that life had passed through here and left evidence behind.

Her hair was braided over one shoulder, more practical than pretty. The braid had started as a solution and hardened into ritual. There was a time when someone else used to reach for her hair without asking, when she’d worn it loose because she thought that was what a good wife did—made herself easy to touch, easy to claim. She knew better now. Loose ends—literal and otherwise—had proven dangerous.

Control wasn’t safety; she understood that now. But it kept the noise down. Kept her from drifting out of jive with the world in ways she couldn’t afford.

She lifted her gaze toward the window, then stopped. Something in the glass held her there. She leaned forward just enough to take another look—not at the street, not at the weather, but at the faint double of herself layered over the morning. Her reflection was incomplete, softened by light and dust.

She remembered him—the one who had once seemed to mean everything. The one she’d let define her without realizing when it happened.

Her chin rested in her palm as her attention drifted outward. Children’s laughter carried in from somewhere nearby, sharp and bright, pulling her back only for a moment.

Her father’s voice surfaced instead, steady as ever.

Never let a man define you. You are your own person.

He’d said it once while making pancakes, wrist loose, skillet hot. He’s son-in-law and the kids had been outside, noise spilling in through the open door. He hadn’t looked at her at first.

The moment you forget that, he’d added, flipping the pancake without effort, you walk away.

She’d watched him then—really watched him.

I didn’t raise a follower, he said, finally meeting her eyes, his gaze firm in that familiar, unyielding way. I raised a leader.

The pancake landed clean in the pan.

Her father had been a wizard of understatement. He’d drop a line the way other men cast spells—quiet, precise, impossible to shake once they landed. He couldn’t fix this for her. Not the way she’d wanted.

It took years to understand that he’d fixed it anyway. No grand gestures. No proclamations. Just showing up—coffee already poured, chair already pulled out—when it mattered most.

She brought the mug to her lips and took her first sip.

The coffee was strong and a little bitter, the taste blooming across her tongue before settling into something darker and steady. Honest. No disguises. It reminded her that not everything needed sweetening to be worth consuming.

Her father was gone now. The husband, too—if not in body, then in attention. The children moved through the house fast, already half-elsewhere, pausing only long enough to ask, Mom, you good?

The idea of flight lingered. Not escape. Just stepping away long enough to remember herself. To feel like something other than a function. To hear her own name without it being followed by need.

Two years, she thought. That’s all. Two years and the house would empty.

The thought made her smile—small, private.

The women from her book club—really just wine and talking in circles—always spoke about that moment. About leaving. About becoming again. None of them ever had.

She wondered, not for the first time, if she had the courage to be the one who broke the pattern.

She reached into the drawer and pulled out a notebook. On the first clean page, she wrote a single word:

Tahiti.

She smiled at it. Just long enough.

Her father’s voice surfaced again, uninvited and familiar. I’m retiring in Tahiti, he used to say, already settling back into his favorite chair. Where the women don’t wear tops.

He’d grin, eyes closed, the idea doing more work than any plan ever had.

She closed the notebook without crossing the word out and set it beside her cup.

The coffee had gone lukewarm.

She didn’t move to reheat it.

Author’s Note:
This piece was shaped in response to a series of prompts and challenges that continue to push my work into quieter, more honest territory. My thanks to FOWC, RDP, Word of the Day, 3TC, and SoCS for the sparks, constraints, and provocations that helped bring Take Another Look into focus.

Shaking Off the Rust

2026/01/23Posted in SplintersTagged blog, creative writing, daily exercise, FOWC, life, love, mental health, RDP, Splinters, Word of the day, writingLeave a comment

The morning comes in sideways, all wrong angles and cheap light, the kind that makes even clean windows look guilty. I stand at the sink with my hands braced on the porcelain, staring at a man I barely recognize. He has my face, sure—but it looks older this way, like it’s been left out in the rain too long. Rust doesn’t announce itself. It settles in. Quiet. Patient.

Most days feel like I’m banging my head against a wall—metaphorically, of course. I’m stubborn, not suicidal. Still, the effect is the same: that dull reverberation behind the eyes, the sense that motion isn’t the same thing as progress. I’m not exactly sure which direction to take each day. Left. Right. Forward. Doesn’t seem to matter much.

It’s been this way ever since she walked out my door.

I know the story I’m telling. I know the numbers. One in five men will either write a story, a poem, or tell some version of this as a cautionary tale. I’m not pretending I’ve discovered new ground. I’m just standing in it, boots sinking, trying to decide whether I’m stuck or simply paused—whether I’ve begun to exclude myself from my own future out of habit more than fear.

I know the issues I face. I can name them cleanly, like parts laid out on a workbench. Grief. Drift. Habit masquerading as survival. None of this is a mystery. Still, I wait—for somebody, anybody—to come along and open my eyes, as if they’ve been closed this whole time. As if I haven’t been watching everything dim in slow motion, pretending observation counts as progress.

I say my prayers. Not the polished ones. The kind you offer late, when the room has already decided not to answer you back. I don’t pray for forgiveness or signs. What I ask for is simpler, and somehow heavier: one thing I won’t walk away from.

Not because it’s easy. Not because it stays. But because it anchors. Because when everything else loosens—people, plans, the version of myself I thought was permanent—this one thing resists my instinct to disappear. There’s something almost fierce in that resistance, even if it looks like stillness from the outside.

Silently, I weep—not because I’m broken, but because I’m honest enough to admit the truth: I may never be ready.

Not ready in the way people mean it. Not polished. Not certain. Not absolved of doubt. The version of readiness I keep waiting for might be a myth we tell ourselves so we don’t have to act while still afraid—or something I haven’t been honest enough to recognize, let alone name.

Still, there is one compromise I won’t make. I won’t trade my integrity for momentum. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. Whether that refusal is courage or fear—or a quieter failure of honesty—I’m still learning to sit with the question instead of smoothing it over, to reclaim some small measure of agency without turning it into another performance.

If this means I move slower, so be it.
If it means I move alone, I’ve done worse.

Readiness may never arrive. Integrity may not be as clean as I want it to be. But I won’t pretend anymore that I understand the difference without paying attention.

So I grieve quietly.
I stay where I am.
And I refuse the comfort of answers that let me off too easily.

The rust isn’t gone.
But it has cracks in it now.

Author’s Note:
This piece was written in response to the creative constraints and quiet provocations of FOWC, RDP, and Word of the Day. Each offered a different kind of pressure—words to carry, boundaries to work within, and a reminder that limitation often reveals more than freedom. I’m grateful for the nudge to sit longer with what resists easy resolution, and to let the language do the listening.

Footprints of Omission

2026/01/22Posted in SplintersTagged 3TC, books, creative writing, daily exercise, fantasy, Fiction, FSS, short-story, Splinters, writing2 Comments

The café was nearly empty, the way it always was at that hour, when the city seemed to hold its breath between one intention and the next. A single bulb hung low over the table, casting a tired halo that didn’t quite reach the corners of the room. He sat beneath it with his shoulders rounded, as if the light itself carried weight, the familiar ache between his shoulder blades reminding him how many mornings had begun this way.

Steam lifted from the cup in front of him, thin and persistent, carrying the faint scent of something burnt at the edges. He didn’t drink it right away. He rarely did. Coffee, like memory, was better approached slowly. The notebook lay open, its spine softened by decades of use, pages crowded with a handwriting that had grown tighter over the years—as though space itself had become something to ration.

He had started the book long before he understood why. Since his father’s death, maybe longer. Names filled the early pages. Dates. Places half-remembered, half-invented. A census line here. A marriage record there. Ordinary things, assembled carefully, as if order alone might explain what had always felt misaligned. The ink had faded in places, smudged where a younger hand had dragged across still-wet letters. He traced a finger over his father’s birth date and wondered, not for the first time, if he had ever truly known his family at all.

Outside, a bus hissed to a stop. Inside, the café remained still.

He paused, pen hovering above the page. A name appeared twice in the records—his grandfather’s—attached to two different women in two towns separated by less than thirty miles. The dates overlapped by three years. He ran his thumb across the indentation in the paper, feeling something settle behind his ribs. It wasn’t proof. It was something worse—suggestion.

They say everyone who looks into their family history will find a secret sooner or later.

The thought didn’t arrive like revelation. It settled. Heavy. Familiar. He lifted the cup and drank, the bitterness grounding him. The past, he had learned, rarely announced itself. It preferred patience.

He turned the page.

What followed wasn’t violent or scandalous. It was quieter. A pattern of omissions. A child listed as “lodger.” A death without cause. A man who moved on easily while others slipped out of the record altogether. There was something almost methodical about it, something faintly sinister in its restraint, like footprints carefully wiped away, leaving only the suggestion of passage.

He closed the notebook and wrapped both hands around the cup. The warmth spread into his fingers, steady and real. Whatever he had uncovered didn’t change who he was—but it explained the silence he’d grown up inside, the way truth had always been treated like something fragile, dangerous, best kept out of reach.

Outside, the bus pulled away. The café’s clock ticked on.

He paid, nodded to no one, and slipped the notebook into his coat, feeling its weight settle against his side. Some secrets didn’t ask to be exposed. They only asked to be acknowledged, carried forward with care.

He stepped back into the cold, the door closing softly behind him. The notebook pressed against him with each step, a quiet reminder that he was just another link in a long chain of silences—and that the light and steam and unanswered questions would follow him home, patient as family ghosts.

Author’s Note

This piece was written in response to the quiet pull of two prompts that lingered longer than expected. My thanks to Fandango for hosting FSS#229, and to Di for MM309. Both offered just enough space to let the story find its own footing. Sometimes the right prompt doesn’t demand an answer—it waits, patient, until the words are ready to catch up.

Holding Pattern

2026/01/21Posted in SplintersTagged 3TC, books, creative writing, daily exercise, Fiction, life, short-story, Splinters, writing2 Comments

I sat hunched over the bar near my gate, a single malt sweating in my hand, cold beads pooling onto a yellowed napkin. The whiskey was unnecessary—a holding pattern. The bar’s wood was too polished, reflecting clusters of strangers stalled between departures and arrivals. The air smelled like disinfectant, old cigarettes, and quiet panic. A television above the bottles played the news without sound. None of it touched me.

I was waiting for the woman I loved.

We met online, in a late-night radio forum—an accident disguised as trivia. She replied to my post with a sharp joke, and I laughed out loud in the dark. Two years followed: messages, calls, pixelated faces, a fragile unity built across time zones and bad connections. Some days the odds felt impossible. Other days I forgot there were odds at all.

People streamed past behind me—wheels clicking, heels striking linoleum, a child whining. I checked my phone again. At passport control. See you soon, promise. I imagined her somewhere nearby, tired, rehearsing the same fears I was: of disappointment, of misrecognition, of how unlike a voice sounds when it finally shares air.

When she appeared, the room shifted.

She stood near the bar beneath the blue glow of the departures board. Her hair was pulled tight except for one loose strand drifting across her cheek. She looked like her photos and not at all—smaller, maybe, worn thin by travel. She ordered a vodka tonic, extra lime. The bartender—an upstart with a waxed mustache and too much confidence—glanced at me, then back at her, and filled the glass.

