My first record player was one of those Mickey Mouse things. I thought it was incredibly cool, back then. Now? I’ve probably lost several thousand cool points just for admitting this publicly. But that was the start—the first time I realized music could be mine, portable, spinning on plastic grooves under a cartoon mouse’s nose.
I never wondered about the first record player until years later, standing in a museum, staring at a Victrola like it had just rolled off a time machine. It was gorgeous—mahogany, brass, that air of weighty dignity machines used to have. And of course, the museum folks wouldn’t let me touch it. I was pissed. I ranted the whole way home, arms flailing like some deranged conductor, until my mother gave me that look that said, Boy, you’ve lost your damn mind. A look I would see many times over the years. My wife eventually perfected the same expression. Some conspiracies never die.
But that Victrola stuck with me.
A Box That Made Music Respectable
Before 1906, phonographs were awkward beasts. Giant horns jutting out like mechanical tumors, gathering dust and dominating living rooms. Eldridge R. Johnson—mechanic, dreamer, and founder of the Victor Talking Machine Company—had the audacity to fold the horn inside a cabinet. A simple trick of design that turned a noisy contraption into something you could sit beside polished furniture without shame.
It wasn’t just sound anymore. It was respectability.
The Price of Belonging
The first model, the VTLA, hit the market for $200—nearly half the average American’s yearly income. That’s about $5,700 today. Imagine explaining that to your spouse: “Honey, I spent half our wages on a box that sings.”
And yet every one of the first 500 units sold.
Because what people were really buying wasn’t a machine. They were buying belongings. Owning a Victrola meant you weren’t just grinding away at life—you were plugged into something larger, a signal that beauty belonged in your home.
Tone Doors, Drawers, and Dignity
The Victrola invented volume control—tone doors you could swing open for a flood of sound, or close when you didn’t want the neighbors to know you were spinning opera instead of hymns. It came with a drawer for needles, record storage built in, and even a lid to hush the surface noise.
What Johnson built wasn’t just a phonograph. It was an alibi. “See, dear—it’s furniture, not folly.”
From Freak Show to Fixture
By 1913, annual production had jumped to 250,000 units. The Victrola transformed the phonograph from curiosity to necessity. Music wasn’t just heard—it was hosted. Families gathered around it the way we gather around glowing screens today.
And the industry bent to Victor’s design. Competitors copied the hidden horn, patents expired, and suddenly, the parlor was the stage where the world’s voices arrived.
The Ghost in the Mahogany
That’s why I can’t shake the Victrola’s ghost. Because every time I hit play on Spotify, I feel it humming under the surface—the memory of when music had weight. When it wasn’t disposable, when it demanded space, when it carried dignity just by existing in the room.
My Mickey Mouse player may have sparked it, but the Victrola taught me the truth: music was never just about sound. It was about what you were willing to make room for.
And maybe that’s the real question—not what deserves that kind of space now, but what you’ve quietly pushed out to make room for noise.
Author’s Note
This piece was inspired by Jim Adams’s Thursday Inspiration #294 prompt: Suddenly. His weekly challenges have a way of shaking loose odd corners of memory and letting them bloom into something unexpected. Today it was a Mickey Mouse record player, a museum rant, and a Victrola that refused to leave my head.
As always, these posts are written as part of the ongoing experiment that is Memoirs of Madness—where history, memory, and a little grit collide. If the story sparks something for you, I’d love to hear it in the comments or see your own take on the prompt. Writing is always better when it’s a conversation, not a monologue.
Memoirs of Madness – Stories from the Edge of Change
Some stories ask to be written. Others sit beside you for a long time and wait until you’re ready to listen.
Stories from the Edge of Change wasn’t planned as a series. It started as a single image: a man sitting on a bench, cold coffee in one hand, a life’s worth of weight in the other. I didn’t know then that his name was Jake. I didn’t know about Dani. Or Angel. Or Finch.
I just knew the corner felt familiar.
And the more I stayed with it—the more I stayed with them—the more I realized this wasn’t just a set of character sketches. It was a reckoning. A quiet excavation. A window into lives we pass every day and rarely get to sit beside.
Writing Jake’s story—witnessing it—felt like a privilege. Not because he’s extraordinary. But because he isn’t. He’s the kind of man the world walks past. The kind who makes people uncomfortable because he reminds them what’s possible when the bottom falls out.
And still, somehow, he stayed.
Angel came next. Then Finch. Then Pete, who slipped in sideways, like most of the people who don’t want to be noticed but can’t stop bleeding the truth. I didn’t invent these characters. They arrived, piece by piece, in gestures and sidewalk cracks, in coffee steam and whispered meetings.
This arc became more than a series. It became a bench I didn’t want to leave.
I don’t know yet if there’s more to share from this world. But I do know there are more stories. I can feel them at the edge of things.
Maybe it’s Dani’s voice, finally stepping into the light. Maybe it’s Angel on a night shift, facing the silence Jake once did. Maybe it’s someone we haven’t met yet—sitting on the same corner, hoping someone looks up.
If these stories meant something to you—if they echoed or stirred something buried—let me know.
And if not? That’s okay, too. This wasn’t written for applause. It was written to hold a space.
Thank you for walking with me this far.
The corner’s quiet now. But it still remembers. And I’ll be here, in case someone else looks up.
The city’s traffic lights started blinking in Morse code, spelling out a warning almost no one could understand. Red. Green. Yellow. Not colors anymore—just pulses like a drunk heartbeat trying to send a message before flatlining.
I lit a cigarette I didn’t want. Rain kept it alive longer than it should’ve. People passed me like cattle, faces blue from their phones, all of them locked in their private prisons. Nobody looked up. Nobody saw.
The code spelled one word: WAIT.
So I did. For a breath. Maybe two. Then the crosswalk man glitched. Froze mid-step, legs twisted like snapped matchsticks, head stretched long enough to whisper a name I’d buried years ago. Nobody else twitched. Not even a pause in their stride.
The lights blinked again. WE.
A bus hissed through the intersection. Windows fogged, seats empty. Except the reflection waving from the glass wasn’t mine. Too many teeth. My hands were in my pockets. I didn’t wave back.
The smoke in my throat turned copper. Tasted like biting down on the city’s own wires. The rain stuck to me too long—warm, clingy, like breath on the back of my neck.
Another blink. Faster. WAIT. WE WAIT. INSIDE.
The crowd moved, blind, obedient. I stayed behind. The city didn’t need their eyes. It only needed mine.
And I knew then—whatever was inside the lights had been patient for years. And patience is the one thing I don’t have left.
Author’s Note It’s been raining here in my head for days. I came across this image, stared too long, and the city started talking back. Not in words, but in signals—broken, blinking, urgent. Madness has a way of showing up like that: subtle at first, quiet enough to miss if you’re sane.
This one was sparked by Fandango’s Story Starter—proof that sometimes all it takes is a single sentence to push the mind off balance and let the city whisper its warnings.
Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind — Entry 5
For years, the suitcase had slouched against the wall, olive canvas faded to the color of dead grass, as if weighed down by secrets. Mara learned to live around it. She told herself it wasn’t hers, not really—it was just another flaw inherited with the apartment, like the warped floorboards or the mildew that bloomed no matter how much bleach she poured. She built routines that ignored it: shuffling past on her way to the kitchen, bruising her shin on its bent wheel while juggling laundry, pretending its mute presence wasn’t following her from room to room.
By day, she worked in the customer service cubicle of a company that sold things no one really needed. Her headset buzzed with angry voices demanding refunds for trivialities: scratched coffee tables, missing screws, colors that didn’t match the brochure. She smiled at her monitor, mouthed apologies she didn’t feel, and counted the hours until she could slip away unnoticed. At night, she returned to her apartment and straightened it into submission—folding towels, smoothing the duvet, coaxing life from a wilting philodendron. Every act was an attempt to prove she still had control.
Her phone rarely lit up with messages. Friends had drifted off in the slow erosion of years, worn away by canceled plans and her tendency to withdraw. Lovers, when they existed, didn’t stay long; Mara always sensed the moment they realized her silences weren’t mysterious, just empty.
The suitcase became her only constant. Not with menace, exactly, but with the patient gravity of an old dog who refused to die. On the loneliest nights, when the city’s noise thinned to a faint hum and her reflection in the window looked more like a stranger than herself, Mara sometimes found comfort in its presence. A terrible comfort, born from the knowledge that if she disappeared tomorrow, someone would find the suitcase and wonder what it meant.
—
She told herself she would never open it. Whatever was inside belonged to some version of herself she had no interest in meeting. Better to let the past rot in peace.
Still, she caught herself circling it. Some nights she’d stand over it with a hand suspended above the clasps, her palm tingling as if braced for a static shock. She imagined sweaters matted with moths, photo albums swollen from rain, useless junk that had once mattered. But beneath those guesses lurked something heavier—the suspicion that the suitcase held not just things, but explanations.
On this December evening, the city outside hushed itself beneath its first snow, and the cold seeped inward until even the air felt brittle. Mara sat on the warped parquet floor, knees tucked tight, her breath fogging the space between her and the suitcase. The silence didn’t feel empty anymore; it pressed against her ribs, insistent, like a held note waiting to be released.
Her fingers found the clasps. She hesitated, pulse drumming in her ears, then pressed. The latch gave with a soft click—an exhalation, almost grateful. The suitcase opened with a muted thump against the wall.
Mara braced for the familiar debris of memory. Instead, the air thickened, sweetened, and began to move.
—
Out of the suitcase spilled green. Not color, but substance: vines, moss, leaves tumbling out in a delirious torrent, as if a dam had burst inside the canvas walls. The vines reached first for Mara’s wrists, curling with the intimacy of a lover’s grip, then crept up her sleeves before she could recoil.
The apartment began to betray her in increments. Carpet fizzed into moss, threads unraveling into living rootlets that burrowed deep into the warped floorboards. Table legs thickened, cracking as bark split through lacquer. Fungal blooms erupted from the bookshelves, pale caps pushing aside dog-eared paperbacks. The ceiling melted into sky—a blue so raw and immense it swallowed the dingy plaster whole.
The air grew dense, wetter, and alive with perfumes that should not coexist: loamy soil, crushed mint, the sweetness of rot, the ozone edge of lightning about to strike. Mara staggered as the scents layered, dizzy with the intoxication of it.
Then came the blossoms. Petals bloomed in fractal explosions—saffron edged in black, violet spirals furred like animal hides, blossoms so red they seemed to bleed. Some pulsed faintly, as if with heartbeats of their own.
Butterflies burst from the vines in a fever of wings, thousands lacquered in jewel tones. They whirled so thick they became a storm, each frantic flutter a whisper against her skin. A dozen landed at once—on her hands, her shoulders, her lips. One perched on her eyelid, its wings opening and closing with the slow rhythm of breathing.
She should have screamed. Instead, her breath came shallow, more awe than terror. For every heartbeat, the wild reached deeper.
Each leaf brushing her skin delivered not scratches but memories—her grandmother’s dough-soft hands kneading bread, her brother’s laughter ricocheting through a sunlit field, her father’s cough echoing down a sterile hospital corridor. The wilderness was rewriting her, splicing joy into wounds, editing her grief with gentler hands.
But wonder had teeth. In the corner of her vision, flowers gaped open to reveal centers ringed not with pollen but with minute, gnashing mouths. A patch of thistles dripped with sap the color of blood. A butterfly passed close enough for her to see one wing stitched together with spider silk, trembling under the effort of flight.
Above, something moved. Too heavy to be a bird, too fluid to be human—a colossal shifting presence that bent the canopy like a wave. She froze, pulse hammering, as the unseen thing exhaled a breath that rattled branches and sent shivers down her spine.
The vines around her ankles tightened, not cruel but unyielding, as if claiming her. The suitcase pulsed behind her like a second heart, no longer a container but a wound, hemorrhaging wilderness into the sterile apartment.
Mara drew in a breath thick with ozone and soil. For a moment, she could not tell whether she was breathing the wild in—or whether the wild was breathing her out.
—
Out of the suitcase unfurled green. Not just the color, but the thing itself: vines, moss, leaves in reckless abundance. They spilled from the hollowed interior with the momentum of a breached dam, clinging to her wrists, crawling up the sleeves of her sweater before she could react.
The rupture startled her so hard her body jolted, heart hammering in her throat as if the apartment itself had split at the seams. Vines surged, leaves and petals clawing into the stale air with a force that left her scrambling backward. For a moment, she could hardly breathe, the world too sudden, too alive.
But then the panic ebbed, steadied, and something else seeped in—calm, foreign yet familiar, like slipping into warm water after a long winter. The butterflies poured from the green in a thousand frantic flutters, their wings catching light that didn’t belong to her apartment, guiding her deeper into this breach. They circled her in loose spirals, herding without force, their chaos carrying a strange order.
One landed on her finger. Its wings pulsed open and shut, slow as breath. Mara froze, remembering the way she’d once cupped fireflies in her childhood palms, the glow painting her skin in fleeting constellations. Her mother had warned her not to hold them too tightly—fragile things needed room to breathe, to live. The memory stung and soothed at once, as if the butterfly itself had dredged it up to remind her: not everything she touched had to die in her hands.
The unease that had clung to her loosened, thread by thread, until what remained was something close to wonder.
Above her, the ceiling vanished, replaced by a canopy of impossible blue and the shimmer of a sun she’d never felt on her face. Somewhere in the new sky, birds cawed and something colossal moved just out of sight.
—
She considered her choices. She could claw her way back through that window, return to her apartment and its parade of quiet defeats—the warped floorboards, the mildew, the muted hum of survival. Or she could stay, let the wildness claim her entirely. For the first time in her life, she felt the weight of true agency. The knowledge that whatever she chose would shape not just her own story, but the world that had so unexpectedly chosen her in return.
The butterflies lifted from her skin, all at once, a living tide of color and motion, as if waiting for her verdict. Their wings beat like a thousand clocks, a patient chorus urging her to decide before time thinned and slipped away.
Mara drew a breath, the air thick with the scent of earth and unnamed flowers, as sweet and dangerous as desire itself. She closed her eyes, pressed the cold, smooth stone to her chest, and felt its weight resonate with every scar she’d carried.
Then she stepped forward into the meadow.
Behind her, the suitcase yawned wider, its frame trembling, the window flickering like a wound in the air—open for now, but unstable, its edges shivering as though the world itself strained to keep it alive. If she turned back too late, it would vanish, sealing her choice forever.