She turned. We smiled at the same time.

For a moment, neither of us moved. Then she crossed the space quickly, set her bag down, and hugged me—too tight, ungraceful, her face pressed into my neck like she was afraid the moment might slip away. She trembled. I smelled citrus shampoo and airplane air.

I almost joked about how different she looked in real life, the words lining up in my throat before I swallowed them hard.

When she pulled back, her eyes were wet. She laughed and wiped them with her knuckles. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be a mess.”

I kissed her forehead, then her mouth. We bumped teeth. She grinned and apologized again.

We sat together at the bar, trading small stories—the flight, the customs line, a stranger who snored. She hated how every airport looked the same. I showed her the duty-free shortbread I’d nearly finished myself. She took the last piece and laughed, and something in my chest loosened.

At the gate, we sat with our knees touching. Silence came easily. I watched her study my face like she was committing it to memory. She laced her fingers through mine and held tight.

When our flight was called, she stood first and pulled me after her.

We took our first-class seats—an indulgence neither of us questioned. She kicked off her shoes and curled inward, already at ease. We declined champagne. We leaned together, whispered through the taxi, joked about the safety video.

At takeoff, she gripped my arm and didn’t let go until the plane smoothed out above the clouds.

Author’s Note:
My thanks to Di for hosting the 3TC challenge. This piece grew out of the quiet constraint of that framework—the kind that asks you to listen harder to what’s left unsaid. I’m grateful for the space to let a moment hold without resolving it. Sometimes, those are the places where the best stories live—in the places left unsaid.

Millhaven Cove Chapter 2

2026/01/20Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, Fiction, Fiction Series, Millhaven Cove, romance, short-story, writing2 Comments

Chapter 2

The Room

Will already knew what to expect before he reached the door: the faint sting of disinfectant undercut by burnt coffee; fluorescent light glaring off scuffed linoleum; a woman at the front ready to talk about choices, consequences, and tomorrow. He smelled disappointment and something that pretended to be hope.

He lingered in the hallway, boots scraping the edge of a faded carpet runner. The voices inside blended together—low, tired, familiar. He thought of them as bots, people who leaned on slogans because slogans never asked questions.

A sharp laugh cut through the murmur.

“Are you going to stand out there eavesdropping like a kid,” a woman called, tone flat and amused, “or are you coming in?”

Will squared his shoulders, drew a breath that tasted like bleach and regret, and pushed the door open.

The smell hit first—old sweat, anxious adrenaline, the faint copper tang of fear. Folding chairs filled the room, every one occupied by a version of damage he recognized without wanting to: a man with a fading bruise behind his ear, another tapping his foot like he was waiting for bad news, a woman gripping a sweater so hard her knuckles had gone white.

At the front sat Emma St. John. Legs crossed. Pen tapping once against a yellow legal pad. Her eyes didn’t soften when they found him. They weighed him. Measured him. Moved on.

“Well, look at that,” she said. “We got ourselves a statue.”

A few people snorted.

“Everyone,” she added, “let’s welcome the statue.”

“Hey, Statue.”

Will’s jaw tightened. He scanned the room for sympathy and found none. This was supposed to be part of his punishment—tough love, no coddling. He sat, anger curdling in his gut.

“I’m Will,” he said, voice low. “I’m an addict.”

Emma leaned back slightly, pen hovering. “Look at that. The statue talks. Larry, tap him and see if he says something else.”

Larry, broad-shouldered and sweating through his T-shirt, hesitated just long enough to make it real. Then he drove a fist into Will’s ribs.

The air left Will in a sharp, hollow burst. Pain flared hot and immediate. He folded forward, a sound tearing out of him before he could stop it.

“Well,” Emma said, nodding like she was checking a box, “he screams with conviction.”

She tilted her head. “That’s enough.”

The room exhaled.

Will straightened slowly, hand pressed to his side. Something in him had gone still, alert. Larry stepped back, grinning.

“Seems like he’s not a statue after all.”

Will met Emma’s gaze. “Who the hell are you?”

She didn’t blink. “Who are you, and why are you really here?”

“I told you,” he snapped. “I’m an addict.”

Her mouth curved, but there was no warmth in it. “That one sounded like you meant it.”

The group murmured.

Will sat, shoulders tight. This wasn’t landing the way he’d planned.

Emma waited, then said, “Stand up again. Tell us the truth.”

“Straight?” Will asked.

“Hells yes,” she said. “Or get out and stop wasting our time.”

Will stood because sitting felt like hiding.

“I’m hooked on stupid things,” he said. “Online games that don’t matter. Noise. Anything that keeps my head from getting too quiet.”

A few people nodded. Recognition, not sympathy.

“And when that doesn’t work,” he went on, faster now, like momentum might carry him through, “I look for distractions that don’t ask questions. People who don’t care who I am when the lights come on. Transactions. No names. No expectations.”

The room shifted. No laughter this time.

“I drink,” Will said. “Because it’s easier than remembering what I’m avoiding.”

He sat back down hard, chest tight, like he’d admitted to something worse than addiction.

Emma studied him, pen still.

“That’s a lot of effort,” she said, “for a man who claims he just wants to numb out.”

Her voice dropped.

“Nobody works that hard to disappear unless they’re running from something specific.”

Silence pressed in from all sides.

Will stared at his shoes.

“Meeting’s over,” Emma said. “You—statue—grab a coffee with me.”

The diner down the street smelled like scorched bread and old grease. Will slid into a cracked vinyl booth across from Emma, a mug of black coffee steaming between them like a truce he didn’t trust. His hands clenched around the rim until his knuckles went pale.

She waited.

Ally’s name came out first.

Then the rest followed—halting, uneven. The floor screaming under weight. Steel giving way. Sirens. Joseph fighting for breath on the gurney. Surgery. The quiet, cruel fact of Joseph dying anyway.

Will tore napkins from the dispenser, wiped his face, balled them up like they could hold the mess. He pulled out a cigarette pack, crushed it in his fist, smoothed it, crushed it again.

“I should’ve been there,” he said. “He was supposed to come home. Watch them fall in love. Walk his daughter down the aisle. See his boy make it to the pros. We both knew that kid had it.”

Emma said nothing.

“If someone had to die,” Will said, voice breaking despite him, “it should’ve been me.”

She let the silence stretch until it hurt.

Then she said, quietly, “Joseph knew what was at stake. He suited up every day. He died doing what he believed in.” She looked at him. “Why are you trying to take that from him?”

Will stared at the stained tabletop. His shoulders sagged, something finally giving way.

Outside, rain misted the street, turning the light soft and smeared. Will lit a cigarette, the ember flaring between his fingers. Emma reached for it after his first drag, took one herself, and handed it back.

They stood there in the drizzle, jackets darkening, the city breathing around them.

Nothing was fixed.

But nothing was hidden anymore.

Distance Doesn’t Need a Name

2026/01/18Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, Fiction, FOWC, life, RDP, short-story, Splinters, Word of the day, writing2 Comments

The road didn’t begin anywhere I could remember. It just opened beneath my boots, a thin yellow line cutting through snow like a promise someone else once made and never intended to keep. Each step came with a dry, brittle crunch, the sound of something breaking politely. The cold worked its way through the soles of my boots, climbed my ankles, and settled behind my knees like it planned to stay awhile. Abandoned trucks sat half-buried on either side, their doors ajar, rust blooming along their seams. They looked like they’d tried to leave once, stalled mid-decision, and surrendered to weather and time. I understood them more than I wanted to.

I kept walking anyway. Forward motion has a way of pretending it’s purpose.

There should probably be a disclaimer here—something about whiteout conditions, emotional exposure, the way memory lies when the temperature drops—but no one reads those when they’re already committed to being alone. Besides, I’d ignored better warnings before.

I replayed the conversation in real-time, every word arriving with the same dull thud it had the first time. I never knew what it took to make you stay. All I ever had were the wrong sentences, delivered too late or too flat, like apologies left on voicemail. I mistook restraint for dignity, silence for strength. I thought playing it cool might make me look unafraid. Instead, it just made me unreachable as you turned and walked away, your outline thinning against the horizon until even regret lost track of you.

The snow did what mirrors always do—it told the truth without mercy. It reflected not my face but your absence, stretched long and pale across the road. You leaving. Again. Always again. The wind carried the smell of old oil and wet iron from the trucks, and somewhere deep in my chest, something tightened, the way it does when grief realizes it’s not done with you yet.

So far away.

I kept climbing hurdles that existed only because I needed resistance—what-ifs, if-onlys, almosts stacked one after another. My breath burned going in, scraped coming out. Effort felt holy for a while, like punishment might substitute for change. It didn’t. The road stayed long. The sky stayed heavy. I began to feel assembled rather than whole—a jalopy of a man, parts borrowed from better versions of myself, held together by habit and rust, still moving but no longer convinced of the destination.

I was the narrow space between pain and heartbreak, where neither one fully commits. I was the argument between love and sadness that never resolves. I was the darkness that shows up after the tears have dried, when there’s no audience left and no reason to perform resilience.

You were the one thing that made the cold feel survivable.
You are the one thing I couldn’t hold onto.

The trucks watched me pass, their empty windshields clouded, patient. They knew how this ended. They’d lived it. I didn’t stop. I didn’t turn back. Some days don’t offer redemption or clarity—only distance, widening with every step.

So far away.

And still, I walked.

Author’s Note

This piece was written for a convergence of daily creative challenges—FOWC, RDP, and Word of the Day—each acting less as a constraint and more as a pressure point. The image set the weather. The prompts supplied the friction. What followed was written in one pass, close to real-time, without smoothing the edges or rescuing the speaker from the walk he’d already committed to.

These challenges aren’t about polish; they’re about showing up, even on disappointing days, and letting the work reveal what’s still unfinished. This one did exactly that.

The Sound Something Makes When the Curtain Falls

2026/01/17Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, fantasy, Fiction, FOWC, RDP, short-story, Splinters, Word of the day, writing5 Comments

She waited in the hollow that followed the steam’s labor, when the pipes fell silent and the breathless mist drained away into a damp, almost reverent hush. The air still carried a faint eucalyptus tang, sharp and medicinal, the kind of scent meant to suggest renewal while quietly admitting it could never deliver it. In that moment, the chamber shed its antiseptic splendor—its tub and basins, once proud emblems of ritual washing—and became something closer to a holding cell. Not a place of punishment, exactly, but containment. The marble walls felt less like luxury than enforcement: white stone veined like ancestral riverbeds, cold by design, reminding her that comfort was always leased, never owned—and that someone, somewhere, had already paid in blood or debt or silence.

She imagined herself as a figure trapped in a painting no one bothered to finish. The robe slipped from her shoulder, neither invitation nor accident, just gravity doing what it always does in the end—pulling everything downward, stripping illusion inch by inch until there was nothing left to negotiate with.

The mirror offered no mercy. It didn’t flatter or distort; it audited. Its reflection carried the sterile precision of an accountant’s ledger, recording losses without commentary. Fine lines fanned from the corners of her mouth. A furrow had claimed permanent residence between her brows. At her throat, the skin no longer insisted—it yielded. Each mark indicated she spent late nights standing still while decisions were made elsewhere, started mornings already tired, and rationed intimacy, mislabeling it as compromise. She met her own gaze and did not look away, not out of bravery—out of fatigue. Anyone could assemble a mask. Few could bear the weight of seeing what remained when the mask finally cracked.