Still, Mara did not look over her shoulder. The suitcase, the apartment, the small life she’d managed to arrange from scraps—they belonged to a different woman, one who no longer existed.
The butterflies parted, clearing her path. The meadow stretched ahead in impossible bloom, humming with promise and peril alike. Somewhere beyond the trees, she thought she heard her true name whispered again, as if the realm itself was ready to receive her.
Mara kept walking.
—
The butterflies steadied her, their wings shimmering in fractured light. For every moment of unease—the vines clutching her ankles, the thorns whispering promises of pain—there came an answering wave of wonder. Her breathing slowed, steadier now, as if the air itself coaxed her into calm.
One butterfly, larger than the rest, descended with a gravity that felt almost deliberate. It landed on her finger, wings fanning like a heartbeat, fragile but certain. Mara stared, unable to look away. The soft pulse of its wings seemed to travel into her bones, reminding her that fragility and strength were not opposites but mirrors.
The unease inside her chest loosened, thread by thread, dissolving into awe. She lifted her hand, the butterfly clinging lightly, and for a heartbeat she forgot the apartment, the years of exhaustion, the muted repetition of survival. This was something else—something she’d longed for without ever naming.
She let the moment stretch. Around her, the wild hummed with unseen life, shadows flickering at the edge of vision, leaves trembling though there was no wind. The fear hadn’t vanished completely—it lingered like a low note beneath the music—but it was no longer in control.
Wonder was.
—
The meadow pulsed around her, as if the earth itself breathed beneath her feet. Butterflies circled in a golden storm, their wings beating in harmony with her racing heart. For a fleeting moment, Mara believed this was what she’d been waiting for all along—this impossible window into a world untouched by failure, regret, or the slow erosion of ordinary days. Here, every wound seemed rewritten in softer ink, every sorrow transfigured into beauty.
And yet, a tug—faint at first, then insistent—pulled her back. A thread wound tight through her chest, reminding her of the apartment that still held her life: the stubborn philodendron in its chipped pot, the stack of unpaid bills on the counter, the silence of rooms that did not breathe without her. She clutched the stone tighter, its cool weight pressing against her ribs like a verdict.
The butterflies parted, as if in recognition, opening a clear path back to the suitcase. The vines swayed, reluctant, but no longer holding her fast. She felt the ache of two worlds pulling at her—one shimmering with wonder, the other rooted in the grit of reality.
Her knees trembled. She thought of her mother’s voice, of promises she’d made to herself on nights when loneliness seemed like an endless horizon. She wanted to stay, to vanish into this dream that felt more like home than anything she’d ever known. But she also knew that surrendering here meant abandoning the fragile, stubborn parts of herself that had fought so hard to survive in the first place.
With a slow exhale, she stepped backward. The meadow dimmed, colors blurring at the edges. The butterflies scattered, frantic, then dissolved into motes of light. The vines loosened and retreated into the suitcase’s hollow, folding the wildness back into silence. For an instant, she thought she heard the trees sigh—disappointed, but not condemning.
Then it was gone. The apartment reasserted itself, grimy and familiar. The warped floorboards, the mildew’s sour tang, the cheap radiator knocking in protest. The suitcase sat slouched against the wall again, its clasps shut as though it had never opened.
Mara sank onto the floorboards, the stone still cradled in her palm. But when she opened her hand, she found nothing—only the imprint of its weight lingering on her skin. She closed her eyes, breathing in the stale air, and whispered to no one, “I’ll remember.”
It wasn’t surrender, not entirely. It was a compromise: to live in this reality, but to carry that meadow inside her, as proof that beauty—even dangerous, untamed beauty—could exist.
Author’s Note: I wanted to step sideways with this Dispatch—into a dream that feels like a window cracked open onto somewhere else. This one was sparked by Esther’s Writing Prompt, and I let the word window become a motif, threading itself through the story. Some pieces you write because the words won’t leave you alone. Others you write because you want to get lost in them and hope the world forgets your rent’s due. This was the latter. I needed a reminder that even the strangest worlds can feel like home for a little while. And maybe—just maybe—that’s the point: the magic’s not in whether it’s “real,” it’s in whether it leaves you blinking when you come back.
MoM Series: Stories from the Edge of Change – Part 5
Jake slipped back to Maple and 9th, just before the day’s first sirens. The sky was a cold bruise overhead—indigo leaking toward gray, the city below still sullen and half-swallowed by fog. Jake’s route here was always the same: the recycled bus air, the smell of new concrete and old bleach at the transfer station, the long walk down streets that still remembered him in all the wrong ways.
He’d liked it better in the days when a hangover let you lie to yourself. Being sober meant memory was out to get you, every hour of the day.
He hadn’t told anyone he was coming, and wasn’t sure anyone would care. Maple/9th wasn’t home, not really, but the corner had a way of calling him back when the rest of the world got too bright and too loud. Where everything had fractured. Where, by some backwards logic, something like a beginning had managed to dig in and take root, though even now Jake couldn’t explain why.
He stepped off the curb, the city unspooling around him in the blue-tinted hush of pre-dawn. Chains of streetlights blinked uncertainly overhead, fighting the thick mist that made them look like distant, drowned stars. Gutter water gurgled past slumped trash bags, and a wind—sharp and chemical, the kind you only got east of the river—whipped Jake’s soaked collar tight against his throat.
It had rained all night, the kind of slow, pounding storm that got past old window seals and filled alleys with shallow, fast-moving currents. His boots were soggy from the first block, each step a cold squelch that made him feel both present and exposed.
He carried a dented thermos of black coffee in one fist, and two foil-wrapped breakfast sandwiches in the other. Not an offering; nothing so grand. More like insurance, or ballast, a way to keep his hands busy while waiting for the morning to decide what kind of day it wanted to be.
Jake found his bench across from the bus stop, same warped planks as always, streaked deep with mildew and the ink of other people’s initials. He sat with a practiced slouch, elbows braced on thighs, letting the bench’s damp give him a chill. The wood was beaten soft by years of sun and rain and the pressure of bodies like his—bent, but holding.
The crust of the world here was thin. Every sound cut through. The city at this hour was a hungover beast, makeshift and miraculous: somewhere a dog barked in warning, a power transformer hummed in gradual crescendo, and a garbage truck, like the planet’s own heartbeat, thudded trash cans up and down the block.
Jake finished his first sandwich in three bites, washing it down with coffee so bitter it felt like punishment. He watched steam coil off the thermos and disappear.
He’d been clean for 343 days—he counted, because not counting was the first step to failure in his book—but the mornings punched hardest. Not cravings, exactly, but the thin, raw quiet where the old engine used to run. The ache was in the absence now, the stretches of time where nothing screamed at you from the inside.
He wondered if he was the only one who found the lack scarier than the compulsion.
People talk about recovery like it’s a sunrise, he’d heard at every group and meeting and shelter table in the city, but that was a lie. Recovery was more like hitting bottom, and instead of dying, realizing you were still clutching the shovel.
The old-timers called it “the work.” Jake wasn’t sure he believed in the work, but he did believe in gravity, and he knew how easy it was to fall back down the hole.
He wiped rain off his forehead and stared at the bus stop across the street. The city here was built in layers, old and new pressed together without much logic: a granite Gothic church wedged between a vape shop and an all-night copy center, tenements with windows starting to glow against the gray, stairwells already moving with the first shift crowds.
The light grew by inches. Jake’s eyes stung; he blinked, forcing himself to watch the street, not the rearview movie in his head.
A figure emerged from the alley behind the liquor store, hood low, gait ragged. Jake tensed—still, after all this time, the old alarms worked. Then he recognized the walk. Shoes caked in mud, chin up, hands buried deep in a jacket two sizes too big: Angel.
Angel had been a regular at the shelter through four of Jake’s own city-sponsored relapses, which made him family, or as close as anyone got these days. Compared to the Angel of last summer, this version moved with more purpose—less side-to-side drift, no fresh scabs or glassy stare. Angel’s jaw was bruised, but healing. The eyes were alert, focused, like he’d learned to see himself again.
They shared a nod—the kind that says, I see you and I know what you’ve been through, and also, let’s not make this a big deal. Angel slid onto the bench beside him, landed hard, and let his backpack fall at his feet. Water pooled around their boots, the surface speckled with cigarette ends, leaves, and plastic fork tines.
Neither of them spoke for a stretch. Jake thought about the time, months ago, when a rehab flyer had drifted down onto his lap from a passing outreach worker. He’d already been clean then—technically, anyway.
Time had a way of flattening out, making you forget how long you’d actually been at it. The city kept its own clock, indifferent to anniversaries. Some mornings, like this one, Jake felt it pressing in, the weight of nothing left to want except to stay above water.
Angel broke the silence first. “You been coming here a lot?” His voice was hoarse, wary, but there was something sturdy in it, too.
Jake shrugged, tracing a finger along the bench’s warped grain. “Now and then. Corner doesn’t judge.”
Angel pulled a sandwich from the foil and bit in, chewing slowly. “Doesn’t judge—but it remembers,” he said, mouth half-full. The words hung in the fog, true in a way that made Jake’s teeth ache.
They watched the city wake up. A woman jogged by—neon sneakers, rain-spattered leggings, earbuds locked into some other world. Down the block, a man in grimy overalls hosed vomit from the stoop of a shuttered bar, his movements quick and practiced. A bus hissed to a stop, doors gasping open. Nobody got on or off.
Jake passed the thermos to Angel, who sipped and grimaced. “You still at the center?” Angel asked.
Jake nodded toward the east, where the sunrise was starting to show. “Nights only. Fewer ghosts after midnight.”
Angel wiped his mouth with the back of a sleeve. “Heard you made it eleven months,” he said. Jake didn’t correct him; time was a rumor on the street. “I’m two months today,” Angel added, voice almost too soft to carry.
Jake tipped the thermos, spilling out a little coffee to mark the moment. “That’s something,” he said.
Angel stared out at the rising light, sandwich forgotten in his hand. “It feels like it could vanish any second,” he said. “Like, if I turn around too fast, it’ll all come back.”
Jake leaned back, the bench groaning under his weight. He studied the old traffic light—still stuck on red, despite the empty streets. “Sometimes it does,” he said, “but you don’t.”
The words were barely a whisper, but Angel nodded. They both knew the math: most of the people who made it this far didn’t stay far for long. The city was littered with their ghosts—names Jake remembered from the group, faces half-blurred by time and by the drugs that used to be his only way to see clearly.
Angel finished the sandwich and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Ever think about running?” he asked, eyes fixed on the pale clouds.
Jake didn’t have to ask where. “All the time.” He closed his eyes, felt the rain seep through his sleeves, and pictured a map with every city crossed out except this one.
Angel laughed, short and sharp—almost a bark. “I dream of a boat, man. Offshore. No laws, no meetings, nobody waiting to see if you fuck it up again.” There was a wildness in his voice, but also a kind of longing. Jake recognized it: the fantasy of disappearance, of finally outpacing your own story.
“You take yourself with you,” Jake said.
Angel let out a breath, not quite a sigh. “Yeah. That’s the problem.”
Across the street, a man in a threadbare hoodie sorted through a heap of cardboard, folding it into a sign. His hands shook just enough to notice. The buses kept rolling by, ignoring him. Jake watched as the man scrawled something—maybe a prayer, maybe a joke—across the cardboard and propped it up for the world to see.
Angel noticed, too. “You going to say something?” he asked.
Jake shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
He thought about it. “First time, nobody listens. You wait until they look up without asking. That’s when they’re ready.”
Angel stared at the man for a long time. “And if he never looks up?”
Jake pressed his boots flat against the concrete, feeling the water squish beneath the sole.
“Then we stay,” he said. “Until he does. Or until someone else comes along who knows how to wait.”
Angel didn’t answer. But he didn’t move either. That was enough.
There were mornings when Jake imagined leaving—not running, just… slipping away. Boarding a train headed somewhere nameless, getting on a boat, disappearing into the haze like an offshore storm no one tracks. But he never moved. Never packed. The fantasy was like a scar: it only hurt when you pressed.
He stayed because someone had once stayed for him. That’s all it had ever taken.
The bench creaked beneath his shifting weight. The corner, as always, said nothing. But it remembered.
And Jake—sober, scarred, still learning—remembered too.
🖋️ Final Author’s Note:
Today’s story incorporates the prompt words offshore, downpour, and creed from FOWC, RDP, and Word of the Day.
This marks the final chapter in the first arc of Stories from the Edge of Change, a MoM original series about survival without spectacle.
Jake didn’t get a miracle. He didn’t get closure. He got a bench, a corner, and a reason to stay long enough to matter.
Sometimes, that’s all we get. And sometimes, it’s enough.
When I was a kid, I wore out VHS tapes like other kids wore out sneakers. I’d rewind, replay, and rewind again until my mother finally snapped, “Lord, not this one again!” We laughed about it years later when my grandkids started doing the same thing — watching the same cartoon on loop until it could play without the TV being on. Obsession runs deep in this family.
Here are the ten films that got under my skin, refused to let go, and still pull me in every time I hit play.
Convoy (1978)
Kris Kristofferson, Ali MacGraw, and a convoy of truckers rolling across America, flipping the bird at authority with CB slang I barely understood.
I couldn’t tell you what hooked me harder — the radios, the semis, or the rebellion. I memorized lines, stomped around the house calling myself Rubber Duck, and believed a convoy of eighteen-wheelers could change the world. It’s not a cinema classic, but it speaks to the part of me that refuses to follow rules, even now.
A Piece of the Action (1977)
Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby playing con men forced to do some good — crime with a conscience, swagger with a side of redemption.
I worshipped Poitier, and seeing him in a lighter role felt like catching your dad cracking a joke when you weren’t supposed to. Cosby was a bonus — I’d worn out Himself on cassette a thousand times, so seeing him on screen was like déjà vu with moving pictures. Add James Earl Jones’s voice booming through the mix and Denise Nicholas as Poitier’s love interest, and I was sold. I didn’t see the social commentary back then — I was too busy grinning. Now, I see it plain as day.
The Chinese Connection (Fist of Fury, 1972)
Bruce Lee tearing through colonial arrogance, fists and fury flying like scripture.
My friends split down the middle: you were either the Six Million Dollar Man or Bruce Lee. I chose Lee every time. We practiced the moves, clumsy imitations in the yard, convinced we were dangerous. Only a handful of us ever stepped foot in a dojo, but the code, the discipline, the honor — that film planted it in me. I still practice martial arts, decades later, because of Bruce.
Blade Runner (1982)
Neon rain, broken people, and machines chasing something like a soul.
I shouldn’t have even been there. Bought a ticket to the godawful Gymkata, slid into Blade Runner like a thief. My first R-rated film on the big screen, and I was gone the second Deckard lit his cigarette. This wasn’t a movie — it was a world. I force-fed it to my kids like vegetables disguised as candy. Years later, one of my daughters called me the week 2049 dropped: “Dad, you ready?” You’re damn right I was. Some obsessions don’t fade. They get inherited.
Excalibur (1981)
Fog, blood, betrayal, and the gleam of steel. John Boorman’s fever dream of Arthurian legend.
This was my first taste of King Arthur, and it sunk deep. I’ve hunted down every Arthurian film since, stacked books on the legends in my house. But it wasn’t the spectacle that stuck — it was the idea of honor, devotion, and duty. It shaped how I thought a man was supposed to be. For better or worse, that sword still gleams in my head.
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Clint Eastwood spitting tobacco juice and cutting his way through the wreckage of the Civil War.
This wasn’t just my favorite Western — it became mine and my wife’s. We’d sit glued to the TV, watching it over and over until the dialogue was part of our marriage. Because of her, I learned to love Westerns in general. And every time I watch one now, I smile at the memory of her beside me. Clint Eastwood was a badass, sure — but she made the movie matter more.
Cooley High (1975)
Friendship, heartbreak, betrayal — and a Motown soundtrack to drown in.
This wasn’t just a movie; it was my life in another time and place. The music, the teenage angst, the betrayals that cut deeper than any knife — all of it felt too close to home. Even though it was set in the ’60s, it mirrored the world around me. It became a staple in the Black community, right up there with Shaft. And it still hits today, just as hard.
FM (1978)
DJs fighting corporate suits with nothing but vinyl and attitude.
I found this one through my mother’s soundtrack, then realized there was a whole movie attached. For a kid glued to the radio, it felt like God had delivered it straight to my TV. My buddy and I even launched a pirate station we called Q-Sky Radio. He didn’t know where I got the name. I smiled and let him think it was his idea. That love of music never left, and I’d argue FM is part of why House of Tunage even exists today. This movie is my jam, then and now.
The Wanderers (1979)
Bronx gangs, doo-wop on the jukebox, swagger and fists flying at the edge of an era.
Everyone around me worshipped The Warriors — and I did too — but The Wanderers dug under my skin in a different way. Maybe it was the sense of a world dying, of everything you know mutating into something unfamiliar and scary. It taught me that you either shrink back or walk forward into the unknown. I chose forward. I’ve read the book five times at least, and it still hits differently than the film, but just as hard.
Lady Sings the Blues (1972)
Diana Ross as Billie Holiday, Billy Dee Williams smooth as glass, Richard Pryor burning in every scene.
My mom loved Diana Ross, so I sat through this film with her more times than I can count. I didn’t share her love for Ross, but Billie Holiday got her hooks in me. Later, I told that story to my wife, and she showed up with two CDs: Lady Sings Jazz and Blues by Diana Ross and a Billie Holiday collection. She knew me better than I knew myself sometimes. Man, I loved that woman.
Closing Reflection
These weren’t just movies. They were obsessions. They taught me about rebellion, loyalty, heartbreak, and survival before I even had the language for it. My mom teased me for playing them to death, but when I watch my grandchildren loop the same film until it frays, I can’t help but smile. The cycle continues. Different movies, same obsession. And maybe that’s what cinema really is — a mirror we pass down, cracked and glowing, frame by frame.
Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind – Entry IV
I’ve spent twenty-five years wandering the constellations of dust that pass for towns in these parts, chasing rumors of justice across salt flats and sun-stained mesas, my hand welded to the only gospel this world respects—cold iron, burnished to a black shine by blood and the desert’s endless hunger. Every dawn, I’d cinch a deadman’s resolve around my ribs and tell myself I was the steady hand in a world built on bad intentions, that each finger’s pressure on a trigger could tip the scales back toward something like decency. But time—time is a lizard’s tongue: flicking, unseen, snatching up the moments until you’re left staring at a husk, trying to remember how you ever filled it. Sooner or later, you see it for what it is: a young man’s dare delivered to the gods, a clumsy ballet of violence dressed up as virtue, death’s grand masquerade with your own face under the mask.
The desert kept its own ledger, written in wind and stone. Rivers shrank to scars, and every town I passed through felt like a graveyard waiting for names. Vultures taught me patience better than any preacher, circling in their slow sermons, never rushing what they knew was inevitable. Out here, the land didn’t just watch—it judged. Every canyon whispered back the sound of your gun, long after the body cooled.
Every soul I ushered into the hush had a name—sometimes carved on a tin badge, more often graven into the blue-black veins of the territory’s memory, where the ghosts stacked up like poker chips. I tried to keep them at a distance, let the desert swallow their last words before they could echo. But there is no distance in these plains, only the illusion of it. You run a man down at noon, the dust still wet with his shadow, and by sundown your own shadow’s right there beside his, stitched together over the dirt. I told myself numbness was a tool, a way to keep the tremor out of my hand, but numbness is a kind of debt, and the interest compounds in silence. I was too busy forging my legend—chiseled in the splinters of busted up saloons and the blue smoke curling from spent casings—to notice what I’d mortgaged away.
So now I’m the last dog in the fight, nothing left but a brittle skeleton propped against a fence post, watching the horizon try to out-bleed itself every evening, waiting for the sun to name one color I haven’t seen a man die in. I count the ghosts that trail me like some biblical plague, each one a mile marker on the road I can’t stop walking.
Just crawled out of a dime stretch—ten years locked inside iron and spit, with only the slow creep of rust and regret for company—but that’s pocket change compared to the ledger I keep in my head, a ledger no warden’s key will ever unlock. The past doesn’t loosen its grip; if anything, it tightens until you can’t tell your own pulse from the memory of someone else’s. Out here, they call me a legend, a walking parable, the old coyote that’s outlived every snare and bullet. But legends are just stories that haven’t had their endings written yet. The endings always come, and they are never kind.
Once, a boy no older than my own reflection at nineteen tried to catch me in the middle of a mud street. His hat was too big, his holster too stiff. I watched his lip tremble before his hand even twitched. And in that stutter of fear, I saw myself—hungry, stupid, convinced the world owed me immortality. I let him draw first, because mercy was a luxury neither of us could afford. When he fell, I felt no triumph, only recognition. The desert doesn’t make room for fathers, only mirrors.
There is a whole generation of greenhorns—some with badges, some with nothing but their mother’s borrowed last name—who’d sleep sweeter with my scalp nailed to their saddle horn. Each one wants to be the one to rewrite the myth: to show the world the old king had no teeth left, that even legends can bleed. What they don’t see is that the fire never really dies, it just settles into the bones. They walk up fast, hot with the promise of their own immortality, and they think the shaking in my hands is age, not anticipation.
Justice—my old, two-faced companion—watches from the back of every whiskey glass and midnight mirror. When I was young, he sat shotgun, fed me lies about glory and honor and the clean line between good men and bad. But that line was always drawn in sand, and every storm I weathered blurred it until no one remembered which side they started on. Now he hides behind the badge, jeering at me from the safety of his armchair, pretending he wasn’t the one who put the first pistol in my grip. Hypocrite. He wants to see me pay for my excesses, but he forgets: I always paid in advance.
When the night rolls over the land and the wind starts to howl like an orphaned child, the voices come crawling in from the edges. “Was it worth it?” they ask, breathless, persistent, soft as the moths in the old preacher’s study. Worth the empty chairs at dinner tables, the widows with nothing left but a wedding ring and a story? Worth the holes I punched in the world, the ones I never bothered to fill back in? I’ve no answer for them, and by now I doubt I’ll ever find one. Only this: the world is made of debts, and violence always knows where to send the bill.
These days, even my dreams betray me. No sweet lies, no gentle horizons—only the endless replay of gunfire, a carousel of faces turning toward me in their last astonishment. Sometimes I wonder if I’d even know what rest felt like, if peace ever did arrive. Maybe I’d flinch from it, the way a stray dog flinches from kindness.
Tonight, I can feel it: the ledger’s come due. The sky above is swept clean and hard as flint, the air stinking of cordite and things long dead. I lie here, spine pressed to the living earth, the stars blinking overhead like a jury summoned to pass sentence. My hand’s locked around the iron, the heat of the last shot still ghosting up through the barrel. Around me, the sand is pitted and blackened, marking the places where hope gave up and history picked up the slack.
This is what justice looks like, in the end: a man alone, weapon cooling, waiting for the world to decide if his next breath will matter. For a heartbeat, everything holds still. The air itself is an intake of judgment.
Will they let me die with my boots on? Will the dead finally cut me some slack and let me drift into whatever comes next? Or will the world keep chasing me, day after day, circle after circle, like a dog gnawing a bone it’ll never finish?
I laugh—a dry, cracking thing that feels like it might shatter my teeth. It’s the laugh of a child who’s seen the trick behind the magic, the snort that follows every preacher’s sermon. Life and death, justice and sin: all of it a rigged game, played out over and over until the deck wears thin.
I should be afraid. I should pray. But all I feel is the deep drag of exhaustion and, maybe, the faint warmth of something like relief.
But peace—peace’s for fools, for greenhorns and saints, not the likes of me. Not a man who emptied his promise to the desert and let it keep the change.
I close my eyes and try to shoulder the weight of every life I ever took, every mile I rode with justice whispering fever-dreams in my ear. Maybe there’s a way out. Maybe there isn’t.
Either way, I’ll keep my iron close and my eyes open. In this world, justice is just another word for a story that won’t end, and legends—they never really die.
They just get older, and a little sadder, and wait for the next bullet to teach them something new.
They just keep glancing over their shoulders, waiting for the next bullet.
Author’s Note
Another ride through the dust for Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind. This one lives in the twilight—half confession, half reckoning—an old gunslinger’s ledger of debts that can never be balanced. The West here isn’t about glory or the last man standing; it’s about the silence that follows every shot, the weight of a myth too heavy to carry. Maybe you’ll hear echoes of your own shadows in his words, or maybe you’ll just taste the grit of the desert wind on your teeth. Either way, this dispatch isn’t about answers—it’s about what’s left when the smoke clears.
MoM Series: Stories from the Edge of Change – Part 4
Jake worked nights.
He liked the quiet. Fewer eyes. Less explaining to do. The outreach center kept him on the roster as a volunteer—two days a week, graveyard shift. It was mostly sweeping, coffee refills, folding blankets, and unlocking doors when someone showed up crying, shaking, or bleeding. They didn’t advertise the hours. The ones who needed it already knew.
He didn’t talk much to the clients. Just nodded. Kept his voice low. Gave out clean socks and disposable razors, and sometimes leftover sandwiches if the early crew hadn’t raided the fridge. A woman once called him a ghost in a hoodie. He took it as a compliment.
They didn’t know his history.
Most of the staff thought he was someone’s cousin. Someone in the program. He was both, in a way. Still figuring out what version of himself was worth keeping. He told the director he didn’t want to lead groups or give speeches. He just wanted to stay close to the door—for the ones who weren’t ready to walk through it alone.
That night, it was cold again. Not dramatic. Not headline cold. Just the kind that seeps through your boots and settles in your bones. The kind that makes concrete ache. Jake had learned the difference between degrees that made headlines and those that just broke people.
He was wiping down the intake counter when the door buzzer snapped.
The front desk kid—a college intern with a buzzcut and the stubborn optimism of someone who hadn’t failed big yet—waved him over.
“Guy outside’s got no ID. Twitchy. Keeps asking for someone named Pete. Said you’d know what that means.”
Jake’s stomach knotted. He did.
Pete had been there in Jake’s first rehab stint—loud, bitter, always quick to spot your softest spot and stomp on it. He was the kind of man who’d mock your breakdown and then sit with you on the curb afterward, passing a half-smoked cigarette like it was communion.
They’d had a moment, months ago, after the group. Pete had come apart in the stairwell, cracked wide open from something the counselor said about fatherhood. Jake had sat next to him, quiet. Didn’t try to fix it. Just stayed.
That was the last time he’d seen him.
Now Pete was back. Gaunt. Twitching. Cheeks hollowed like spoons. His hoodie was soaked around the collar, eyes glazed like bad glass.
Jake opened the door.
Pete stumbled in, clothes clinging wet. The rainfall outside had picked up, soft but relentless. He looked like a man who’d slept under bridges and crawled out just long enough to fall again.
“Shit, man,” Pete mumbled. “Didn’t know where else to go.”
Jake didn’t answer right away. The smell of damp wool and stale sweat filled the gap between them. Pete’s arms trembled at his sides like he was holding invisible weights.
“Come in,” Jake said. “You need a blanket?”
Pete blinked. “You still here?”
“Still here.”
They sat him down. Pete wouldn’t sign the detox papers. Said he just wanted warmth. Just wanted to sit somewhere without a knife in his back or a siren in his ear. Jake gave him coffee. Black. No sugar. His hands were shaking so bad that half of it sloshed onto the floor.
“I was clean,” Pete muttered. “Six months. Then my brother died in a car crash. I don’t even cry. Just go buy a bottle like I’m on autopilot.”
Jake said nothing. Let him say it without interruption.
“I thought I was good, like I was done paying. Like I was… exempt.” He laughed once. It cracked like a cough. “Grief doesn’t work like that. No punch card. No discounts.”
Outside, the rainfall whispered against the windows. Steady. Relentless. A low percussion against the building.
Jake thought of that phrase Pete used to say in rehab. “You want grace? Get a dog.” He understood now. Grace wasn’t something you earned. It was something that showed up when you didn’t run from the stoop.
Later, when Pete fell asleep curled around a donated coat, Jake stepped outside. The pavement was slick with oil and rain. Steam rose from the sewer grates like the city was exhaling something it didn’t need anymore.
He didn’t feel proud. Didn’t feel like a hero. He just felt… rooted. Present. Like a chair that had stopped wobbling.
Some nights, that was enough.
🖋️ Author’s Note:
Written for today’s FOWC, RDP, and Word of the Day prompts: stoop, rainfall, and pavement.