She had learned to spot performance everywhere. Confidence sold by the inch, tailored and pressed, then paraded as authenticity. Desire shrink-wrapped, reheated, passed hand to hand until it lost all heat and meaning. Intimacy reduced to choreography—glances practiced, sounds cued, exits planned. She had participated. More than once, she’d worn her own counterfeit self like armor: a smile that cost nothing, a nod that promised compliance without surrender, a silence that said this will not follow me home. Those tactics worked—until they didn’t. Until the stage lights dimmed and she realized she’d mistaken endurance for strength.

A bead of water slipped free from her hairline and traced a slow, deliberate path down her temple. It curved along her jaw, lingered at the hollow of her collarbone, then detached and struck the marble bench below with a soft, obscene plop. The sound landed heavier than it should have, echoing in the room like punctuation—final, unavoidable. It startled her. Not because it was loud, but because it was real. Something had fallen, and nothing rushed in to explain it away.

She let her hands rest where they landed—one against her knee, the other flat on the bench, skin cooling fast against stone. There was a quiet defiance in not arranging herself, in refusing the reflex to pose or brace or correct. Her body softened. Her thoughts did not. Instead, they began to close ranks. Regret, curiosity, bitterness, the faint residue of want—things she usually scattered to survive the day—had gathered without her consent. Not neatly. Not kindly. Just enough to demand acknowledgment.

This was the moment most people missed. Not the spectacle, not the collapse, but the narrow interval afterward—the space where there was no audience left to please and no script to hide behind. A reckoning without witnesses. A pause where the scaffolding of roles—lover, professional, survivor—stood exposed long enough to reveal how temporary it all was. She had avoided this space for years, filling it with noise, motion, ambition. Now it held her still.

Soon she would leave this marble mausoleum, wrap herself in fabric chosen for its discretion, and step back into the corridor of borrowed lives and borrowed confidence. She would speak when expected, laugh on cue, disappear politely when required. But she would carry this with her: the unguarded second when nothing was staged, when nothing asked her to perform. The cost of admission had been simple and brutal—you had to see yourself whole.

And you had to stay.

Author’s Note

My thanks to the hosts and community behind FOWC, RDP, and Word of the Day for creating spaces that reward risk, restraint, and the quiet work between spectacle and truth. Challenges like these aren’t just prompts—they’re pressure points, asking writers to stay present long enough to see what remains when the easy choices fall away.

Looking for a Reason to Sit Still

2026/01/172026/01/16Posted in SplintersTagged creative writing, daily exercise, Splinters, writing1 Comment

Morning found her exactly where she’d gone to ground—at the small kitchen table by the window, curlers still biting gently at her scalp, both hands wrapped around a mug that had already surrendered its heat. The light came in low and amber, catching dust in the air, making the room feel older than it was.

She had decided—officially—to go on a spiritual journey after the breakup. That’s what she told people. It sounded cleaner than the truth.

He had been good to her. Attentive in ways that left no room to hide. He remembered what she needed before she asked. That, more than anything, had made her restless.

Her friends said she was jinxed. Said love slid off her like rain off wax. One of them even joked she should find a holy man, let him wave incense around her head, burn out whatever faulty wiring made her allergic to staying.

She watched the window instead of answering, thumb tracing a chip along the rim of the mug. The coffee smelled faintly bitter now, stale.

The truth was quieter. The moment something began to feel safe, she felt the familiar itch—like engines warming somewhere inside her chest. She didn’t fall apart. She didn’t scream. She simply started looking for a reason to jet.

So she called it a journey. Let the word soften the leaving. Let it sound like movement instead of retreat. Outside, the morning went on without her, steady and unconcerned, while she sat very still, wondering when rest had started to feel like a trap.

Right on Cue

2026/01/16Posted in SplintersTagged creative writing, daily exercise, Fiction, FSS, life, love, short-story, Splinters, writing4 Comments

Dawn came early, the way it always did—no warning, no mercy. The sun didn’t rise so much as shove its way in through the slit where the blackout curtain had given up, and the landlord’s plastic rod had bowed to gravity. Even with my eyes shut, the light burned red behind my lids, hot and insistent, like it had something personal to settle.

I reached for the clock on the milk crate beside the mattress and knocked over the chipped mug I’d forgotten to finish. The smell of stale coffee lifted into the room, bitter and faintly sour. Three hours. Maybe three and a half if I lied to myself. The numbers glowed an accusing green.

Sleep used to feel like rest. Somewhere along the way, it turned into a negotiation. Too much, and I woke up slow, waterlogged. Too little, and every sound cut straight through me. Either way, the house won. It always did. I’d learned to live with that, the way you live with a low-grade ache—by pretending it wasn’t there until it suddenly was.

I sat up carefully, joints popping like they were keeping score, and I was losing. Five years in this apartment, and my body never lets me forget what it cost to stay. For too much rent, I got one bedroom, a kitchen that doubled as a hallway, and a bathroom floor that sloped in three directions, none of them toward the drain. To knock a few hundred off the rent, I’d agreed to be the building’s super—a title that came with keys, complaints, and the quiet understanding that nothing was ever really under control.

I didn’t mind the work. There was a grim satisfaction in fixing things with vise-grips and duct tape, in persuading broken parts to cooperate. The tenants left me alone until something failed. Then it was always my fault: the pipes, the heat, the smells that crept up from the basement like unfinished conversations. I kept a toolbox in the hall and a can of WD-40 on every windowsill. Some days, that was enough to feel useful.

For a long time, the building held a fragile peace. People suffered privately. Doors stayed closed. Even the plumbing knew better than to complain too loudly. Then, six months ago, something shifted.

The guy in 4B decided the rest of the world no longer mattered.

It took four months to learn his rhythm. Another two to accept that there was no beating it. If he was awake, the building was awake. Television blaring. Speakerphone arguments with creditors and voices I never heard respond. Footsteps that shook dust loose from the ceiling. Noise as occupation.

Right on schedule, the first sound tore through the pipes—a wet, animal bellow that rattled the radiators. I lay there counting the beats that followed. I knew the order. I always did. The grunts. The crash of something heavy. The metallic clatter of breakfast was like a punishment.

You could set your watch by it, if you didn’t mind waking up disappointed.

I swung my legs off the mattress and crossed to the sink, splashing my face with water that couldn’t decide what temperature it wanted to be. My hands shook slightly as I braced against the porcelain. In the cracked mirror, I barely recognized the man looking back—thinning hair, bruised eyes, a face that had learned how to endure by going blank.

Behind me, the apartment listened. The fan sighed. The fridge ticked. A cockroach darted from behind the toaster and froze. We’d reached an understanding, the bugs and me. I didn’t hunt them, and they kept their distance. I flicked the crumb tray. The roach vanished.

From down the hall came the roar of a daytime talk show and a voice shouting back at it, furious and certain. The sound slid under my skin, settled somewhere I hadn’t named yet.

I stood there longer than I meant to.

Then I crossed the hall.

I didn’t knock.

With one kick, the door gave way.

The sound of splitting wood cracked the morning open. The towel jammed beneath the door skidded free and the smell rushed out—burnt oil, old sweat, something sour that had stopped pretending it was food. It hit me all at once, thick enough to taste.

The television kept screaming.

He stood frozen in the middle of the room, frying pan dangling from his hand, eyes wide with the kind of surprise men wear when the world finally refuses to accommodate them. For a second, neither of us moved. I could feel my heart hammering against my ribs, each beat sharp and electric, like my body was bracing for something it hadn’t agreed to yet.

I hadn’t planned anything past the kick. No speech. No threat. Just the quiet that rushed in behind it, heavy and unfamiliar.

“Turn it off,” I said.

My voice didn’t sound like mine. It was low, even. That seemed to scare him more than the door ever could. If I’m honest, it scared me a bit as well. He looked at the television, then back at me, like he was weighing his options for the first time in a long while.

I took one step inside.

The frying pan hit the floor. The volume dipped, then cut out entirely. The silence that followed felt exposed, like skin after a bandage is pulled away. Thin walls. Held breath. A building pretending not to watch.

I stood there longer than I should have. Long enough to notice that the quiet felt good. Long enough to realize how easily I could get used to it. That was the part that stayed with me.

I left before it could harden into something else.

Back in the hall, my leg started to shake. Not fear—release. The kind that comes after you cross a line you didn’t know you were standing near. I leaned my palm against the wall until it passed, the paint cool and gritty, grounding me in a way nothing else had all morning.

The building stayed quiet.

It wouldn’t last. I knew that. Letters, calls, consequences—those were already lining up. But none of that mattered right then.

What mattered was this:
for the first time in months, the noise had stopped because of me.

And that knowledge sat heavier than the sound ever had.

Author’s Note

My thanks to Fandango for hosting FSS #230 and for continuing to make space for writers to test edges, take risks, and let stories breathe a little rough. Flash work like this thrives on constraint and invitation in equal measure, and it’s always a pleasure to step into a prompt that encourages both tension and honesty. I appreciate the time, attention, and community that go into keeping these sessions alive—and for giving this piece a place to land.

— Mangus Khan

The Distance We Practiced

2026/01/15Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, fantasy, Fiction, MMLM, short-story, Splinters, writing2 Comments

The city leaned toward midnight, its spine bent by years of weather and worse decisions. They moved with it, two figures descending an alley that felt designed for secrecy. The stones underfoot were slick, dusted with rain and soot, each step stirring a faint echo that refused to settle. From somewhere above, a tired streetlamp cast a thin beam of light—weak, jaundiced, unable to decide what deserved illumination.

She walked to his left, he to her right, the arrangement deliberate and old. Once, it had been instinct. Now it was habit, the kind that survives after meaning has burned off. The space between them was exact, calibrated, a distance duplicated so many nights it no longer felt accidental. Anyone watching from a window might have mistaken them for a pair, but the city knew better. The city always did.

The alley’s walls were dark, their bricks breathing out the memory of arguments and bargains struck too cheaply. The air smelled of wet iron and neglect. Each shuttered window felt reminiscent of something neither wanted to name—other walks, other endings postponed by cowardice or hope.

Near the top of the incline, he remembered the night he’d told her she was the only thing in the world worth keeping. He’d believed it then. That was what made remembering dangerous. A promise, once cherished, doesn’t fade quietly—it sharpens.

She stopped without warning. He took two more steps before the absence registered, before the silence took shape and weight. It felt ceremonial. Final.

“This is where I turn,” she said. No tremor. No plea.

He nodded. Anything more would have been an insult—to what they’d been, or to the truth they’d finally stopped dodging.

She turned away, footsteps receding until they dissolved into the city’s indifferent breathing. He stayed where he was, letting the streetlamp buzz overhead, letting the cold settle in his bones. Then he turned back the way they’d come, alone now, the alley already closing ranks behind him as if he’d never been there at all.

Synopsis

2026/01/12Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, Fiction, Ragtag Daily Prompt, RDP, Short Stories, short-story, Splinters, Word of the day, writing6 Comments

The porch had learned him.