Second Shift is part of Stories from the Edge of Change, a series about quiet recoveries, unglamorous grace, and showing up when there’s nothing left to prove. Sometimes, staying close to the door is the most radical thing you can do.
Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind – Entry III
Some storms don’t soak the skin. They reach inside and drown the marrow.
Tonight the rain falls with the weight of a kept promise. It doesn’t descend so much as push down, insist on itself, fill the air until breathing becomes an act of resistance. The umbrella in my hand is a thin, trembling continent; its black fabric funnels water into dark rivers that spill from the ribs and rope to the ground, drawing vertical lines that feel like tally marks. Somewhere I’m being counted.
The street has shrugged off its people. Windows glow, then look away. Streetlights smear halos on the mist like saints who regret their own patience. My coat is heavy enough to qualify as armor but still lets the cold in—through the seams, through that spot between the shoulder blades where water always finds a shortcut. The storm carries the smells I grew up trusting: iron, pavement, the faint algae note of gutters choked with last year’s leaves. Petrichor is what it’s called when rain wakes dust. This isn’t that. This is the breath of basements, of clocks that stopped and never got restarted.
Most people say storms cleanse. They don’t. Storms etch. They score the world and leave grooves for the next one to follow. Memory works the same way. Once a path is cut, the water takes it again and again, deepening it until it becomes a canyon, and you call it fate.
I tell myself I walk for the exercise, for the chill that makes coffee taste better when I get back. The sidewalk knows the truth. Each step lands with a small slap like a hand refusing to be held, and every slap says a name I don’t let my mouth say. I keep the umbrella low. Its edge makes a moving curtain; beyond it the world is a stage I decline to enter.
The rain speaks in small questions, a whisper pressed to the cartilage of my ear. Why carry ghosts in your pockets? Whose absence is shaped so perfectly you keep mistaking it for a lung? How long can you pretend the storm is a sky problem and not an internal climate?
I don’t answer. Some questions aren’t interrogations; they’re companionship. They walk beside you until you forget whose footsteps are whose.
Water beads on my knuckles, then threads down my wrist, finds the cuff, and hides there. My fingers have gone bone-white at the tips; the skin looks borrowed from an antique photograph. I switch the umbrella from one hand to the other, and the frame shivers, a metal insect deciding to live. At the end of the block, a bus sighs at a stop devoid of bodies, doors wheezing open and shut as if practicing a conversation it will never have.
I turn toward the river because storms like edges, and I like to know where mine are. The path down to the water is a sheet of black glass scratched with gravel. Headlights pass behind me; their light arrives a breath late, as if slogging through syrup. I don’t look back. Looking back is a hobby that requires drier weather.
At the railing, the river is all sound—slap and suck, slap and suck—the old mouth of the city learning, forgetting, relearning the same word. I lean the umbrella to the wind, and the rain repositions itself like a cat denied a lap. It finds my cheek. It salts my mouth with a taste like pennies. The umbrella is darker at the seams, as if it has a memory of other storms and the memory is leaking through.
When I was small, thunder meant counting. Lightning was the beginning of a math problem: one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, the exact distance between flash and sound giving the gloom a measurable spine. The grown-ups said the counting made it less scary. They were wrong. It made it precise. Fear wears a suit better than it wears a costume.
The river throws back a warped copy of the sky and, inside that copy, a copy of me: a shadow under a shadow, face freckled with rain that refuses to choose a direction. The umbrella’s edge drips like ink. If I stared long enough, I’m sure the drips would form letters, and if I read them, they would say the exact sentence I’ve been dodging since the hospital room went quiet. I look away.
A figure moves under a distant awning—just a darker shape tucked against a wall—but the storm has trained my nerves to salute things that might become stories. It’s nothing: a stack of plastic chairs shrink-wrapped for the season, the blue sheen of water making their edges animate. I laugh once at myself, and even the sound is wet.
I walk on, because the body hates stasis more than it hates weather. The umbrella tugs at my shoulder with the low, dull impatience of a dog that knows the route better than you do. The wind changes, and I tilt to keep the edge against it; the whole world follows the same choreography, heads bending in the same direction, rain showing us how obedient we can be. Somewhere a shutter slams, the beat so regular it could be a heart or a metronome or the conversation of two neighbors who never liked each other and never will.
The storm consults its ledger and turns a page.
I remember a kitchen on a morning that wasn’t raining. A mug warm in both hands. The door opened a crack because someone kept promising they were only stepping out for a second, and the air didn’t believe them. I remember the way your umbrella leaned by that door: a black spine, a curved handle, nothing special until it was. I remember how an object becomes a relic without changing its weight.
Thunder rolls itself across the city like a drunk trying to find the couch. I count u—no. I stop. I let it arrive when it arrives. The rain thickens as if consistency can be argued into existence. A seam gives way; a bead becomes a string becomes a thread that refuses to break. Water starts a new river down the inside of my sleeve. I could be angry about it. I let it have me. There are defeats that feel like permission.
Halfway back from the river, a dog materializes from the blur. Yellow eyes, coat the color of soaked cardboard, not close enough to touch or call a breed. It considers the umbrella with the careful contempt of a creature that prefers honest weather. For a second, I think it will fall beside me, become a sentence in this night that makes the ending feel earned. It snorts rain out of its nose and vanishes between parked cars, a ghost that refuses the job.
There’s a scent here I can’t place at first, sweet and wrong. Then the wind angles and the bakery on Third breathes out its late-night hymn: sugar, yeast, something caramelizing into morning. The storm catches it and ruins it to perfection, the way a good sadness ruins a good song. My stomach remembers hunger. My mouth doesn’t.
I pass the pharmacy where the lights never sleep and the aisles are organized into the many ways a human can try to manage a body. A cardboard cutout smiles behind glass, offering discounts to the version of me who believes relief comes with a barcode. I keep moving because the storm makes shoppers into fish, mouths opening and closing on hooks they can’t see.
By the time I reach the long, unclaimed wall that smells like damp chalk, the umbrella has become less a shelter than a prop. The fabric sags. The ribs press through like bones, attempting to confess. The handle is slick between my fingers; each step tightens my grip until I think of all the things I held like this that weren’t designed to be held so hard. Another seam lets go. The drip from the edge becomes a fringe.
I stop. The storm doesn’t.
There’s a moment in every walk where the umbrella becomes the negotiation instead of the weather. Do I keep the pretense? Do I bow to pure utility? Do I admit I was never trying not to get wet—I was trying to look like a person who knows how to behave when the sky loses composure?
I close the umbrella.
The world arrives all at once. Rain tattoos my scalp. It pounds my coat into submission. My breath goes winter in my throat. Without the fabric’s invented horizon, the street expands; space stratifies into layers of falling, and I stand inside the waterfall the city pretends to be. The cold is immediate and honest. For a second, I’m a bell that’s just been struck.
It’s louder without the umbrella’s drum-skin. The storm’s voice loses its mutter and speaks plainly. You are not special, it says, which is not cruel. You are not being punished, which is not comforting. You are weather, which might be both.
I tilt my face up. Raindrops hit the soft parts first: eyelids, lips, the tender seam where nose meets cheek. Each one is a document signed by pressure. They run into my mouth and turn language into an optional feature. I swallow some. I let the rest choose their exit routes.
When I open my eyes, a reflection waits in the blank glass of the office building across the street. It’s me, of course, reduced to two tones and the blur of falling lines. But in the pane beside mine, there’s another me, half a step out of sync, hair pasted against a forehead I don’t admit to, mouth a different shape. We stand together, both of us soaking, both of us looking like a problem that finally stopped pretending it had a solution. When I lift a hand, she doesn’t. We agree to ignore the difference.
The rain thins, not because the storm has decided to be kind but because it has done what it came to do. The grooves are deeper now. The next pass will find them without effort. Water slackens from torrent to conversation. Far away, a siren remembers it is a note and ends like one. I open the umbrella again, not because I need it but because carrying it closed feels like an argument I didn’t mean to win.
I cut back toward home through the block nobody chooses unless they live on it. The shutters have found their rhythm. The bus has given up. The bakery exhales one last sweet breath before morning takes the shift. My shoes report their failures. My coat, relieved of drowning, becomes merely heavy. I am etched, but upright.
At the corner, a streetlight clicks off mid-sentence, and the dark it leaves behind is not empty; it is honest. I stand in it for a count of ten, the way I used to stand behind the door for hide-and-seek, pretending the game wasn’t rigged by the size of the room. When I step out, the light wakes as if I’d taken something from it and it had questions. I don’t answer. I give it my back and my rain and the slow swing of the umbrella’s weight.
Storms end. They always do. The air will be washed, and new people will step into it and call it clean because they weren’t there to feel the drowning. But the grooves remain. Bone remembers. Roads keep secrets in their cracks. The next sky will know where to pour.
By the time my key finds the lock, the rain is a fine whispering. I hang the umbrella by the door, a black spine cured of ambition. It drips politely onto the tray that exists to forgive it. Inside, the room reeks of heat and old paper, and the first thing that comes to mind is dry. I strip the coat, peel off the sleeves that turned river, and stand listening to the last of the storm speaking to the window. It’s only water, it says. It’s only weather. And yet.
I breathe. The breath goes all the way down. It finds the places the rain found and settles there like a treaty.
In the morning, no one will believe the sky ever weighed this much. That’s fine. The street will carry the record for me. The umbrella will remember. My bones have been engraved with tonight’s handwriting, and the next time the ceiling opens, I’ll step outside already fluent.
Author’s Note: Third splinter. Storms don’t absolve; they annotate. If you walk long enough, you learn to read the margins.
I used to treat setting like an afterthought—slap a name on a town, maybe add a landmark, and call it done. But by accident, I stumbled into a book on worldbuilding, and it flipped something in me. Now I see the world itself as a character, one that presses against the protagonist and antagonist alike. The streets breathe. The shadows crawl. The town isn’t just where the story happens—it is the story. Almost like the place itself is the boogeyman lurking in the dark. And honestly, that’s what I enjoy most right now: shaping a world that fights back.
I didn’t just sit at a desk and invent details out of thin air. I pulled out a notebook, stacked up the photos from my travels, and let the world start whispering. I’ve crossed oceans, driven the continental United States, and every stop—whether a dusty diner, a half-broken neon sign, or a small-town mural—carries something worth keeping. This time, instead of pushing the idea of “place” aside, I leaned into it. Notes piled up. History mixed with imagination. Articles, old texts, even scraps of folklore—they all became raw material. Slowly, the world started to take on a pulse of its own.
The most interesting part of my travels has never been the landmarks—it’s the people. Their traits, the way they speak, even the rhythm of how they move through the world—all of it has the potential to slip into one of my characters. The world itself is beautiful, yes, but it’s the hidden histories that take my breath away. I don’t announce my sources, but my binders are crammed with notes—detailed, cited, cross-referenced, tabbed like I’m building my own private archive. The research takes longer than the writing, and I don’t mind. Once I get my hands on a piece of history, I can twist it, bend it, or use it in ways it was never meant to be used. That’s the thrill—watching a small discovery push a story into a direction I never planned.
What I’ve discovered is that if you build a world properly, it doesn’t just hold one story—it can hold a whole series of them. A single town, mapped and breathing, can stretch into multiple narratives, each pulling from the same veins of history, rumor, and atmosphere. That’s the real joy for me right now: knowing the work I put into one world can echo across stories, creating a place readers can return to, and a place I never quite finish exploring myself.
The positive emotion I feel most often is contentment. I’m not one of those sunshine-all-the-time people, and I’m not walking around mad at the world either. I land somewhere in the middle. When I finish a project and it matches the standard I set for myself, that’s when it hits. Not as fireworks, not as a euphoric high—more like a long exhale.
Most of my life, I pushed things to the edge just to get by, so being content feels like a win. It means I don’t have to live in constant overdrive. It’s not about chasing joy or ducking pain—it’s about recognizing that “enough” can be its own kind of peace. And I’ll take that over chaos any day.
There’s no shortage of nifty acronyms about goals floating around the internet. Toss a dart and you’ll hit one.
When I was growing up, we didn’t talk about “goals.” We had tasks. You made a checklist, worked through it, and crossed things off. Simple. Direct. No mysticism, no motivational posters required.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I started hearing people talk about “goals” like they were magic spells. Set your goals, visualize them, and manifest your dreams. Cute. But does anyone ever stop to ask what the hell a “goal” actually means? Does it have a deadline? A measure? Or is it just a vague wish written in business casual?
When I was in the military, I leaned hard on the task-oriented system. Every mission boiled down to clear tasks that could be checked, tracked, and rechecked. Later, when I moved into social services, my organization introduced another acronym: S.M.A.R.T. goals. At first, I hated it. Not because the form was broken, but because the instructions were. People filled it out and treated it like a box-checking exercise.
So, I started using it alongside my task-oriented system. That’s when it clicked. Paired with a real process, S.M.A.R.T. stopped being fluff and started being functional.
What the Hell Are S.M.A.R.T. Goals?
It’s simple:
S – Specific: Clearly define what you want to accomplish.
M – Measurable: You can track it — numbers don’t lie.
A – Achievable: Ambitious, not impossible.
R – Relevant: It actually matters to you.
T – Time-bound: A finish line, not “someday.”
That’s it. Straightforward enough. But the trick is using it right.
How to Use Them Effectively
Most people treat S.M.A.R.T. like a worksheet you fill out and forget. That’s not planning — that’s paperwork.
Here’s what makes it actually work:
Break it into tasks. A goal is only real if you can do something today that moves it forward.
Apply P.A.C.E. thinking. Your Primary plan, Alternate options, Contingency if things shift, and Emergency fallback. Same system I use for emergency preparedness.
Review often. If you never check the plan, it dies on the page.
Real-World Example: Writing
Vague goal: “I want to write more.”
S.M.A.R.T. goal:
Specific: Publish one blog post per week on Memoirs of Madness.
Measurable: One a week = 4 per month.
Achievable: Realistic with your schedule.
Relevant: Writing sharpens your craft and feeds the community.
Time-bound: Do this for 12 weeks, then review.
P.A.C.E. it?
Primary: Write at your desk on schedule.
Alternate: Draft on your phone if you’re away.
Contingency: Record a voice memo, transcribe later.
Emergency: Jot bullet points in a notebook — messy but usable.
Suddenly, “write more” isn’t a dream. It’s a system you can actually work.