It knew the sound his knees made when he stood, the way his weight shifted before he sat, the exact board that dipped because he always landed there. It had taken years, but the wood had adjusted. That seemed fair. He was still working on it.

Ford claimed the left side. Chevy took the rail when it was warm, the chair when it wasn’t. The cooler stayed between them, neutral territory. No one argued about it anymore.

The pills were still in his pocket. He didn’t take them right away now. Not rebellion—delay. He liked the small window where his body still belonged to him before chemistry took over negotiations. The doctor called it wellness. He called it maintenance.

Earlier that day, at the pharmacy, the girl—no, the woman—had touched his hand.

Not accidentally. Not lingering. Just a soft, practiced thing as she explained what the pills did, how often, what to avoid. Younger, but not embarrassingly so. Age-appropriate, like that mattered.

The sensation moved through him fast and clean. A shockwave. Lovely. Immediate.

A smile crept onto his face before he could stop it.

She returned it. Let his hand go, then thanked him with a look that stayed a moment longer than necessary. A woman hadn’t looked at him like that in years. Maybe they had and he hadn’t noticed. Or maybe he hadn’t been ready to be seen—to feel anything other than the familiar ache of grief.

It felt like cheating on Olma Jean.

One of the last things OJ said—voice already thinning, eyes still sharp—was that he should live his life without her. Find someone. Share it. He’d called it hogwash at the time. Still did.

But he hadn’t pulled his hand away.

Because her touch proved something.
That he still existed.
That he was alive and visible, even if only for a moment.

It was nice to be seen.

He gathered his things quickly. Too quickly. He needed distance—from the counter, from the light, from what the moment threatened to become. Outside, he sat in his pickup with the bag of meds on the seat beside him and a fresh supply of treats for Ford and Chevy rattling in the cup holder.

Inside, the house still smelled faintly like citrus if the light hit it right. The juicer sat on the counter, dust settled into its seams. He hadn’t cleaned it. Couldn’t bring himself to. Everything turns permanent if you don’t argue back.

He sat down on the porch again, pills still in his pocket, the echo of that touch lingering longer than it had any right to.

He said the words out loud, just to hear them land.

He was still here.

The porch did not respond. It didn’t need to.

But for the first time in a long while, he didn’t sit because he was tired.

He sat because he wasn’t done.

Millhaven Cove – Chapter 1

2026/01/12Posted in Fiction, SplintersTagged creative writing, daily exercise, family, Fiction, Fiction Series, life, love, Splinters, writing3 Comments

Chapter 1

The Sister

Dawn in Millhaven Cove never comes in fresh. It oozes through the horizon like sour milk spilled on an oil-slicked counter—thin, cold, already unwanted. The sky hangs bruised and jaundiced, more purplish bruise than golden promise. Morning stumbles in with a limp. The air tastes of scorched coffee grounds, stale cigarette ash, and the weary indifference of a town that looks right through you once it’s marked you as invisible.

I spent nights wedged behind a shuttered bakery by the harbor, my back pressed to crumbling brick, concrete scraping my shirt. I slept on yesterday’s newspaper, drinking in the damp sea breeze when I dared. Dawn cut me out of sleep and pushed me toward Maple and Third—the bleakest corner in town—where I’d squat on the curb, shoulders drawn in, while traffic lights blinked urgent and useless, as if blinking hard enough might change something. Politeness was a luxury here. Vulnerability was currency: if you whispered, no one listened; if you trembled, they stared at the pavement.

That’s Millhaven Cove’s quiet contract: the more you need, the more you disappear.

My fall wasn’t dramatic. No sirens. No headline moment. It was a slow rust—one small compromise piling on the next until the floor finally splintered under me. Once, I punched time cards at the pencil factory on East Main—where we turned graphite and paint into elemental optimism for schoolkids. Blue pencils for hope. Yellow for caution. Green for keep going. I believed in the alchemy of small things. I believed that mattered.

I dated a woman who clipped horoscopes from magazines and wrapped my sandwiches with love notes. She said my Taurus stubbornness grounded her. She left when my stubbornness calcified into inertia.

When the factory shuttered—another silent casualty of digital “progress”—rent notices multiplied like mold. Groceries became cheap beer from the corner store; my bed became a park bench. My apartment vanished first thing in fine print, a tidy legal erasure of everything I’d built. I held on to one relic: a stub of an optimism pencil, worn down to the metal ferrule, the eraser chewed into a jagged ulcer of hope. I stuck it in my pocket like proof that I’d once had a reason to believe.

The final push came in my sister’s handwriting. She’s a social worker, so her we love you was perfectly folded—professional compassion. Then, in cramped smaller letters that cut deeper: Don’t come home unless you mean it. No one tells you how it guts you when the last person you could count on decides to stop rescuing you.

I read that line over and over until it carved itself behind my eyes.

Addiction, I learned, isn’t about the drink or the pill—it’s about boundaries bleeding away. You almost forget they were ever there. First it’s never before noon. Then never except on Tuesdays. Then only when it rains. Until one morning you wake on a Thursday with rain soaking your face and realize you’ve broken every last promise you swore would save you. And you’ve become the very person you swore you’d never be. My universe shrank to three stained blocks—the bus station restroom, the liquor store with its plastic mini-bottle display, and the blinking OPEN 24 HRS sign that lied as much as I did. The letters R and S in HOURS had rusted off. I figured they’d given up too.

Salvation didn’t rock up with trumpets. It slapped me in the knee—literally—with a flapping flyer on a February wind: MILLHAVEN COVE RENEWAL CENTER—HOPE STARTS HERE. I laughed. Hope was a billboard lie for people who had backup plans. Still, the ink ran into my thumb and something in my chest stirred. Reflex or longing, I tore off the address tab and tucked it beside the pencil stub.

That night, under a sputtering streetlamp, I counted coins and did the math I’d done a thousand times before: another night numb or a reckless bet on this “renewal.” I split the difference—bought a stale muffin, saved the bus fare, vowed to step inside for just one day.

The center’s lobby was too bright, too clean—like it expected me to behave. A receptionist with kind, tired eyes asked my name and didn’t flinch at Just Jake. She handed me forms and a cup of coffee from a silver carafe so polished I almost didn’t recognize my hollow face in its curve. Then group therapy: folding chairs in a circle, voices trembling over past wreckage—some confessing like defusing landmines, others brandishing their losses as badges. We worshiped at the altar of worst of all. I found myself nodding along to the litany of broken promises.

Detox was brutal. No poetry there—just nights that shook me raw, bones aching as if life itself had been wrung out. Dreams clawed their way back through the surface. I cursed every well-meaning soul who’d ever said, Take it one day at a time. But the mornings came anyway. Hot showers scoured the residue of last night’s shame; accidental laughter cracked through the tension like sunlight.

I relapsed once. Hard. My sister’s voice on my cell phone, begging me not to die, cut straight through the stupor. Guilt came roaring back—who begs a grown man not to kill himself? She talks like my darkness can be fixed by daylight rules. Like I don’t remember her own sleigh rides, the ones she labeled letting off steam. I’ve heard that story before. I’ve told it myself. Just take the edge off. I could throw a rock and hit five people with that same excuse in any direction. She’s sober now, settled into the role, preaching the familiar sermons with the confidence of someone who made it out. I know she’s disappointed in me. But what gutted me more was realizing how deeply disappointed I was in myself. Everything I’d clawed back slipped away in a haze. Still, this time, I limped right back to the same folding chair. Learned—again—that humility isn’t erasure.

Recovery taught me to treasure tiny victories: brushing my teeth, making my bed. No banner-waving moments—just head-down work. I wrote apology letters I wasn’t sure anyone deserved. They felt clichéd, hollow gestures—a whisper of regret in a storm of consequences. But I mailed them anyway. My sister wrote back: I’m proud of you. I read that line until the paper thinned in my hands.

And then—no grand finale, just quiet change. I started volunteering. I found work sweeping floors at the very bakery I’d slept behind. I stopped conflating survival with absolution. I showed up.

They love the I got better ending. But they never ask what recovery cost. Sobriety didn’t hand me clarity so much as it stripped away the fog that used to soften every edge. Now I see the damage—mine and everyone else’s. I see how close the drop-off still is. How easily survival can become a performance.

Sometimes I still roll that chewed-down pencil stub between my fingers, feeling the metal edge where hope’s eraser used to be. It reminds me that hope isn’t a color someone hands you. It’s something you sharpen, again and again, knowing it might splinter at any moment.

Millhaven Cove remains bruised at dawn. The streets still turn their faces from those who need too much. But some mornings, when the light slices through the haze just right, I can stand in it without flinching.

That’s not a miracle.
It’s a chair I keep coming back to—
and a morning that, once in a while, doesn’t limp quite so badly.

Silence Does Not Yield

2026/01/11Posted in SplintersTagged creative writing, daily exercise, Fiction, FOWC, life, love, Ragtag Daily Prompt, RDP, short-story, Splinters, writing4 Comments

I kept thinking I needed something new to say.
What I really needed was to sit still long enough to hear the words that were already here, humming beneath my skin.

The room smells of dust and old paper, touched by the faint metallic cold that creeps in when winter presses its cheek against the glass. The windows vibrate in their sills, a thin argument with the wind.

I push the front door open and let the cold in. It slices across my face, biting cheeks and knuckles with clean precision. The air passes me as if I’m furniture—no more consequential than an empty chair. When I close the door, the room exhales. The smell settles into something familiar. Something that knows my weight.

On the porch, the boards groan underfoot. The world reduces itself: wind through bare branches, a distant car, the patience of winter waiting for nothing. I linger between inside and out, as if crossing back requires permission I haven’t earned, as if I need to traverse something unseen before I’m allowed to return.

I’ve been hunched at the desk for hours. Or days. My legs ache like rusted hinges; my spine stiffens when I shift. Time has stopped offering its verdict, and I don’t ask for one. Some distances aren’t measured in miles or minutes, but in how long you can endure your own thoughts without reaching for escape.

The notebook lies open before me. Blank. Not accusing—just patient. The page holds a quiet gravity, waiting for something that won’t wilt under light. I’ve tried to force pages like this before. Paper never yields to pressure. Only to attention.

I used to think silence meant absence. I know better now. Silence is crowded—filled with abandoned sentences, thoughts I promised I’d return to when I was steadier, braver, less tired. They linger whether they’re too heavy to lift or too plain to hide behind craft.

Seamus offers a single, unimpressed meow and resumes washing her paw. Judgment delivered.

The clock ticks, stubborn and slow. Outside, children’s laughter cuts the air, then disappears. Branches scrape as squirrels tear through the trees, reckless with energy I no longer spend freely. Somewhere just beyond my vision, something waits. I don’t turn. I don’t speak.

The radiator clicks once and settles. A car passes, tires whispering over wet pavement, already forgetting where it’s been.

The pen shifts between my fingers. I hadn’t noticed how tightly I was holding it. Ink meets paper—soft, inevitable. One word forms. Careful. Measured. Not a beginning. A catalyst.

I don’t rush to follow it.

I stay where I am, listening.