Real-World Example: Preparedness
Vague goal: “I want to be ready for blackouts.”
S.M.A.R.T. goal:
Specific: Build a 72-hour blackout kit with food, water, and lighting.
Measurable: 3 gallons of water, 9 meals, 3 working lights.
Achievable: Start with basic supplies, expand later.
Relevant: Storm season hits every year — this matters.
Time-bound: Have it assembled in 30 days.
P.A.C.E. it?
Primary: Store kit in the house.
Alternate: Keep a smaller kit in the car.
Contingency: Borrow or share with neighbors if needed.
Emergency: Improvise with what’s on hand — but only if you must.
Now, you’re not just “hoping to be ready.” You’ve got a clear target with backup layers.
Final Word
S.M.A.R.T. goals aren’t magic. They’re not perfect either. But paired with tasks and P.A.C.E. thinking, they actually become useful.
Because at the end of the day, a goal isn’t about the acronym. It’s about whether you can move it from “idea” to “done.”
Question for You: When you set a goal, do you actually break it down into tasks, or does it stay a vague idea floating around in your head? And if you’ve ever used something like S.M.A.R.T. goals — did it actually help, or did it feel like just another form to fill out?
When I was in the military, I used P.A.C.E. more times than I can count. We prepared, checked, and rechecked things to the extreme. We did this because we had to — failure wasn’t an option.
Fast forward a few years. I’m out of the service, living civilian life, and a nasty storm rolls through. Most of the city lost power for days. Some parts stayed dark for weeks. Suddenly, all that military planning muscle memory kicked in. I had to reach into my trusty bag of tricks. Yeah, that’s right — I was doing some Felix the Cat shit.
That’s the thing about P.A.C.E. — Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency — it’s not just for the battlefield. It works anywhere you need layered backup plans… like when the lights go out and stay out.
The idea is simple:
Primary – The way you expect it to work.
Alternate – The way you hope you won’t need, but will use if the first fails.
Contingency – The way you grit your teeth and say, “Well, this sucks, but it’ll do.”
Emergency – Last-ditch survival mode when the universe has gone full chaos.
Let’s run it through a blackout scenario — focusing on keeping in touch and keeping the lights (or at least the coffee) on.
Primary – Your Everyday Comfort Zone
Communications: Cell phone + home Wi-Fi. Group texts. Video calls. Social media doomscrolling while you wait for the lights to flicker back on. Power Strategy: Lights work. Outlets work. Your devices are charged without you even thinking about it.
Enjoy it. It’s your baseline. But don’t assume it’ll last forever.
Alternate – When the Obvious Fails
Communications: The Wi-Fi’s dead, and cell towers are overloaded. You switch to a fully charged power bank, use text instead of calls (less bandwidth), and if you’ve got one, a GMRS or FRS radio for local chatter.
Power Strategy:
Portable Power Stations – Bigger than a phone power bank, these can run small appliances, recharge laptops, and keep lights on.
Vehicle Charging – A car inverter can power essentials if you have gas in the tank.
Rechargeable Flashlights & Lanterns – No hunting for batteries in the dark. Just remember: unplug them once they’re fully charged to keep the battery healthy and extend its life. If the device allows, consider buying a spare rechargeable battery so you’re never stuck waiting for one to charge.
Pro Tip: If you’ve got a local battery repair shop, get to know them. I’ve used mine for years to rebuild batteries for gear most people would just toss. Odds are, there’s one in your area too — and they can save you money and keep your kit ready for the next outage.
Question for You: When was the last time you actually checked your power banks or battery supplies? If you had to use them right now, would they be ready — or dead as door knobs?
Contingency – The “We’re Really Doing This” Stage
Communications: Phones are dead. Radios are on low battery. This is where pre-arranged meeting times, printed maps, and low-power radios (kept in reserve) come in. Maybe you’ve even stashed a cheap prepaid phone with a different carrier for coverage overlap.
Power Strategy:
Solar Chargers & Panels – Even small foldable panels can keep radios, lights, and phones alive indefinitely — as long as you have sunlight.
Crank-Powered Gear – Flashlights, radios, and USB chargers that work with a hand crank. No sunshine? No problem.
Rechargeable Lanterns – Longer runtime and more coverage than a flashlight, and most can be topped off from a power bank or solar panel.
This is when people who didn’t plan start borrowing from people who did. Don’t be the borrower.
Question for You: If you have an Emergency Preparedness Plan, when was the last time you actually pulled it out and checked things? Plans don’t work if they live in a drawer collecting dust.
Emergency – Last-Ditch Survival
Communications: Nothing electronic works. You send a neighbor to check on your sister across town. You use whistles or flashlight signals after dark.
Power Strategy: It’s no longer about powering gadgets — it’s about heat, light, and cooking enough to keep going. Fire pit, layered clothing, shared shelter.
For lights inside the house, I’ve used old-school oil lamps. I also keep several candles as backup. Fun fact — in the winter, you can use blankets over windows and doorways to trap heat. You’d be amazed at how much warmth a candle can put off in an enclosed space. You won’t be sweating, but it can prevent you from freezing to death. And remember, even if you have a gas furnace or stove, the ignitors still run on electricity — so I keep long matches on hand to light them manually when the power’s out.
For hot meals, propane stoves and other fuel-based camp stoves are worth their weight in gold. They’re compact, easy to store, and can run even when the grid is completely down. Just store the fuel safely, and rotate your supply so it’s fresh when you need it.
This is where the difference between “prepared” and “in trouble” gets real.
Power Strategies – Keeping the Juice Flowing
The world we know runs on electricity. Our homes, our jobs, our grocery stores, the way we communicate — hell, I can hardly think of anything that doesn’t need power these days. Take it away, and things get interesting real fast.
We all know about portable power packs. You probably even own a few. I do too. The problem? Half the time, they’re as dead as the power grid when you need them. I’ve got a couple of those damn things stuffed in go bags, and when I actually checked them… dead as doorknobs. Might as well have been carrying bricks.
So, let’s talk about rechargeable power sources — the stuff that can keep you going in a blackout without turning you into the neighborhood caveman.
Primary: Keep devices charged, rotate your power banks, and use a small UPS for short-term internet access.
Alternate: Portable power stations, vehicle charging, rechargeable flashlights, and lanterns.
Contingency: Solar chargers, crank-powered gear, rechargeable lanterns.
Emergency: Shared resources and low-power living.
DC Power – The Unsung Hero of Blackouts
Your car’s not just a way to get around — it’s a rolling DC power source. And DC gear skips the waste of converting to AC, meaning more runtime for less juice.
DC Lifesavers:
12V Fridge/Freezers – Sips power, keeps food safe for days.
DC Coffee Pots – The apocalypse should still come with caffeine.
12V Fans – Crucial in hot climates.
LED Work Lights – Long runtime and efficient.
Your Vehicle: More Than a Ride
With a few smart tweaks, your vehicle can be a blackout powerhouse.
Safe, Useful Mods:
Extra 12V outlets.
Heavy-duty battery or dual-battery setup.
Marine Battery + Inverter Combo – A dedicated deep-cycle battery connected to a properly sized inverter for AC gear. Marine batteries handle deep discharges, so you can use their stored energy without killing them. Recharge via your car’s alternator or solar panels.
Roof rack storage box for emergency gear.
Why it matters: It doesn’t hurt the vehicle, supports DC and AC power, and doubles as a camping setup.
Final Word: P.A.C.E. isn’t just military jargon — it’s the difference between sitting in the dark complaining and flipping on your backup light with a grin because you’ve got the next three steps already covered. The lights will go out again. The question is, will you be ready?
Her name is Raquel, but my given name is Rachel. I first noticed her when I hit high school and the air around me started to hum with a voltage—lockers slamming, gossip sparking at the seams, hallways strung like power lines through a town that never slept. She didn’t arrive with voices. No whispers, no commands. Just a pressure at the edge of thought, a cool hand pressed to a fevered brow. She only shows up when I need her. I don’t hear her, but I know when she’s standing just to my left, looking out through my eyes.
The first time, it was October and every tree in the county had decided to bleed. The maples along the football field turned a red so violent the grass looked stunned. A rumor had gone around that I’d said something about a senior’s boyfriend—nothing true, nothing new—just a scrap of talk fed into the hungry mouth of a school day. By the last bell, I could feel the circle forming before I even walked outside. Girls with folded arms. Boys with bored eyes. The taste of pennies. The sky bruised itself purple.
I didn’t have a plan. I never did then. The thing I remember is the wind. It came hard across the parking lot and threaded itself through my hair, then deeper, as if there were a second set of hair inside my head—branches, fine as nerve endings. I felt them sway. And then I wasn’t exactly taller, but I was standing in a different way, like my weight knew how to root. Someone shoved me. The circle tightened. The world clicked into a cleaner focus, edges sharpened, sound pared down to necessary pieces: breath, footfall, a cheap bracelet pinging against bone. The part of me that panicked went quiet, like someone cupped both hands over its mouth and said shhh.
I walked forward. The girl in front of me took a step back without meaning to. I didn’t bare my teeth, make a fist, or say anything that would later be quoted. I just looked at her until she had to break eye contact. The circle sagged. Somewhere a whistle blew—practice starting on the field—and that was that. No heroics. No detention. I went home with the leaves still burning in my skull and the wind still combing through the trees inside me, and it was the first night I understood that Raquel was not a person I could point to. She was a stance. A recalibration. A forest that woke up when I needed cover.
The second time that year, a man in a green cap followed me from the grocery store to the bus stop. My hands shook so hard I almost dropped the bag. The sky was that color between storm and dusk that makes you doubt the honesty of streetlights. I tasted the same pennies. Then the shift: the quiet. The trees. Autumn exhaled, and the world tilted just a fraction. I turned my face toward him the way a deer turns toward the distant snap of a twig. Nothing about me changed. I changed anyway. He crossed the street at the next gap in traffic and kept going. Maybe I was never in danger. Maybe sometimes a girl doesn’t need to prove anything to make it true.
I learned to mark the moments Raquel left. It felt like stepping out of a lake—clothes heavy, hair dripping, adrenaline sickly-sweet on the tongue. I’d sit on my bed and stare at the blank corner of my room until I felt ordinary again. There are only so many times in a week you can be a wildfire before you start to worry about what you’re burning down.
Years run. You lose track. You collect jobs and dead houseplants and the soft weight of other people’s expectations. I left the county for a city that ate its old buildings and spat out condominiums with mouths like glass. I learned to be proficient in email communication. I learned to keep dinner reservations. I learned to carry myself in ways that didn’t invite questions from strangers. Raquel walked with me, a scent I couldn’t name, a second pulse nested under the first. Sometimes months would pass without her, and I’d convince myself I’d grown out of childhood’s private magic, the way you grow out of believing the closet door might need locking. Then something would happen—a hand a beat too slow to withdraw from my waist, a boss whose compliments were salt in fresh cuts—and the wind would turn. The maples inside me would flare hot.
It got worse the year my mother died. Grief scrubbed everything down to the metal. I returned home for a month to sort papers and sort the shape of the silence and to live in the small, gray house whose faucets coughed like old men. The town hadn’t changed much. The football field’s grass is still stunned by autumn. The grocery store is fluorescent and timeless. The bus stop on the corner remains a question that nobody has bothered to answer.
I slept in my childhood room and woke to find the dresser mirror breathing. My face was layered with hers—my mother at twenty, my mother at fifty, my mother already gone—each sliding across the glass like oil on water, never settling. Their eyes moved in different directions, watching corners of the room where nothing stirred. The smell of her perfume—vanilla and cigarette ash—hung in the air though the bottle had been dry for years. Behind them, and behind me, Raquel hovered: not protective, exactly, but like a shadow that had learned to look back.
On the third night of that month, I went walking. I told myself I needed air. The truth is I wanted to find the place where the world felt thin. There’s a cut of road on the edge of town that used to lead to the sawmill. Beyond the road, the forest keeps its own counsel, thick with pine and story and things that don’t bother learning your name. I walked that way, past the last of the porch lights, past the mailbox that always leaned as if listening. The sky had bruised itself again. I thought of purple knees and childhood grass stains that never quite washed out.
The forest welcomed without welcoming. I stepped into the trees and felt something inside me stand up straighter, as if the very matter of me remembered what it was built from. Needles underfoot. Damp earth. The faint iron of water nearby. The wind moved, and my hair followed; the branches inside my head swayed in time. For a second, the overlap made me dizzy—like looking at a double exposure until your eyes grab the wrong layer. I closed them and leaned against a trunk. The bark was rough enough to declare itself. My palms stung. I breathed.
This is the part where people want a miracle. They want a deer to step out onto the path with a crown of leaves tangled in its antlers. They want my mother’s voice to come through clean, radio static scoured away. They want the boundary to drop and the red of the maples to mean something more than a season doing what a season does. I can’t give them that. What happened is simpler. I heard footsteps, and they didn’t belong to me.
Not heavy. Not careless. A person who knew every twig that could break and chose the ones that wouldn’t. I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t need to. The second pulse rose in me. The forest inside caught the rhythm and matched it, branches swaying in a pattern that wasn’t the wind. The footsteps stopped three paces to my left.
“Rachel,” a woman said.
Not my mother. Not anyone I could pull from a yearbook. The voice came the way cold water knows how to find your wrists. Calm. Unavoidable.
I opened my eyes. There was nobody there.
The thing about absence is how specific it is. The air where a body should have been was charged, as if a thunderhead had chosen human shape and then thought better of it. I turned my head slightly, and in the edge of my vision—caught the way you catch a reflection in a dark window—I saw her. My face doubled and slipped, features not quite aligning, hair like a spill of black water into the tree line. The second mouth set in a small, knowing line. My breath forgot to breathe. The forest inside me stilled to listen.
“Raquel,” I said, and the saying opened a door I hadn’t known was shut.
We stood there—one of us in the path, one of us in the glass of the world. We didn’t speak. If I tell you we communed, you’ll picture incense and soft lights, and I won’t have earned the truth. It was simpler and stranger. She lifted her chin. I felt mine tilt. She narrowed her eyes. I felt the muscles move. She took a breath, and the air entered me twice, filling two sets of lungs layered perfectly out of sync. It hurt in a good way, like stretching after you’ve been carrying other people’s weight all day.