The Draft (working title)

2025/10/27Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, Fiction, flash fiction, life, short-story, Splinters, writingLeave a comment

The ticking from the clock on the wall beat like a hammer against a concrete block—dust and debris flying, and every now and again a spark. That was my writing tonight. I had a head full of ideas but nothing with any heat. Then I heard something slide under the door. I froze for a second, thinking it might be the landlord bringing that “good news”—you know, thirty days and then it’s the bricks. But I remembered I’d caught that gig upstate with those high-class folks who wouldn’t know the blues if it hit them in the face, so I was good.

I walked to the door and looked down the hallway. Nothing. Then I saw Woodrow—the rat—gnawing on something. He paused long enough to size me up, then went back to work. I didn’t have the energy to do anything about it, and he knew it. Ms. Pearl, the neighbor’s tabby, slipped in through the gap and rubbed against my leg. I let her stay. Gave her some kibble, then hopped up on the edge of my desk. The page sat there, daring me to write something.

Someone once told me that’s how it starts: just sit in front of the typewriter and speak. Never worry about what you’re going to say; that part works itself out. Just don’t bitch out and you’ll be fine. Lamont Norman said that the day I bought his suitcase Royal typewriter. I laughed, thought he was kidding. He didn’t even smile. “I bitched out,” he said. “Good luck.” That was years ago. The typewriter’s still here—metal scarred, keys sticking like old grudges. I keep waiting for it to start talking first.

That’s when I noticed the envelope. Plain white. No stamp, no handwriting—just my name in black ink that bled a little, like the paper had been sweating. Inside: You are invited to The Draft. Midnight. The Double Down Tavern. That was it. No signature. No RSVP.

I laughed anyway. It sounded like something a drunk poet would dream up at closing time, but I stared at it longer than I should’ve. By eleven-thirty, I was tuning the Gibson, putting on the least-dirty shirt I owned, telling myself I wasn’t going. By midnight, I was already halfway there.

The Double Down? I’d heard of the place, but no one I knew had ever been there, and certainly nobody knew how to get there. It was one of those names that floated around in late-night stories—half joke, half rumor—always mentioned right before the bottle ran dry. I went down to the bodega on the corner for a pack of Luckies and to ask Mr. Park about it. Mr. Park knew everything worth knowing in this neighborhood: who owed rent, who got locked up, who was sleeping with whom.

But tonight he wasn’t there.

I can’t remember the last time I’d walked into that store and not seen him behind the counter, sitting on his stool, eyes glued to that little portable TV wrapped in enough tin foil to bake a potato. When the picture went fuzzy, he’d rap the side with his knuckles, nod, and mutter, “Everything just needs a good tap now and then.” The sound of that tap was part of the neighborhood’s heartbeat. Without it, the place felt wrong, too quiet, like the air had skipped a beat.

There was this strange woman behind the counter, somebody I’d never seen before, popping her gum slow. Who the hell pops gum slow? She didn’t even look at me when I asked for a pack of Luckies. Just slid them across the counter like she was bored of gravity. I decided to go for broke.

“Hey, you wouldn’t know how to get to the Double Down, by chance?”

She didn’t answer, just stepped out of sight for a second. When she came back, she slid a folded piece of paper across the counter. No words, no smile.

I opened it. It was an address. Nothing else.

I turned and walked out of the store, paper in one hand, cigarettes in the other. Halfway through the door, I looked back to thank her. She nodded without looking up, eyes still fixed on something only she could see. But in the glass of the door, I caught her reflection—and for half a heartbeat, I could swear her eyes were sparkling. Not with light. With recognition.

The address on the paper looked ordinary enough—just a number, a street I didn’t recognize. I lit a Lucky, watched the smoke coil off the end, and decided to walk. It wasn’t far, according to the city grid, but the grid had a habit of lying after midnight.

The streets were half empty, half asleep. A drunk kid laughed at a joke nobody told. A siren moaned somewhere uptown, fading slow like a horn section dying out. My shoes echoed too loud on the sidewalk; even the sound seemed to flinch.

I passed storefronts I swear I’d never seen before: a pawnshop that sold only typewriters, a record store where every sleeve in the window was blank white, a barber shop with a red neon sign that read OPEN but no reflection in the mirror.

The farther I went, the fewer streetlights there were. The city felt like it was backing away, leaving me to walk inside its ribs. I checked the paper again. The ink shimmered faintly, as if wet, and I realized I wasn’t reading a map—I was being led.

As I got close to the address, a drunk staggered out of the shadows and poked me in the chest. “Whatcha doin’?” he slurred, eyes glassy and mean. “You think you ready?”

I didn’t answer.

“You?” he barked again, then broke into laughter—loud, jagged, wrong. I pushed past him and kept walking, but when I looked back, the sidewalk was empty. The laughter stayed, close, right beside my ear.

I stopped cold, heart hammering. Took another drag of my straight, exhaled slow. When the smoke cleared, I turned toward the street—and there it was, standing where the map said nothing should be.

The Double Down.

The door didn’t look like much—just wood and paint tired of each other—but the air around it hummed like a bass string. I could feel the groove before I heard it. Slow twelve-bar, heavy on the bottom end, something that could drag your sins across the floor till they begged for mercy.

I grabbed the handle. The damn thing was warm. When it opened, the sound hit me full in the chest—smoke, whiskey, perfume, electricity—all of it moving to the same beat. The door sighed shut behind me like it had been waiting to breathe again.

Inside, the room stretched wider than geometry allows. Corners bent. Shadows leaned the wrong way. Tables sweated rings from drinks poured before I was born. Every light was gold, every bottle looked like it had a soul trapped inside praying for one last round.

The crowd was a mix of then and now: drunks in denim, poets in funeral suits, a few specters in clothes older than jazz. One cat had a typewriter balanced on his knees, keys twitching on their own. Another wore a fedora that flickered in and out like a bad reception. Every time I looked straight at him, the air shimmered.

Behind the bar stood a woman with silver hair and a stare that could sand wood. She polished a glass that was already clean. The jukebox switched gears—Howlin’ Wolf growling through busted speakers—and the floorboards started to tap back.

I took a seat near the door, playing it cool. The bartender poured something the color of regret and set it in front of me.

“On the house,” she said, voice smooth as gin and twice as dangerous.

I looked around. At the back, a stage the size of a confession booth glowed red. A man sat there, guitar in his lap, fingers resting easy like he’d been born holding it. He didn’t play; he just watched me. Smile sharp enough to slice a chord.

“Place got a name?” I asked.

She half-smiled. “You tell me.”

The drink burned good going down—smoke and sugar and bad decisions. I blinked, and the room changed. Every face turned my way. No talking, no movement, just the weight of attention pressing down.

Then a man in a white suit stood by the jukebox and tapped his glass. The sound cracked the silence like a snare drum.

“Welcome,” he said, voice rolling through the room slow and mean. “Welcome to the Draft.”

The crowd answered with a low hum that crawled up my spine.

I could see there were a few guys like me who didn’t have a clue what the hell was going on. Then there were the ones who thought they did—scribblers with confidence and cologne, already imagining the book deals. I knew that breed. They never last. If it wasn’t so funny, it would’ve been tragic, but instead it was just pathetic.

The muses began to move—slow, gliding, half smoke, half skin. Each one shined in its own color. The room buzzed like a hive. They touched foreheads, whispered, and kissed some poor souls right on the mouth. Wherever they touched, something happened: laughter, sobbing, a glow under the skin.

Names were called. Not mine.

One by one, the seats around me emptied. The writers who’d been chosen vanished, or maybe just slipped sideways out of time. The unlucky ones sat frozen, pretending it didn’t matter, staring into their drinks like they could find meaning in the ice.

I kept my eyes down. The drink had gone warm.

A man near the jukebox started laughing too loudly. “Didn’t get the call, did ya?” he said to no one. “Guess you’ll be writing grocery lists now.” His laughter spread, nervous, contagious.

I waited. Nothing. No muse came my way.

The smug ones still sat upright, chins lifted, waiting to be crowned. I’d seen that look before at open mics and literary festivals—the face of somebody convinced the universe owed them a round of applause.

If it hadn’t been so funny, it would’ve been tragic. But right then, it just felt pathetic.

A thin, cold panic crawled up my spine. I was the last fool at the table. The muses had moved on. The man in white was clinking his glass again, ready to close the show.

I told myself I didn’t care. I told myself I’d been through worse. But I felt hollow—like a joke everyone else was in on.

I couldn’t believe this shit. I didn’t even know what The Draft was until an hour ago, and now it was already over. I didn’t get picked. Harry Lucas gets the nod? What the hell is going on?

To add insult to injury—Terry Best. Terry damn Best. Man hasn’t written a line worth reading since the Carter administration, and suddenly he’s chosen? Harry and I carried that sorry bastard for years. I’m jealous, sure. Harry’s good—better than I’ll ever admit out loud—but still, it stings.

“Congrats, you lucky fuck,” I muttered, raising my glass to no one. The drink burned all the way down, a reminder that some fires don’t keep you warm; they just scar you.

The room was thinning out. The chosen ones disappeared into the smoke with their shiny new partners. The rest sat there staring at the bar like it might offer consolation. Nobody spoke. The music died, the hum faded. For the first time all night, the silence had weight.

That’s when the folded piece of paper slid across the counter, slow and deliberate.

No one was near me. Nobody close enough to reach.

I hesitated, then picked it up. The paper smelled faintly of cigar smoke and cheap lipstick.

I unfolded it. Two words written in lipstick.

END

Mercy Street

2025/10/27Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, fantasy, Fiction, short-story, The Seven Day Mile, writingLeave a comment

A Seven Day Mile Story

Neon hummed like a migraine that wouldn’t quit, the kind that sits behind your eyes and waits for you to flinch. Rain slicked the street in lazy sheets, turning the city into a mirror that didn’t want to see itself.

He sat in the car, engine off, watching moths bump into the streetlights over and over—addicted to pain or maybe just tormented by the routine. They couldn’t help it. Neither could he. The radio crackled; he’d forgotten it was even on.

He waited for the speakers to spit louder. Voices chased one another, desperation disguised as competence. No one was fooled, but they were all too polite to say otherwise—the kind of manners born of dread and regret. He popped a couple of Rolaids into his mouth, chewed, then swallowed without a chaser.

The moths chased one another. Were they playing? Children, maybe—the streetlamp their merry-go-round. The thought made him laugh once, sharp and dry, before the static swallowed it.

A mess of transmissions blurred together, dispatch calls bleeding into the wheeze of cheap speakers. Mostly noise: arguments, false alarms, ghosts trying to sound important. Then one word cut through the distortion—Rogue.

He didn’t move. Just reached for the half-crushed pack in the cup holder, thumbed a smoke free, and watched the rain carve faint scars across the glass. He flicked his thumbnail against the wooden match, let the light burn a moment before touching it to the cigarette. The first drag went deep; he held it there, letting the nicotine do its job.

“Always the good ones that break first,” he muttered, though he wasn’t sure if he meant her or himself.

The cigarette burned low, ash clinging stubbornly to the tip. He cracked the window just enough for the wind to take it. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, leaving the air thick with metal and wet concrete.
Raindrops caught the streetlight like cheap diamonds. Down the street, a siren came to life, and a dog sounded its alarm on the opposite side. Windows lit up—shadows of witnesses who’d never seen a thing. It was safer that way. They just let the Night play.

He turned the key halfway and let the dashboard flicker to life. The radio hissed again—fragments this time, coordinates maybe, or names swallowed by static.

“Thunder Island” perforated the silence. He wondered if a place like that even existed. He turned down the car radio and turned up the police band. Nothing is more dangerous than being the target of someone looking for something. They rush in, do things they can’t take back. Then they have the nerve to say they’re sorry—and worse, there are tears. Even worse, they actually mean it, and spend the rest of their lives shattered.

He didn’t bother writing anything down. Whoever was still talking wasn’t talking to him.

He leaned back, the seat creaking under his weight, and watched smoke crawl toward the open window. He told himself it was time to move, but his body didn’t buy it. There was a comfort in the stall, in pretending the world would wait for him to catch up.

When the transmission finally cleared, the voice was colder, official—clipped consonants, no room for mercy. A woman’s voice, maybe. The kind that used to mean something.

“Target confirmed. Proceed with caution.”

He took one last drag, killed the radio. The smoke burned; his eyes began to water as he started the vehicle. That deep rumble of the police interceptor always brought him joy. Agents were supposed to turn in the old cars years ago, but he and the motor sergeant had history—the kind that stands a lifetime without a single word needing to be said. The kind no one questions, because you wouldn’t like the answers.

He let the engine idle a moment, lights off, watching the rain bead and slide down the hood. Then he shifted into gear and rolled into the dark.

The rain washed the streets, but they’d never come clean. Too much poverty in the cracks, too much sorrow in the gutters, and just enough hope to make it cruel. Everyone still wanted everything—guilt, happiness, grace.

At a red light he watched a man curse his demons. He didn’t see them, but he knew they were there all the same. His own had a permanent seat beside him, rain or shine.

At the next light, a woman staggered down the block, stopped, and threw up her dinner—or breakfast, hard to tell at this hour. She braced herself on her knees, took a breath, and sat right there on the sidewalk. Wiped her mouth with her sleeve like it was just another thing to get through.

The wipers dragged across the glass with the sound of bones under cloth. He kept the lights off until he turned onto a narrower road, the kind the city forgot about except when it needed somewhere to dump its secrets.

The address came from memory. He didn’t need to check it; some places get branded into you like scars. The building looked smaller now, windows boarded up, the brick dark with age and rain. A single light glowed in the hallway upstairs—thin, yellow, and nervous.

He parked across the street, engine idling low. The smell of exhaust and damp asphalt mixed with whatever passed for courage. He sat there a long moment, thumb worrying the cigarette burn in the steering wheel, thinking about the last time he’d seen her face.

Not that it mattered. The past was a closed room; this was just cleanup duty.

He slipped the car into park, checked the glove box for the piece he never quite admitted carrying. He never liked the man he needed to be when he carried. There was a click as he fastened the sidearm in its holster. His boots and the wet pavement had a brief disagreement.

The rain had started again, softer now, whispering against his collar.

By the time he reached the door, the light upstairs was gone.

The hallway reeked of urine, stale beer, and mildew—the ghosts of the unspoken past everyone tries to forget but never does. The farther he went down the corridor, the more the aroma changed. He wished it hadn’t.

Wallpaper peeled in long curls like it was trying to escape the situation. The ceiling light flickered, revealing the old scabs beneath the peels. Even the walls were wounded.

He moved slowly, letting his boots announce him—no point sneaking when everyone in the building already knew the sound of trouble. He hoped these ghosts and his demons would play nice. He hoped he wasn’t too late, but he feared the damage had already been done. The only thing left was to manage it.

A door creaked somewhere up ahead. He stopped, listened. Nothing but the groan of pipes and the faint hum of rain slipping through the ceiling. Then a floorboard gave—deliberate, weighted.

He slid along the wall until the narrow window gave him a slice of the alley out back. A figure stood there, half in shadow, a hood pulled low. Not moving, just waiting.

He exhaled through his nose. Always the same dance—the waiting, the pretending nobody had to bleed tonight.

The back door stuck before it opened, metal swollen from the damp. He stepped out into the alley, smelling of trash and rain thick as old coffee. The figure turned, slow and calm, hands visible but empty.

“You came alone,” the voice said.

He almost smiled. “That’s what I do best.”

The silence stretched, tight enough to hum.

Rain hissed against the dumpster, each drop a small explosion in the puddles. The alley light above them buzzed and died, leaving the world painted in shadow and breath.

He kept his hands visible. No need to startle a ghost with old habits. The figure’s hood fell back just enough for him to see the face—tired, older, eyes like a mirror that didn’t want to reflect him.

“You shouldn’t have come,” the voice said.

“Maybe not,” he answered. “But I never was good at staying gone.”

She—or maybe it was just the shape of what she’d become—tilted her head, rain streaking down her cheek like sweat.

“They said you sold me out.”

He took a slow breath, the kind meant to buy time, not truth.
“You know better.”

She stepped closer. Close enough for him to smell the rain in her hair, the metal tang of adrenaline.

“Tell me it’s not true.”

He looked past her, at the alley mouth where light threatened to crawl in.
“Seriously? When did you start believing dumbshit?”

The silence that followed was heavier than the rain. She didn’t lower the gun, but her hand shook just enough to show the years between them.

“You always did know how to ruin a moment,” she said.

He almost smiled. “Guess some things don’t fade.”

The safety clicked off—soft, final.

Author’s Note:
Today’s plan is simple — celebrate a friend who’s been the steady hand behind the chaos.
It’s my editor’s birthday (yeah, a little late — story of my life), and she’s the reason this machine keeps running when I’m ready to set it on fire.

She spent her day listening to me whining about rebuilding the Lab, cleaning up code, catching my typos, and quietly holding everything together. That’s how she works — no spotlight, no noise, just precision and patience.

So this one’s for her. She hasn’t read Mercy Street yet — but she’s in it. Not by name, but in every line that holds restraint where rage should be, in every small mercy that refuses to die.

And since it’s her birthday, I’ll be posting a few extra stories — wouldn’t want her thinking she’s getting off easy or anything.

Happy belated birthday, Editor Extraordinaire.
Here’s to late nights, clean drafts, and the kind of loyalty that never asks for applause.

By Its Light

2025/10/21Posted in SplintersTagged creative writing, daily exercise, family, Fiction, flash fiction, FSS, Grief, life, love, Resilience, Splinters, writing18 Comments

We learn to live with death the same way we read by firelight—slowly, painfully, beautifully.

No one prepares you for the feeling of loving something that Death has touched.

I sit here looking around his cabin—now mine. The air smells of pine sap, old smoke, and the faint tang of whiskey soaked into the floorboards. Dust floats through the thin light that leaks between the curtains. Each corner is stacked with books—subjects as varied as anatomy and jazz theory. A shelf of vinyl lines the far wall: Coltrane, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson. Then, tucked behind them, a few heavy metal records—Sabbath, Maiden, Priest. My father, it seems, was a closet metalhead. I smile at that. Maybe I inherited more from him than just a pulse: the music, the books, the need to understand the noise inside.

Warmth slides down my cheeks before I realize I’m crying. The tears catch the scent of dust and woodsmoke, grounding me. I never knew him growing up. He and my mother had a moment in their teens—one of those sparks people mistake for destiny before life smothers it with reason. She was in law school; he was home on leave from the Army. They met at a party through a mutual friend, made promises under a drunk moon, and a week later, he shipped out. Nine months later—technically ten, if you’re counting the way we do in obstetrics—I arrived.

I became a doctor partly to make sense of what my mother wouldn’t talk about: biology, infection, the way life insists on being messy no matter how sterile you keep your hands. That’s where I met my father—though I didn’t know it then.

He came into the ER after an accident. I was covering trauma, running late for my weekly lunch with Mom. She’s a federal judge now, but every Thursday we make time—just an hour to remember we’re still mother and daughter, not just professionals orbiting duty.

When I finally reached the ER, Mom was already there. She’d come looking for me, irritation etched into her face. But as I began to explain, she froze. Her gaze fixed on the patient lying in bed—multiple fractures, head laceration, vitals unstable but holding. The antiseptic smell and hum of monitors felt suddenly foreign, like I’d stepped out of my own body.

“Mom?” I asked.

She stepped closer to the bed. Her hand rose to her mouth, and for the first time in my life, I saw her cry. Real tears—silent, unstoppable. She reached out, caressed the man’s forehead, her fingers trembling like someone touching a ghost.

“Mom, what’s going on? Do you know him?”

She didn’t answer. Just kept tracing the lines of his face, as if memory might come alive under her touch.

“Mom!”

Finally, she turned toward me, her voice steady but low.
“He’s your father.”

Then she pulled a chair to his bedside, sat down, and called her clerk to clear her docket.

My chest tightened. My legs went weak. I recognized the physiology even as it overtook me—tachycardia, dizziness, shallow breath. I nearly hit the floor before someone caught me.
Carol—my charge nurse, my right hand for ten years. A skinny little thing, but deceptively strong.

We weren’t just colleagues. We were friends.

“Sue, what’s going on?” she asked, her voice sharp with command. I heard her barking orders, but the words blurred into static. The next thing I knew, I was staring at a white ceiling, the steady beep of a monitor tracing the edge of my humiliation.

I tried to sit up—irritated beyond measure—but Carol pushed me back down with one hand. For such a small woman, she was a brick wall.

“Pilates?” I asked, breathless, trying to find my bearings.

She grinned, pouring me a cup of water. “The Judge filled me in. Your dad’s a hottie, by the way. Banged up and all.”

I snorted. Of course, she’d say something like that. That was Carol—always trying to make me laugh when she knew I was about to unravel. The water tasted metallic from the cup, cold against the desert of my throat.

She stood beside me, one hand resting over mine, thumb tracing small circles like she was smoothing out the tremors beneath my skin. Neither of us spoke for a while. The monitors filled the silence. Somewhere down the hall, a code was called, and the world kept spinning as if mine hadn’t just tilted off its axis.

After a few minutes, I was steady enough to stand. Carol and I walked back to my father’s room. The corridor smelled faintly of disinfectant and rain-soaked concrete from the ambulance bay. Mom sat beside his bed, holding his hand. The look on her face—devastation mixed with fierce worry—nearly broke me. When she saw me, she stood and came toward me, wrapping me in a soft and trembling hug.

“You okay? I know it’s a lot,” she said.

“It must’ve been one hell of a week,” I quipped.

To my surprise, she roared with laughter—real, unrestrained laughter. I didn’t think it was funny, but she lost it in the middle of the ER.

“It was, actually,” she said, still smiling. “We made you.”

Her eyes drifted off somewhere far beyond the fluorescent lights. It’s strange how memory works—how it lets you step back in time, not just to see it, but to feel it, every heartbeat replaying as if the past were still happening right now.

I had two years with him. Two years I’ll never trade for anything. I’d never seen my mother happier. Watching them together, I understood their brief story hadn’t been some teenage fling—it was a spark that waited decades to breathe again. For a while, it felt like the world had given us a second chance.