Then the footsteps came again, from deeper in, and this time they were neither careful nor considerate. A man moving too fast to be lost, heading for the shortcut hunters take when they’re late and the light’s gone wrong. He broke a branch. He swore. He was close; he was not yet aware of me. The startled part of me wanted to step off the path, hide behind the particular tree my fifth-grade self knew was good for hiding. The other part—the forest part—just watched the space where he would appear.
Raquel’s hand rose. I didn’t see it. I felt it. A small tightening in the tendons of my right wrist, the way a violinist’s muscle memory wakes before the bow touches the string. When the man reached the curve, he looked up and saw—no, that’s not right. He didn’t see anything he could put a name to. He faltered the way people falter when an old superstition tugs the hem of their good sense. He glanced left. He saw the empty air where Raquel stood and his face went politely blank, as if someone had asked him a question in a language he almost understood. He took two cautious steps backward. He chose another path, the long one. He kept swearing, but softer now, as though he’d agreed to be a guest in a house he hadn’t realized he’d entered.
“Thank you,” I said, and immediately felt foolish for saying it aloud.
Raquel did not nod. She didn’t vanish. She shifted the way light shifts when a cloud decides to be merciful. I closed my eyes again and leaned my forehead against the bark and let the slant of the earth hold me up. Time went the way time went when you finally agreed to sit down. When I opened my eyes, the air was only air, and the double exposure had clicked back into a single frame. I was Rachel in a forest near a town that felt smaller than it used to. My palms remembered bark. My mouth remembered the taste of pennies and then didn’t.
On the walk home, the wind stayed with me. Houses appeared. Porch lights took their places like stars whose contracts had just been renewed. I tried to think of what I would tell anyone who asked why I’d gone out and what I’d found. The story kept refusing to shrink to fit. I passed the mailbox, still listening. I passed the bus stop, still questioning. By the time I reached the gray house, grief had turned from a violent guest to a tired one, the kind that finally stops talking because there’s nothing new to say. I let myself in. The faucet coughed. The floor knew where to creak. I was ordinary again, which is to say intact enough to sleep.
In the morning, I brewed coffee the way my mother did and burned the first slice of toast the way she always did and laughed, which surprised me so much I had to sit down. In the mirror, my face was my face.
But as I turned toward the door, something caught in the glass of the hallway mirror. Not just her—me, but smiling in a way I don’t remember. It’s a thin, private thing. My lips are still; hers move. She whispers without sound, and though I cannot hear the words, the marrow in my bones understands them well enough to ache.
When I’m ready to step outside, I do. The wind turns. The day opens like a field. And there, in the corner of my eye where the world keeps its most honest reflections, a second mouth makes a small, knowing line. We walked. We chose the long way. We let the light take its time deciding for us.
Author’s Note: Second splinter, pulled straight from a place I didn’t mean to walk into. Some stories don’t ask permission—they just lean in and whisper something you can’t quite remember but still know in your bones. Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind isn’t here to explain itself. It’s here to leave something sharp under your skin.
In the shadowed sprawl of the junkyard, she stirred—wings of flayed brass and splintered steel rattling against the wind. Once, a brilliant engineer had built her to fly, not for war but for wonder. That was a long time ago. The world had since taught her sharper lessons.
Years had stripped her down to bone-metal. Rust ate her joints. Rain chewed the wires in her spine. Scavengers tore away the delicate things first—the fingers, the fine clockwork at her heart’s center—until she patched herself with jagged plates and stolen screws. She carried the smell of oil and ozone, the hum of barely-contained voltage.
The night was still until it wasn’t. A sound—thin, panicked—threaded through the skeletal heaps. She tilted her head, antennae twitching to catch the echo. There, between the carcass of a burned-out truck and a tower of split engines, a child huddled in the metal rot.
Her eyes flared—twin disks of molten gold. The child froze, unsure if the thing before them was a savior or a trap. Do not fear, she said, though her voice came as a tremor in the air, the hiss of electricity through frayed coils.
She took the child’s hand in her cold, jagged grip. Together they moved toward the fence line, her battered wings shivering sparks into the dark.
At the edge, the child looked back. In the flicker of failing light, they saw her for what she truly was—patchwork predator, guardian by choice or by compulsion, hard to tell which.
Tomorrow, the child would go home. Tonight, the fairy lingered in the junkyard’s breath, eyes still burning, waiting for the next cry to find her.
Author’s Note: First splinter on the wire. Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind will drop in from time to time—standalone flashes sparked by a single image, no two alike. You’ll know them when you see them.
I can’t tell you when it started, but some genius decided “surreal” was the sexiest word in the English language, and everyone lined up to mangle it. Back in the day, we actually looked words up in a dictionary, underlined them, wrote them down, and tested them in sentences to see if we were using them right. Madness, right? Now it’s easier to grab a word and make shit up. Surreal used to mean dream-logic and fever visions—like stepping into a Dalí canvas where clocks melt and eyes bloom into roses. Now it’s slapped on oat milk shortages or spotting a C-list celebrity in baggage claim. “It was surreal,” they sigh, like they just returned from some cosmic vision quest. No—it was Thursday. And I still had one more load of laundry left. Do I have enough quarters?
And if “surreal” has been abused to the point of boredom, “unprecedented” is its overachieving twin. Unprecedented was used to pack heat, carry weight, and demand attention. Now it’s what people whine about while waiting for a latte—right before bragging about a thrift store “treasure” that’s just a busted lamp with a missing cord. These days, it’s duct-taped onto headlines, CEO pep talks, and press releases written by people who wouldn’t buy their own pitch. “We live in unprecedented times,” they chant, like the words alone could cover the rent or clean up the wreckage they helped cause. People actually know what the hell they’re talking about. Now that would be unprecedented.
These two words have become the lazy twins of public speech, tag teaming their way through news broadcasts, political soundbites, and influencer captions. Surreal and unprecedented. Say them together enough, and they dissolve into flavorless mush, like a stick of gum chewed until it’s nothing but rubber and spit. That’s the real surreal moment—watching language bleed out in the gutter while everyone nods along like it’s still breathing.
Author’s Note: This one started as a gripe about “surreal” and snowballed into a two-word autopsy. I don’t expect people to stop using them—they’ve already been beaten into cliché—but maybe we could save them for moments that actually deserve them. Until then, I’ll be over here, counting quarters and waiting for the day “unprecedented” gets the dictionary funeral it deserves.
People talk about peace like it’s a cabin in the woods, or a deep breath, or some Instagram-ready sunset. Sounds nice, I guess. But my life’s been a long stretch of noise—some of it mine, most of it not. I’ve gotten used to living in the hum, like an old fridge that rattles in the night. Or the hiss of an air compressor after it shuts down. Then you jump every time it kicks back on. It happens when you least expect it, just like the things in life.
I’ve been at peace in the woods. I’ve been at peace in the desert. That’s about as far apart as you can get, which tells me it’s not the place—it’s the state of mind. But the trick is holding onto it, and that’s where I lose it every time. Quiet feels like the moment before the other shoe drops, and I’ve had enough shoes drop to know better.
If peace ever shows up, it’ll have to find me where I am—coffee cooling in my hand, pen scratching against paper, the world still loud but not enough to stop me. Until then, I’ll keep moving through the noise.
The words slid through my dream and cracked it in half. I came up out of the dark slow, like surfacing through tar. The TV in the next room kept spitting out canned laughter, each burst bleeding through the plaster like a bad memory you can’t scrub out.
I left breadcrumbs for them to find me. Hell, I practically lit the path in neon. So why the delay? They should’ve been here hours ago. Unless this is the variantwhere they let you stew first, make you sweat until you start negotiating with yourself. I’ve seen that play before.
I hope they come. No—I need them to. It’s the only thing holding the walls together. But hope’s a sucker’s bet. Optimism’s for pretty people and the kind of bastards who get served first in every bar. The rest of us? We know the rules. They get champagne. We get the backwash.
Paranoid? Maybe. But paranoia’s just the truth with the varnish stripped off. And here I am, sitting in a sweat-stained chair in a mildew-sick motel room with a suitcase full of cash at my feet. Waiting for men without faces to come take it—and maybe me—with them. People say those types don’t have a code. That’s bullshit. Everyone’s got a code. Theirs just doesn’t match yours, and it sure as hell doesn’t care about your pulse.
The suitcase sits there like a loaded confession. The clasps are worn, the handle tired, but the weight… Jesus, the weight hums in the air. Life-changing kind of weight. The “fresh start” kind. But that’s a fairy tale for the clean and the lucky.
Me? I’ve got ghosts baked into my bones. Every choice I ever made cut a groove I can’t climb out of. And no matter what’s in that case, I’m not getting out clean.
Author’s Note: It’s been weeks since I’ve thrown down a little flash fiction. I’ve been neck-deep in the world-building swamp for a project that keeps getting bigger every time I turn a corner. Figured I’d come up for air before it swallows me whole. This one’s thanks to Fandango’s Story Starter and FOWC for tossing me the match—sometimes you just need the right spark to remember you still know how to burn.
We’ve been trained to expect clarity. To believe every big feeling must end with a moral— A neat conclusion, a TED Talk takeaway, a three-step solution.
But here’s the truth, I keep chewing like nasty gristle:
Some things don’t resolve. Some stories stay jagged. And some blogs, this one especially, aren’t built to clean up after your pain. They’re built to leave it on the floor, still breathing.
I started Memoirs of Madness because I didn’t know what else to do with the words.
Over a decade ago, someone said every writer needed a blog if they were serious. I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t know if I was serious. I just knew I had things in me that wouldn’t stay quiet.
I wrote because I needed to. Still do. Not to change the world. Not to craft a brand. But because silence costs too damn much.
So when you ask me, “What change do you want your blog to make?” I honestly don’t know. And that’s not me being evasive. That’s me refusing to lie to you.
I could dress it up. Tell you it’s about healing. About expression. About building a community for the unseen. All of which might be true, sometimes. But defining that change in a singular, bite-sized way would flatten what this space actually is.
This blog isn’t one thing. It’s a mirror that distorts and reveals depending on how the light hits. It’s rage on Monday, softness on Tuesday, confession by Thursday, and grief that overstays its welcome every damn Sunday.
If Memoirs of Madness changes anything, I hope it changes the way you think about being unfinished.
I hope it disrupts that polished self you wear in front of strangers. I hope it reminds you that not knowing is still worthy of a voice. Those messy, unresolved, and unsellable truths still deserve the page.
I hope this blog pisses you off sometimes. Not because I’m aiming to provoke, but because something buried in you recognized itself and flinched.
Because it sure as hell pisses me off— dragging up things I thought I buried, making me admit shit I’d rather leave unsaid. That’s how I know it’s honest.
So no, I didn’t build this place to change the world. I built it to survive mine.
And if, by some luck or accident, it helps you survive yours— then maybe that’s the kind of change that matters most.
This is what I talked about the first time I answered this question:
I’ve dropped stupid money on “fine dining” more than once, usually to be served food that looks like it belongs in a museum instead of my stomach. But the one that sticks with me? The night I took my late wife to that steakhouse she wouldn’t stop talking about. She made me dress up—tie, polished shoes, the whole bit—like we were going to meet royalty.
The place was gorgeous, sure. Atmosphere dripping in class. The kind of joint where they pull out your chair for you and whisper when they ask for your order. But the food? Overpriced mediocrity on a porcelain plate. I sat there chewing, thinking about how many actual cows must’ve died in vain for that bland cut of steak.
She smiled through it, pretending it was everything she’d hoped for. I stayed quiet, pretending right along with her. We drove home, still dressed to the nines, and the first thing she did was pull ground beef from the fridge. Buttered buns, sizzling patties, a dusting of garlic salt. Her famous cheeseburgers hit the table ten minutes later.
She took a bite, lit a cigarette, and said, “That place was sure nice, but the food was horrible.”
I laughed, halfway through my own burger, grease running down my fingers. “Yeah,” I said, deadpan, “but you’re sure wearing that dress.”
She gave me that mischievous grin that meant the night wasn’t a total loss.
So no, the meal wasn’t worth it. But sitting in our kitchen, sharing those burgers, talking like the world didn’t exist outside those four walls? That was priceless. And no five-star restaurant has ever come close.
“Fine Cuisine,” scoffs. I’ve been dragged to a few more of these temples of pretension since my wife passed, and it’s always the same circus act: menus written like bad poetry, plates dressed up like runway models, and food that couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag flavor-wise. Then, some slick-haired waiter wants to tell me about coffee made from monkey poop like it’s the gospel of good taste. Stop for a second and consider: Why in all that is holy and suspect would anyone want to drink monkey poop coffee? Maybe I missed my calling as a food critic. I’ve got the palate, the sarcasm, and enough bad meals under my belt to write a horror anthology. I just stare and think, Does your Mama know you talk like that? Don’t you lie to me! Whew, were you about to lie on your mama? Let me slap you for her. Come on now, take this. Over here, lying on your mama. Just shame. Because here’s the truth: half these places are selling smoke and mirrors, not meals. And most nights, I walk out thinking, I could’ve stayed home, cooked a real burger, and saved myself the insult and the bill.
I don’t get this thing where people make lists about what makes them happy. Feels like busywork for souls that forgot how to breathe. Maybe that’s the trick now—scribble down thirty reasons to keep your heart beating and hope one of them sticks.
Me? I don’t have thirty.
Hell, I barely scraped together five—and even that feels like a stretch some days. But here they are, the small anchors that keep me from drifting too far:
A cup of coffee strong enough to burn the fog out of my skull.
A good smoke when the world won’t shut up.
A pen that glides like it knows what I’m about to say before I do.
A fresh pad of paper, clean and waiting for truth or madness to spill on it.
Not having to wade through nonsense questions about things nobody really wants to know.
Maybe that’s enough. Maybe happiness was never meant to be a laundry list—it’s just these little sparks that keep the dark from swallowing you whole.
And if you’re wondering why there aren’t more?
I live by one code: Truth or happiness? Never both.
Writing didn’t start as some big calling. It was just something to do when there was nothing else, a way to keep my head from turning into static. A hobby, they called it. Hell, I never thought of it as a career. I think I wanted to be something else once—can’t even remember what anymore.
Oh wait… yeah, G.I. Joe. That was the dream. Plastic helmet, stick grenades, and saving the block from imaginary bad guys. Thought war would feel like that—fast, clean, with clear winners. Turns out real soldiering doesn’t come with a soundtrack or a script, and I sure as hell didn’t have Kung-Fu grip.