Then the disease came, and everything changed.
Nothing was ever the same after that.

So far, the disease had cropped up in five different towns, ravaging everyone and everything in its wake. My father was one of them.

I begged my mother to leave the area, but her stubborn ass wouldn’t budge.

“I won’t hear of it! Nothing’s running me from my home,” she snapped.

I couldn’t believe people actually said that kind of thing outside of old movies. I figured it was one of those lines characters use when they’ve already decided they’re not going anywhere.

Then she gave me that look—sharp, deliberate—and sighed.
“Okay,” she said finally, downing her afternoon scotch. “When are we leaving?”

“I have patients, Mom,” I replied.

She smirked faintly, that judge’s confidence slipping through the exhaustion. “So do I, honey. Mine just happen to sit in courtrooms instead of hospital beds.”

“We just lost Albie to this shit. I won’t risk you as well,” she said.

That stopped me cold. Mom never swore. That was Dad’s thing. Hearing it from her snapped something loose inside me. I looked at her, really looked, and saw the fear beneath all that steel.

We stood there in silence, and in that silence we understood what needed to be done. If it was going to end, let it end like this—on our feet, fighting.

“Sue, honey, you die with your boots on,” my father had told me when he first started showing symptoms. He’d been delivering meds to the infected zones, refusing to stay home. I begged him to stop, but a daughter’s love isn’t enough to turn a man away from his calling.

I wish it were.

Back at the cabin, the world felt smaller, quieter. The disease had moved on, taking what it wanted and leaving the rest of us to sort through the ruins.

I sat in Dad’s old rocker, which creaked like it still remembered his rhythm. The fire popped softly in the hearth, smoke curling through the faint scent of pine and old varnish. A book lay on the end table—Judas, My Brother. Of course. Trust Dad to pick something that questioned everything. I turned it over, thumbed through the pages soft from use, and slipped on his glasses. The prescription was surprisingly close to mine. The world blurred for a heartbeat, then settled into focus—clearer, heavier.

Mom had built the fire and sat on the couch with her usual scotch, watching the flames without speaking. The glass glinted amber in her hand. She didn’t have to say anything. The silence between us said everything—loss, endurance, maybe even grace.

I read a few lines, hearing his voice in the space between words. Then I closed the book, leaned back in his chair, and let the rocker creak like it was breathing for him.

No one prepares you for the feeling of loving something that Death has touched.
But you learn.
You learn to read by its light.

Author’s Note:
Inspired by Fandango’s Story Starter #223.
Thank you, Fandango, for the spark — this one burned quietly but deep.

Litany in Black 3

2025/09/302025/09/30Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, fantasy, Fiction, Fiction Series, FOWC, RDP, short-story, Splinters, Word of the day, writing2 Comments

Chapter 3

Eli’s fingers hammered the Underwood, the platen ratcheting like a drumbeat inside his chest. Words crashed onto the page raw and unprocessed, each keystroke sharp as broken glass. He didn’t try to catch his thoughts; they lagged behind anyway, always scrambling, always too late. Second-guessing was for people with softer bones.

The typewriter filled the basement like a predator pacing. The ding of the carriage bell jolted him at every line, each return snap a small guillotine. He welcomed the violence. As long as the machine roared, the silence couldn’t close in and strangle him.

Behind him, Iris moved. He didn’t look—didn’t dare. He knew the sound of her presence: drawers opening, papers shifting, the glide of her feet across concrete. She spoke sometimes, soft nothings that dissolved into the cinderblock walls, too sweet to be trusted. He kept his eyes forward, certain that if he broke rhythm the spell would snap and something worse would rise.

She spoke in platitudes—surface shit that didn’t mean a damn thing, not even to the person saying it. She knew I hated them. She knew I’d rather choke on silence than fill it with low-grade noise. And after everything, don’t I rate the premium line of bull? Instead—clichés. Cheap ones. Wrong on too many levels.

The words poured, jagged and necessary. He bent closer to the keys, fingers aching, shoulders burning. The smell of paper and machine oil clogged his sinuses. His job was to write. One job. Write.

Then—click. Whirr. The clatter of vinyl.

His trance shattered. Eli shot up from the desk. “NNNNNOOOOOOO!”

The speakers coughed dust. A warped guitar riff crawled from the jukebox.

Arnold Layne had a strange hobby…

The lyric nailed him to the chair. His body froze, his heart battering too fast against his ribs. A high metallic screech tore through his skull. Somewhere in the sound he swore he heard a howl, long and low, as if the memory itself had found a voice.

The world went black.

—

He blinked awake in a different room. Bare bulb. Cracked mirror. The stink of disinfectant.

In the glass, Iris stared back—hair damp, eyes too wide, skin gone bare and bloodless.

Jonquil’s shape coalesced behind her, a figure lit by candlelight. She smiled, but her mouth never moved.

“You had one job,” Jonquil said, velvet over stone. “Keep him writing. Don’t let the memory in.”

Iris clutched the sink, knuckles white. Words failed her.

Jonquil’s gaze sharpened. “You know what happens to leaky vessels.”

The memory ripped through Iris: a Guild meeting, Uncle Bug tearing into a junior agent, the sudden hush, then the impossible sight of Bug blowing softly in the man’s direction. The agent’s outline wavered—and collapsed into vapor. The smell of iron had clung to her clothes for days.

Iris trembled. If Jonquil told Uncle, she’d be next.

—

The bar hit him like a punch—heat, smoke, neon fractured on dirty glass. Bodies surged to the music, sweat and whiskey thick in the air. Eli stood in the middle, drowning in it.

Onstage, a woman with cropped hair and a voice like gravel tore through Dead and Bloated. She wasn’t covering the song; she was burning it down and rebuilding it from ash.

Her eyes found his. She grinned, stepped off the stage, and cut through the crowd like she owned it. Her hand snared the back of his neck. She kissed him hard, tasting of blood and whiskey, breath hot with hunger.

The taste hit him like déjà vu—sharp and sweet, like a kiss he’d lived before in another life, though he had no memory of whose lips had given it.

Then she pulled back, lips almost brushing his ear. “You don’t belong here. Go back. Now.”

She shoved him. The bar collapsed, light and shadow swallowing the floor. Eli fell.

—

He jolted awake at his desk, lungs empty, head pounding. The Underwood sat waiting, a fresh sheet rolled in.

On the corner of the desk, a tabby cat licked her paw. She froze mid-motion and fixed him with a single stare.

“Meow,” she said, clipped and final, before resuming her grooming.

Eli’s hands shook as he reached forward. Beside the typewriter, on a square of yellow paper, a single word was scrawled in black ink:

Frog Creek.

The letters burned into him. His stomach turned cold.

He remembered.

Something he had sworn never to speak of again. Something only he had survived.

The typewriter, the cat, even the walls felt suddenly foreign—no shelter at all, just a trap waiting to close.

Why was it surfacing now?

Author’s Note

When I released Litany in Black, my editor didn’t mince words. The call was short and sharp: “I want more.” So here it is—the next chapter, pulled from the dark seam where memory, myth, and madness overlap.

This piece draws on three of my favorite community sparks: FOWC, RDP, and Word of the Day. Those prompts slip into the prose the way shadows slide into corners, sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden in plain sight. If you caught them, you’re paying attention. If not, maybe the story is working on you the way it should—sly, unsettling, creeping in under the skin.

Chapter 3 is about fracture—Eli caught between the rush of creation and the trap of memory, Iris learning that mistakes echo louder than excuses, Jonquil tightening her grip on both. Frog Creek has finally bled through the page, and with it, the reminder that some stories don’t just haunt you; they claim you.

To those following along, thank you for walking with me into the dark. The deeper we go, the less clear the ground beneath us becomes—but that’s the only way to find out what’s waiting on the other side.

The Inkwell Rider

2025/09/292025/09/29Posted in SplintersTagged books, creative writing, daily exercise, fantasy, Fiction, FSS, short-story, Splinters, writing8 Comments

The pounding at the front door began long after midnight. Each blow was deliberate and unhurried, like the careful stroke of a sculptor’s chisel against glass. Not a summons but a demand. Brazen. Insistent.

He didn’t rise. He lay still in the attic room, letting the sound seep into him, inevitable as tide against stone. He counted the interval between strikes until his heartbeat followed the rhythm. The house trembled. Thunder muttered beyond the horizon, folding the knock into something larger—an unmeasured tide, washing through the marrow of his bones.

Then the room split open. He stood on a windswept shore. Salt spray stung his lips; the wind tasted of copper and regret. Mist curled along the sea, thin as gauze, trembling as if it hid another world.

A horse exhaled. Its breath rolled heavy as storm clouds, hooves thudding like a buried drum. Damp wool and brine clung to the air. He tasted fear, sharp and metallic, like sucking a coin.

Through the haze came a glint of battered armor—silver rubbed to pewter, seams cracked, catching light from a sun that didn’t exist. The rider’s silhouette wavered, impossibly tall, visor down, face unreadable.

The pounding at the door merged with hoofbeats. Frost rimed his lashes. His boots sank into sand that softened into ink, black and iridescent as beetle shell. The rider advanced, and with each step the sea receded, exposing bones and wire in the seabed’s muck. The air stank of rot and possibility.

A question swelled in his throat, too heavy to voice. Another strike at the door—and the dream collapsed.

He jolted upright at his desk. Shelves stood skeletal, spines stripped bare. Dust clung stubbornly to the air, as if the room refused to surrender its memories.

Only the inkwell remained. Obsidian glass, gleaming like a pool of midnight.

It spoke—not in words but as a tremor in his bones: You are the one I belong to.

Ink leapt upward, coiling into the suggestion of a figure, a face more idea than flesh. Its eyes were ancient and exact, pinning him to his chair.

Are you the writer? The question was absurd and infinite.

The shelves rattled as though books clawed to return. Each knock at the door struck like a punctuation mark, vibrating his jaw.

The room thinned. Corners bent inward. He clapped his hands to his ears, but the pounding only burrowed deeper, lodging itself behind his temples, merging with the pulse behind his eyes.

He tried to stand but found himself rooted. The ink-figure grew, head brushing the ceiling, mouth curling in some half-expression—amusement, hunger, pity.

In the mirror above the desk, his reflection wept. Ink streamed from its sockets, streaking cheeks until the face dissolved into a blur.

The whisper gained teeth. Are you the writer? Answer. Answer. ANSWER.

His tongue flooded with ink, bitter as spoiled wine. He gagged, then finally let the words tumble out, steady as confession:
“Yes. I am the writer. I am the Muse.”

For an instant, silence. The sea stilled. The door hushed. The world held its breath.

But silence bears weight. And weight cracks.

The pounding resumed—faster, furious, like a heart hammering against bone. Shelves pitched forward, gnashing their empty spines. The rider’s visor leaked tar; waves behind him thickened into oil. Seafoam crawled across the rug.

The lamp shrank to a pinprick. Walls bowed outward, then snapped back, leaving him gasping.

He clutched the inkwell. Its glass was fever-hot, pulsing like it contained a second heart. Each knock rattled his skull, more intimate now, less house than body.