Somewhere between pretending to be a hero and learning what the word actually costs, I picked up a pen. Maybe it was just another mission, this time against the noise in my own head. Now writing’s the only weapon left. It doesn’t fix anything, doesn’t make the past cleaner or the future brighter. But it gives me a place to set it all down before it eats me alive.
When we were kids, life taught us early how far a nickel could stretch—and how often it didn’t. We’d walk the streets collecting bottles and cans, hoping to scrape enough together for a sugar rush at the corner store. Back then, they were Mom-and-Pop joints, the kind where everyone knew your name and your running tab of trouble. We’d stand at the candy rack, counting and recounting our coins, trying to game the system and get the most candy for the least cash. Never worked out like we wanted. Especially when a new treat hit the shelf, shiny and out of reach.
Fast forward a few decades. I’m in one of those little grocery stores that somehow survived the big-box purge. I catch sight of two kids doing that same math on the floor, coins spread out like a desperate poker hand. Something about it yanked me backward in time, to the weight of nickels in a sweaty palm and the taste of wanting more than you could buy.
So I slid the cashier a few bills and told her to make sure those kids didn’t have to choose between sour worms and chocolate that day. The store owner, in his well-meaning way, pointed me out like some small-town hero. The kids lit up, grinning at me like I’d handed them the moon.
And that’s the part I hated. Not the kids’ smiles—hell, that’s the good stuff—but the fact that it wasn’t supposed to have my name on it. My father brought strangers home, gave them a meal, a place to sleep for the night, and never said a word about it. My stepmom told me those stories later, like family lore whispered over coffee. I grew up believing you do what’s right, no matter the cost. I didn’t understand this then, but as I got older, it began to resonate.
Kindness, the way I learned it, is quiet. It’s supposed to slip in, do its work, and leave without a sound. That day, the sound of my name broke the rule I was raised on.
Let’s be honest—last month didn’t exactly go according to plan. Deadlines slipped, chapters missed their mark, and Truth Burns got yanked off the shelf completely. But don’t mistake the quiet for inactivity. The Forge is still burning, and I’m hammering out something more substantial beneath the smoke.
I’ve been waist-deep in worldbuilding—not just character backstories or timelines, but full-on infrastructure. Truth Burns needed a city that felt real, with streets you can navigate, neighborhoods that breathe, and a logic that holds up past chapter five. Turns out, designing a place from scratch is like running an urban planning boot camp while writing a novel. No wonder other writers fictionalize real cities. Creating every bridge, hospital, and back alley by hand is a nightmare, and you don’t notice the holes until you’re knee-deep in a scene asking, “Where the hell do they even go from here?”
Usually, I live in stream of consciousness writing. I like flying by the seat of my pants and letting the story find its path. That works for flash fiction, short pieces, even most of what you see on MoM. But long fiction is different. When you don’t have a plan, you end up with chapters that are just you thinking out loud. You deserve better than that.
So I’m slowing down to get it right. Truth Burns will return, rebuilt from the ground up with a foundation strong enough to carry the story it deserves. Until then, the rest of the Forge keeps firing.
What’s Still Live
While Truth Burns is in surgery, other series are still rolling out:
Garden of Ashes – Mondays
Ashwood County – Fridays
Bourbon & Rust – Saturdays
Sundays are my admin day across the MKU universe, Wednesdays are reserved for worldbuilding and the occasional Love Drop. Everything else? It’s being reforged to last.
What’s Next (No Dates, No Rush)
There are other stories simmering in the background, waiting for the right moment to hit the page. They’ll come to The Forge when they’re ready, not before.
This isn’t a stall—it’s a rebuild. Thanks for sticking around while I tear things apart just to make them stronger. The Forge will burn brighter for it.
What good is a physical description to someone blind? They won’t get lost in your eyes. They won’t grin at your sculpted muscle or at that little pudge on your waistline. A woman once told me that’s what made the “cute guys” irresistible—that pudge. Then she kissed me hard, with enough heat that it said she meant every damn word. So, without sight, how can anyone truly see you?
I’m the one brooding in the corner. Always there if you need me, never in your way. You can tell my size by the weight of my breathing. You can tell I’m a troubled man by how it stumbles—half regret, half resolve.
Blindness isn’t just losing sight. It’s what we refuse to see even with both eyes open. If you can’t see me, maybe you’re not missing much. I’m not built on appearances. You’d know me by how the air shifts when I walk in.
Before I say a word, you’ll feel the drag of boots on old floorboards, the kind of silence that’s got teeth. My laugh, when it comes, sounds like it fought its way through smoke. I keep my distance but stay close enough that you know you’re not alone in the dark.
So don’t picture my face. Picture the weight of a man who’s been through fire and stayed standing. Picture silence with sharp edges and breath that’s seen too many long nights. That’s me. If you need me, you won’t need eyes to find me—you’ll feel the shadow that doesn’t leave until you’re safe.
Traditions? We didn’t have those. What we had was the grind—long hours, picket lines, busted knuckles, and dreams that never quite made it past the kitchen table. That’s what I grew up with. That’s what I walked away from.
My Ma worked her ass off every damn day. She never made speeches about doing it for me—she just got up, got dressed, and kept food in my mouth. I spent time on picket lines with her, too young to know what we were fighting for but old enough to feel the solidarity—cookies, soda, and snacks passed my way no matter the weather. Years later, sitting in thirty-below weather on my own grind, I thought, so this is how it feels. Some lessons don’t come wrapped in wisdom—you learn them the hard way.
My father’s grind was a different verse to the same song. He and my stepmom worked long hours, no safety nets. Dad taught me how to fix things with lines like, “Boy, grab me this,” or my favorite, “Fix this—it better be done by the time I get back.” He never yelled. There was a rare calm in him when he was fixing something, like bringing broken things back to life was his way of breathing. That stuck with me. Eventually, I learned not just to fix things but to make them better. Maybe that was his version of a tradition.
Retirement was the myth in my family, whispered about like a holy grail no one ever reached. My dad swore he’d finally read when he retired. He never got there. My ma hit semi-retirement only to take extra shifts to keep the lights on. My stepmom? She made it, still kicking, still talking smack.
And me? I’ve retired twice now, younger than they ever did. When I visit my stepmom, I tease my older brothers about it with gusto, like it’s my life’s calling. She just smiles and finally says, “Leave your brothers alone.” But I don’t. I earned this one.
I read every damn day. I smile. I exhale. That’s the tradition I refused to keep—the one where you grind yourself to dust chasing a finish line you never reach. I broke the cycle. I fought like hell so I could finally breathe.
Julian had been through storms before. But this one wasn’t weather—it was a squall of circumstance, and it smelled like old whiskey and bad intentions.
He leaned against the chipped brick of the ancient building, rain dripping off the brim of his hat like the world couldn’t stop reminding him of its bad mood. The sign above the doorway read: “Elysium Apartments”, letters half burned out, as if hope had checked out decades ago. Somewhere inside, a tip waited. Or maybe another mistake he’d put on his tab.
He stepped in, shoes squelching with every move, the kind of soundtrack that reminded a man of all the dignity he’d lost along the way. The lobby was empty except for a single elevator whose doors looked like they hadn’t closed properly since Prohibition.
The button flickered weakly when pressed. The elevator groaned like it was waking from an ancient sleep, chains rattling in protest, before the doors lurched open.
“Going up?” asked a voice from inside.
Julian squinted. A man in a bellhop uniform leaned casually on the railing, smiling like someone who knew where all the bodies were buried—and probably where they were rented out on weekends.
Julian hesitated. Everything about the moment screamed nope. But his life had been one long argument with common sense.
He stepped inside. The doors screeched shut with a sound that could file your teeth for you.
“Top floor?” the bellhop asked, already pulling the lever.
“Okey dokey,” Julian said, because sometimes sarcasm was the only shield a man had left.
The elevator jolted violently. Numbers on the panel blinked, but not in order—3, 7, 2, basement, 99, question mark. Rainwater dripped down his neck as the cage rattled. For a second, Julian wondered if this was it—if all his choices were finally cashing out in a metal box headed somewhere past destiny’s curbside.
Then the bellhop grinned wider, showing teeth that were far too sharp for customer service. “Relax,” he said. “Everyone’s going up eventually.”
The city doesn’t just live in her—it clings to her like cigarette smoke in a cheap motel room. Neon signs flicker behind her eyes, half-lit promises that never quite make it past dawn. The streets wind through her silhouette, rain-slick and restless, always leading somewhere she’d rather not go but can’t stop heading toward.
She’s a walking skyline, a soft silhouette with hard edges, every shadow on her skin a back alley full of regrets. The hum of the city is her pulse, low and relentless, a rhythm you can’t dance to but can’t ignore. And under it all, there’s that quiet truth every soul in this town knows: you can leave the city, but it never leaves you. Not when you’ve already let it build a home beneath your ribs.
If you asked me this morning, I’d have said yeah, just another day in the trenches. But now? Sitting in a half-dismantled lab, my old Mac humming like it’s judging me for abandoning it years ago, and my desktop sulking in the corner after another crash-fest—I’m not so sure.
Today was supposed to be simple: get the other MKU sites moving, feed the beast, keep the universe spinning. Instead, my main machine decided to reenact a demolition derby every time I opened a design file. After the fourth hard reboot, I did what any sane person would do—I shut the whole thing down, stared at the chaos, and muttered a few choice words about technology that I won’t repeat here.
Reorganizing the lab felt like a hostage negotiation with my own mess. Cables everywhere, notes buried under old coffee cups, and me wondering if “organized chaos” is just code for “I gave up.” Eventually, I gave in and switched to the Mac. It felt weird, like moving back into your childhood bedroom—familiar walls, but you don’t quite fit anymore.
And because I never know when to leave well enough alone, I decided an active series needed a complete rewrite. Not a tweak, not a tidy edit—a tear-it-down, salt-the-earth, start-from-scratch rewrite. Why? Because “active” doesn’t mean “good,” and I’m done posting just to keep the lights on. If it doesn’t hit the mark, it burns. That’s the rule.
So, was today typical? In some ways, yeah—just another battle between me, my machines, and the madness of trying to build something bigger than myself. But in other ways, no. Today came with surprises: chaos, frustration, a few muttered expletives, and one revelation worth keeping—this Mac keyboard? Absolute magic. The rest of my machines are getting one whether they like it or not.
Maybe that’s how most days really are in this line of work: half plan, half fire drill, always one keystroke away from starting over.
He told himself it was a supply run—donate some canned goods to the church pantry, maybe check on a guy from group. But his body betrayed him. It always did when he got too quiet. So instead of downtown, he found himself standing at the edge of the block he’d avoided for almost four years.
Same cracked sidewalks. Same rust-colored brick and crooked porch rails. It smelled like last night’s rain and rotting leaves and fried onions from the corner store. The same ghost-town warmth that made the cold worse.
Finch had lived longer than expected.
Mrs. Eldridge had kept him alive. A neighbor. Not a friend. She never offered forgiveness, just water bowls and unspoken understanding. Jake had overdosed two rooms away from where Finch used to sleep. The paramedics saved Jake, but left the dog pacing in circles around a pile of vomit and needle caps. Mrs. Eldridge took him in after that. No speech. No fanfare.
Now, Finch lay curled in a fleece blanket on her enclosed porch, his gray snout twitching in sleep, ribs pressing against skin like old bones trying to escape.
Jake crouched in the doorway.
“Hey, boy.”
Finch opened his eyes slowly. The gaze wasn’t surprised. It was tired. Familiar. He blinked once, let out a rattling sigh, and put his chin back down like, Oh. It’s you.
The porch smelled like cedar planks, sour dog breath, and dust. A cracked radio whispered gospel from another room. Jake sat with his knees pulled up, feeling the wood grain bite into his back.
He had spent so many nights talking to this dog, when words failed around people, when dope blurred the edges of memory. Finch never barked. Just stared at him like he understood too much.
Jake rubbed his temples. His fingertips felt greasy with sweat and guilt.
“I thought you’d be gone by now,” he said quietly. “Guess we’re both too stubborn.”
Finch let out a half-sigh, half-snore. The kind of sound that made you ache behind the ribs.
Jake remembered the last night. The screaming. Dani in the hallway, crying, holding her son with one arm and blocking the door with the other. Jake had tried to push past her. Not with violence, just desperation. That’s the problem—desperation doesn’t always care about the difference.
Micah, barely seven, had clutched Finch’s leash and screamed, “Don’t hurt Mommy!”
Jake hadn’t. Not really. But the way he grabbed the leash—hard, clumsy—made the boy scream louder. Jake saw his own reflection in a hallway mirror in that moment, and it scared him more than anything. The wildness in his face. The failure.
He ran. It didn’t feel brave. It felt like a retreat. Like every other time, he’d chosen the exit over the consequence.
The air smelled of impending rain—ozone and something metallic. A low rumble rolled across the sky. Jake reached down and brushed his knuckles against Finch’s paw. The pads were rougher now. Cracked. Familiar.
He’d read once in a recovery forum about how animals mourn. How they carry memory in ways we don’t understand. He believed it. Finch had always known things Jake never said.
“I’m sorry,” Jake whispered.
It wasn’t just for the dog.
Mrs. Eldridge came out with a bowl of water and a towel. She looked like she hadn’t aged, just weathered down into something harder. Not brittle—stone.
“He’s not eating,” she said. “Won’t last the night.”
Jake nodded.
“Can I stay?”
“You should’ve never had to ask.”
He stayed.
All night. The porch grew colder. The rain finally came, misty at first, then steady, like it meant something. Jake didn’t talk much. Just sat with Finch under the dim porch light, watching shadows shift and windows glow in the distance.
He thought about all the ways he’d tried to escape himself. Pills, powders, rage, silence. But Finch had always brought him back—anchored him when he floated too close to the edge.
Finch died an hour before dawn. No drama. No sound. Just one last slow breath, and stillness.
Jake buried him in the alley garden, near the back fence where Finch used to bark at raccoons. He dug with his hands. Let the mud ruin his jeans. Let the wet earth crawl under his nails and the blisters stab open without complaint.
He didn’t want gloves. He wanted it to hurt.
He wrapped Finch in the towel and laid him down gently, like the way you close a book you’re not ready to finish. On impulse, he cut a strip from the leash and buried it with him.
No stone. No cross. Just the dirt and the sky and the silence.