He tried to scream, but ink poured out, running down his chin, soaking his shirt. The inkwell slipped and shattered. The spill spread, black and inexorable, birthing the rider whole, towering, boots leaving prints that hissed as they seared into the rug.

He dropped to his knees. Through the cracks between floorboards, he glimpsed writhing shadows—half-finished stories, worlds waiting for permission. The window rattled behind him, panes shaking like teeth in a jaw.

The pounding stopped.

Silence swallowed the room. Every particle of air strained toward the door. A gauntleted hand hovered just beyond the wood. The whisper softened, almost tender: Are you the writer?

He staggered forward, each step leaving an ink-black footprint. His hand shook on the knob, slick with sweat. The ceiling sagged, the house groaning as if it would collapse if he refused.

He swallowed fear and turned the handle.

No pounding. Only the slow, splintering sigh of wood.

The door was not being knocked upon.

It was being opened.

Author’s Note:
Thanks to Fandango for another amazing Fandango’s Story Starter #218 (FSS) prompt. Some doors you knock on, others knock on you. This one wouldn’t stop pounding until I opened it. Funny how a single line can spiral into something that feels less like a story and more like a confession in ink. Appreciate the spark, Fandango — and the reminder that prompts aren’t just exercises; sometimes they’re invitations we can’t ignore.

Litany in Black 2

2025/09/23Posted in SplintersTagged creative writing, daily exercise, fantasy, Fiction, FSS, short-story, Splinters, WDYS, writing13 Comments

Chapter 2

The bed had held her like a warm conspiracy—pillows swallowing her shoulders with their downy weight, linen softened by last night’s restless turns. Lantern light pooled in amber halos on the walls, quivering against damp wood. Four hours of sleep after eighteen-hour days should have grounded her for a week, but her body insisted on rebellion. Awake again, she sat upright, toes grazing the cool floorboards, eyes blinking against the dim glow. The tang of office coffee still clung to her tongue: a bitter echo of burnt midnight oil and water-thin sludge, the kind that left her stomach knotted but kept her nerves humming like exposed wiring.

She dragged a chair across the cabin with deliberate care—the legs scraping in protest—and perched at the balcony’s edge. The night air bit her bare arms, each shiver sharpening her senses. Beyond the railing, the mountains stood silent, dark ridges pressed like secrets into the horizon. The lake lay flat as polished obsidian, mirroring bruised clouds of early dawn. Across the glassy water, an old man in a faded plaid shirt painted the silence. His brush moved in slow, patient arcs, each stroke less about color than stitching the world back together, as if he fought gravity and time with bristles and oil.

“Are you just going to sit there, peeking out the window? That’s rude, you know?” A voice cracked through the quiet like a shot glass on stone. Jonquil’s heart jerked—her pulse thundering behind her ribs. For a moment, she blamed the sleepless haze—too many nights hunched over microfiche, eyes stinging under the sterile hum of library projectors, chasing Frog Creek’s ghosts through brittle ’30s newsprint. Dead ends, coy smiles from locals who treated the story like a campfire riddle.

“Bring some coffee and a glass of water while you’re at it,” the voice added, dry as driftwood.

Her gaze flicked back to the painter. He hadn’t paused, but she was certain the brim of his floppy hat dipped—a slow, knowing nod cast in shadow. Words felt heavy, too sluggish to catch. She slipped off the chair, the floorboards groaning like reluctant witnesses, and padded to the kitchenette. She measured the coffee grounds by instinct, water steaming in two battered mugs. She filled two slender glasses with cool spring water. Even before she carried the tray back, the earthy tang of brewed coffee rose to meet her, promising clarity.

As she stepped into the painting’s quiet domain, the tray trembling slightly in her hands, a thought flared: What the hell am I doing? She set the tray on a rough-hewn table beside the painter and stepped back into the flicker of lantern light.

“What took you so long?” he muttered around a sip, not looking up—then slowly raised his head and found himself staring down the barrel of her .40-caliber Smith & Wesson. The metal gleamed silver in the lamplight.

He froze. Recognition bloomed in his eyes, calm as a breeze off the lake. He tilted his head, then—deliberately—brought the coffee cup to his lips. The steam curled around his weathered face before he met her gaze.

“Jonquil! You old firebrand—you scared the hell out of me!”

Her chest unclenched in one rush of relief, fury, and love warring beneath her ribs. She lowered the gun with a shaky exhale, the weight of it receding like a tide.

“Are you gonna give me a hug,” he drawled, “or should I start feeling offended?”

“Offended, of course,” she muttered, stepping forward.

He rose with a groan of old joints, arms outstretched. His paint-stained palms smelled of turpentine and lake mist. She hesitated a heartbeat—then melted into the solid warmth of his embrace. His arms were rough bark, familiar and unyielding.

They held each other while the mountains bore silent witness. Bug kissed her temple, then eased back to study her face under the brim of his hat.

“Tell me about the writer,” he said, voice low. “Is he writing?”

“I made contact,” Jonquil replied, voice soft with pride. “It’s begun.”

“Good. How long before he’s ready?” Bug asked, tone businesslike as he sipped his coffee.

“I’m not rushing him. He’ll be ready when he’s ready,” she snapped, the heat in her words betraying more than she intended.

Bug spread his paint-stained hands in mock surrender, a crooked smile flickering at his beard’s edge.

“Actually, Uncle…I’m glad you’re here,” she added, calmer now, raising her mug. The coffee was strong, bitter—and it steadied her pulse.

They fell into silence, watching dawn bleed into the sky while the lake held its reflection like a promise.

“Tell me about Frog Creek,” she said finally.

Bug jolted, coffee sloshing against his knuckles. His eyes sharpened, horror and determination flickering in the same breath.

“Don’t ask questions that need answers, Jonquil,” he growled, the words rough as gravel.

She swallowed the last of her coffee without flinching, letting his warning sink deep. A faint smile ghosted across her lips. “That’s it,” she said, each word measured. “We’re getting to it.”

Bug’s jaw flexed, unease rippling beneath weathered skin. The lake’s hush pressed in on them, but between the two of them, the silence crackled.

“Did you make contact personally, or one of your people?” Bug asked.

“My agent in the city,” Jonquil replied, cool and distant as gathered smoke.

Bug’s eyes narrowed. “Not Iris, I hope? That woman’ll have you jumping around barking like a dog for sport!”

Jonquil snorted, a half-laugh. She risked a glance at him, the corner of her mouth twitching with reluctant agreement.

—

In the bookstore’s basement, Iris leaned against a battered jukebox, fingertip tracing dusty chrome. The air was thick with mildew, ink, and the metallic tang of old wiring. Fluorescent bulbs flickered overhead, humming like restless spirits.

“I wonder if this thing still works,” she murmured, voice low. A manicured nail tapped a faded title card: Arnold Layne. A slow smile curled her lips as she mouthed the name, eyes bright.

She pressed a button. A dull click echoed, gears whirring beneath the dust. Vinyl clattered into place.

“Don’t—don’t you dare—” Eli’s voice shredded the gloom. Boots scuffed concrete as he lunged from the shadows, sweat beading his forehead under the dim light.

Iris turned, cool as midnight, watching him approach. She let the speakers crackle to life, a warped guitar riff slicing through the air like a knife.

Eli halted, breath caught in his throat. The sound held him hostage, every nerve taut as a plucked wire.

“Arnold Layne had a strange hobby…” The lyric spilled from the small speakers, tinny and inevitable. Dust motes swirled in the beam of flickering light, drifting like lost memories.

Iris tilted her head, eyes never leaving his face—waiting for the moment the past would snap into focus.

—

On the far side of the lake, Jonquil froze mid-sip. At first she thought it was the scrape of dawn against stone, but then—faint, distorted, impossible—the opening riff of Arnold Layne crawled through the air like static on a dying radio.

Her hand tightened on the mug, knuckles whitening. Goosebumps blossomed along her arms as the melody haunted the silent morning.

“Way too soon, Iris,” she breathed.

Bug’s brush scratched canvas in steady strokes, oblivious—or willfully blind—to the tremor in her voice.

But the song lingered, a ghost bridging two worlds, threading Jonquil’s dread to Eli’s terror. The mountains exhaled around them, and the lake held its breath.

Author’s Note:
My editor called me after I released Litany in Black and simply said, “I want more!” So here’s the next chapter. I drew from Sadje’s WDYS #307 for the scenery and Fandango’s Story Starter #217 for inspiration.

As always, prompts like these push the story into corners I might not explore alone. Noir breathes in silence, in warnings half-heard, in the places where memory and dread overlap. That’s where Jonquil, Bug, Iris, and Eli are circling now.

If you’re new here, Litany in Black is part experiment, part confession: prompts, noir atmosphere, and a little madness stitched into something ongoing. If you’ve been here before, you know the deal—the coffee’s bitter, the ghosts don’t rest, and the story is never safe.

Thanks to Sadje and Fandango for throwing fuel on the fire. And thanks to you for reading, following the litany deeper.

Safe Word: Bibliography

2025/09/16Posted in SplintersTagged #FFFC, creative writing, daily exercise, flash fiction, Splinters, writing2 Comments

Becca only meant to peek at Advanced Thermodynamics for People Who Hate Numbers.
Page twelve snapped shut like a mousetrap—whump—and the textbook flopped over her like an ambush blanket.

The velvet sofa wheezed under the impact. Its cushions smelled of mothballs and forgotten tea, a floral musk that clung to her sweater like an old rumor.
“Great,” she muttered. “Death by glossary.”

Heat pulsed from the radiator in damp, metallic breaths. Pipes ticked like a patient metronome, marking every minute she wasn’t studying. Somewhere near her ankle, a silverfish scuttled a neat little patrol.

A soft rustle drew her eye to the far arm of the couch.
A gerbil—plump, cinnamon-colored, eyes like polished seeds—sat upright, paws folded as if grading her performance. Its nose twitched with microscopic authority.

“You ever feel like life is just one long footnote?” Becca asked.
The gerbil twitched.
“Like we keep collecting facts, but the story keeps editing itself?”
More twitching.
“Do you think entropy is personal? Because I feel personally attacked.”

The gerbil blinked once, whiskers vibrating like tuning forks.

“Fine,” she said, curling deeper beneath the book’s heavy cover. “Stay silent. Let the human do all the emotional labor.”

A dulcet, throat-lozenge cough broke the hush.
“Ma’am,” said the custodian, leaning on his mop like a philosopher king, “are you being… harassed by the literature?”

Becca peeked out, hair static-frizzed into a purple-green mushroom cloud.
“It’s consensual,” she deadpanned. “We’re workshopping an integrated learning experience.”

The custodian squinted. “Book club gone feral, huh?”

“Yeah. Safe word is bibliography.”

He gave a solemn nod and shuffled off, his squeaky shoes fading into the oak-paneled quiet.

Becca settled back, feeling the papery heartbeat of a thousand unread pages press against her ribs. Maybe surrender was just another kind of study session.

Somewhere in the folds, the book rustled and whispered,
“Shh. Plot twist incoming.”

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Chapter 2

The Room

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Chapter 1

The Sister

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Chapter 3

Author’s Note

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Chapter 2

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