Before leaving, Jake walked to Dani’s building. Same rusted mailbox. Same flickering porch bulb. He paused at the door, soaked and shivering. Thought about knocking.
Didn’t.
Instead, he slid a letter under the door. It wasn’t long. Just honest.
I buried him. He waited longer than I deserved.
He stood there a moment, listening.
Nothing.
Jake turned and walked into the soft gray morning, the rain trailing behind him like a prayer left unfinished.
Stories from the Edge of Change is a quiet fiction series about reckoning, recovery, and the long, uneven road back to ourselves. This one is for the ghosts we leave behind—and the ones who wait anyway.
They called him Angel. Not because he was good—he wasn’t. But because that was the name his mother had scrawled on the back of a birth certificate before vanishing into whatever hole the meth and the men had dug. That’s what the caseworker said, anyway. He never knew if it was meant as a blessing or a dare.
Maple Street didn’t care what your name was. It didn’t give a damn about backstory or trauma files. It just asked if you had something worth trading—dignity, a story, sometimes blood. If not, it lets you rot in its shadow. Cold. Dirty. Forgettable.
Angel’s coat smelled like salt and mildew. His jeans were stiff with city grime and sweat. He kept his hoodie pulled low and his mouth shut. That was his trick—if you kept your eyes on the pavement, people passed by faster. If you sat still enough, maybe the shame wouldn’t boil over.
He didn’t want sympathy. He wanted protein. He wanted socks. He wanted to fall asleep without twitching awake to sirens or wet cardboard collapsing under him.
And maybe—though he’d never say it out loud—he wanted someone to call him by his name without checking a clipboard first.
The man who sat next to him that day didn’t look like much. Worn hoodie, creased face, tired eyes. Same as the rest. But he didn’t try to hawk salvation. Didn’t flash a business card or mutter some rehab mantra through a forced smile. He just lowered himself down, exhaled like it hurt, and offered a protein bar.
“You don’t gotta stay here.”
That was all he said.
Angel didn’t answer. But the words landed anyway, quiet as dust, sharp as memory. There was no lecture in the tone, no brag in his posture. Just something steady. Like a man who knew what a long fall looked like and still chose to climb anyway.
Angel watched him walk away. There was a patience to his stride, not fast, not dragging, more like a hawk circling something that hadn’t happened yet.
The protein bar felt heavy in his hand. Real. He unwrapped it hours later behind the train station, fingers cracked and trembling from the cold. It tasted like chocolate and chalk. Like something that might matter.
That night, he couldn’t sleep.
Not because of the cold—he was used to that—but because of the quiet. Something inside him had shifted, and he didn’t like it. He wanted the usual numbness back, the hollow where hope had once lived.
He kept hearing that sentence. You don’t gotta stay here. It scraped against the walls of his skull.
Because what if the here wasn’t just the corner? What if it was his skin? His blood? His whole damn life?
The wind picked up and pushed trash through the alley. A soda can clattered down the curb like it was running from something. He pulled the hoodie tighter. Even wrapped in layers, he couldn’t shake the chill. It wasn’t just cold—it was recognition.
He thought about every report, every meeting, every incident on file. His whole existence was a debt—an account he didn’t remember opening but kept getting billed for. A chain of overdrafts, each mistake compounded by the last. And the thing about that kind of debt is, no one wants to co-sign your recovery.
The flyer was still there in the bench slat. Creased and slightly damp, but readable. The rehab center’s logo had a bird on it—a dove, maybe, or a pigeon pretending. “Supportive, Long-Term Recovery,” it said in round, hopeful font, like a band-aid on a bullet wound.
Angel stared at it for a long time. Then shoved it in his pocket.
He didn’t go in. Not that day.
Instead, he drifted. Three more nights outside. Two sober. One was so drunk he pissed himself in his sleep and woke up shaking. He thought about mugging someone at the red line platform. Didn’t. Thought about calling Marcus—his old foster brother, who once tried to stab him with a pencil during a group home fight. Didn’t.
Then, one morning, he was there.
Just standing outside the center like a sleepwalker. He didn’t remember making the decision. His feet had dragged him there like they were on auto-pilot. He kept his hands in his pockets and stared across the street.
A nurse with dreadlocks carried a cardboard box of snacks through the door. A man with sunken cheeks and a twitch stood outside arguing with security, begging for one more chance. A woman in pajama pants and slippers stormed out, phone in hand, yelling at her sponsor that she was done doing this bullshit.
It was clear enough—nobody was exempt from the wreckage. No matter how clean you looked walking in, the ghosts still followed.
Angel lit a cigarette. Took slow, deliberate drags. He didn’t cross the street. But he didn’t walk away either.
And somehow, that felt like the start of something he didn’t yet have the words for.
Stories from the Edge of Change is a slow-burn series about survival without spectacle. It’s for those caught in between the ones who haven’t crossed the threshold, but also haven’t run. This story belongs to the uncertain, the reluctant, the almost ready. We see you.
What one Sabbath song taught me about adrenaline, fear, and the silence that follows the hit.
I wasn’t planning to write about Ozzy Osbourne — I had a ticket in hand to see Earth, Wind & Fire. My mind was elsewhere — groove, joy, rhythm, nostalgia. And then the news came through: Ozzy was gone.
I’m not a diehard fan. I didn’t grow up in the church of Sabbath. But one track — one slow, heavy track that felt like it had something to say long after it stopped playing — stayed with me. It wasn’t a hit. It wasn’t a song anyone quoted. But I’ve carried it. And maybe that’s the thing about deep cuts — they don’t always connect when the world is loud. They wait.
For me, that song was “Hand of Doom.” Not because it rocked. Because it spoke — in the language of things we’re not supposed to say out loud. And as someone who’s walked through the slow churn of fear, of silence, of control disguised as coping… I heard it for what it was.
Not a story. Not a warning. A truth.
Paranoid is the album everyone thinks they know. “War Pigs,” “Iron Man,” “Paranoid” — they’ve been immortalized on T-shirts, classic rock stations, and generations of guitar-store riff flexes. But buried in the middle of Side B is a track that speaks quieter and hits harder than all of them: “Hand of Doom.”
It’s not catchy. It doesn’t try to be. It starts slow, like a body being dragged. Geezer’s bassline feels surgical — steady, ominous, too calm for what’s coming. Then the lyrics begin, and you realize this isn’t a protest song. It’s a field report. A soldier comes back from war. But the war comes back with him.
“You push the needle in…”
There’s no glamor. No metaphor. Just addiction, disillusionment, and the long tail of trauma no one wants to claim responsibility for. Sabbath wasn’t just telling a story — they were holding up a mirror to a nation that fed its young to the fire, then blamed them when they couldn’t come home whole.
A lot of people describe the opening of “Hand of Doom” as a funeral. I’ve seen it written that way dozens of times. But as someone who’s stood in the stillness before something breaks loose, I hear it differently. That intro isn’t mourning. It’s anticipation. It’s the body preparing itself for impact before the mind catches up. It’s the weight of knowing something’s coming — and not being sure whether it’s physical, mental, or spiritual. We all have our own versions of that moment. Some of us walk into it in uniform. Some of us find it alone in a room at 3 a.m. But the question remains: when the unknown finally steps out of the shadows, will we be ready?
Now — with everything we know about PTSD, opioids, and institutional failure — this song still rarely gets mentioned. It makes people uncomfortable. That’s precisely why it matters.
It didn’t scare me as a kid, not like horror movies or ghost stories. It scared me because I could feel the silence around it, like everyone heard it and turned the volume down just a little too fast. Like it was saying something we weren’t supposed to know yet. Or worse — something we already knew, but had no idea how to answer.
When the tempo kicks up, the song finally gets its legs, but it doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like adrenaline. And for me, it brings back that wired moment just before everything breaks loose. I remember being trained not to let fear take over. Taught that fear was the enemy. But no one tells you the truth: you can’t outrun fear. It doesn’t dissipate — it embeds. The real skill isn’t conquering it — it’s learning how to use it without letting it use you. This part of the song brings me back to the early days, before I learned that lesson. When your heart is pounding, your vision sharpens, and the fight-or-flight reflex kicks in so hard it makes your teeth ache. Everyone talks about those two instincts — but there’s a third no one wants to admit: freeze. And those were the ones that really got to me. The ones who froze. Because when that happened, it didn’t just endanger them — it split your focus. You had to break off from the target, from the objective, and turn toward someone whose body had already left the mission. And that… that’s its own kind of helpless.
There’s a brief pause in the song — a flash of return to the original tempo — and for me, it’s always felt like a breath that never quite makes it to your lungs. It’s not relief. It’s the moment before the shit gets real. It’s that split-second when you know the break is coming, but it hasn’t hit yet. The sound slows, but the tension tightens. I’ve lived that second. We all have, in our own ways. Whether it was the phone call, the sudden detour, the warning tone in someone’s voice — that moment before impact sticks with you. It’s what lets you feel the hit coming before it lands. And that’s what Sabbath nailed here: not just the crash, but the foreknowledge of it. The second your system knows everything’s about to change, but there’s nothing you can do except feel the bottom drop.
Then there’s the damn groove — that stretch of rhythm in the song that doesn’t feel panicked or chaotic. It feels locked in. And for those of us who made it to the other side of the moment, that groove is familiar. It’s the rhythm you step into when you’re fully immersed, taking care of business, senses dialed all the way up. But it’s not a jerking motion. You’re not holding your breath. You’re fluid. You stop trying to control the moment — you become part of it. You become one with it.
And just like that section of the track, the feeling barely lasts — so fleeting you question whether it even happened at all. It’s a kind of cognitive dissonance — a mental vertigo that never quite resolves. It’s like a strange trinity: us, them, and the thing we created in between. That thing… was doom. And in that moment, we were its hands.
“Hand of Doom” wasn’t a warning. It was a receipt.
And when you carry that receipt long enough, you stop asking for change.
Author’s Note: This piece was written as part of Jim Adams’ Song Lyric Sunday. Each week, contributors reflect on songs tied to a given theme. This week’s prompt led me here — to a track I hadn’t planned to write about, but couldn’t ignore.
Love gets framed like it’s soft. Passive. Even foolish. But what’s braver than offering your heart, knowing it might not be held gently?
To love — in any form — is to risk: Being misunderstood. Being rejected. Being reshaped.
It’s easy to armor up. Easy to say you don’t care. But love? Love says: I’ll stay anyway. I’ll risk knowing you and being known in return. I’ll meet you — not to save you, not to fix you, but to witness you.
There’s nothing weak about that.
Love is hard. Love is work. Love is war, sometimes — and you fight it by standing still, heart open.
So no, love isn’t weakness. It’s choosing to remain tender in a world that begs you to go numb. That’s not soft. That’s courage.
Reflective Prompt
Where in your life have you mistaken vulnerability for weakness — and what might shift if you saw it as bravery instead?
Jake had a name once. Not the kind of people muttered when they passed him on the corner—junkie, beggar, waste. He had a name that once meant something. It was stitched onto a work jacket once. It was on birthday cards, driver’s licenses, and bank forms. But time has a way of chewing the edges off a man until even he forgets what he started as.
Maple Street didn’t ask questions. It didn’t brag about what it took. It just waited—like a dog in the rain. Took your warmth in winter, your pride in spring, and your last dollar in the fall. Jake used to think the city was cruel. Now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was just tired.
The slab of concrete on the corner became a sort of confession booth. You sat there long enough, and the sidewalk started remembering for you. Jake’s cardboard sign said, “Anything helps,” but that was a lie. It was a cover-up. What he wanted was for someone to look at him and not flinch.
He remembered the last time Dani, his sister, saw him. Her kid, Micah, clung to her leg, watching Jake wipe blood off his arm in the hallway. The forty bucks he’d taken from her purse sat folded in his sock. That money bought him silence for a night. It cost him her voice for three years.
He told himself he didn’t blame her. But in the quiet—when even the street was empty—he hated how much he missed being loved.
Then came the flyer. Wind-blown, smeared, half-crumpled trash. A rehab center. Big blue letters promising dignity, as if it could be laminated and handed back to you. Jake picked it up because it was the only thing around that looked more beaten than he felt.
He walked to the center wearing a loaner hoodie from the shelter bin, pockets frayed like open wounds. The front desk didn’t blink when he gave his name. That undid him more than judgment would have. Kindness, he realized, cuts deeper when you know you don’t deserve it.
Rehab wasn’t a clean arc. It was tremors and teeth-grinding nights, screaming into pillows, praying to a god he didn’t believe in just to shut off the screaming in his spine.
Then there was Pete.
Gruff, scabbed-over, loud. “You think surviving means you’ve earned something?” he growled one day after Jake mumbled about being ready to try. “You haven’t even apologized to the mirror yet.”
Jake almost left that night. Got as far as the lobby. But there was a vending machine in there—half-lit, full of stale snacks. He stood staring at it for thirty minutes, realizing he didn’t want chips. He wanted a reason to not disappear.
He stayed.
Progress didn’t feel like progress. No one clapped when he made his bed. No one wrote a headline when he chose water over whiskey-flavored mouthwash. But he kept showing up. He kept writing Dani letters. First few ended up in the trash. Then he mailed one.
The reply came weeks later. Just a text: Still clean?
That was all. But it didn’t sound angry. It didn’t sound like goodbye either.
When they handed him his discharge folder, he stared at it for a long time. He didn’t feel done. He didn’t feel new. He felt like wet clay. Still soft. Still shaping.
He passed by Maple Street that afternoon. Same corner. Same stains on the sidewalk. But now someone else was sitting there—a kid, maybe twenty. Hoodie pulled low, cardboard sign shaking in his grip.
Jake didn’t stop with a speech. He didn’t have one. He sat next to him. Quiet. Like the way an old scar settles under your skin.
The kid didn’t look up. But he took the bar. Hid it fast, like it might be stolen. Jake nodded, stood up.
He wasn’t saved. He wasn’t clean in the way people brag about. He still had nights where the dark got too loud and the past whispered things in voices that sounded like his own. But he hadn’t used. He’d stayed.
The sidewalk didn’t cheer. It just stayed where it was. Cold. Unforgiving. Familiar.
But this time, it didn’t hold him down.
Author’s Note:
This piece was written in response to today’s prompts from FOWC, and Word of the Day. Sometimes, the words given feel random—until they don’t. Until they crack open something real.
The Corner Knows is the first in a quiet series about what it means to crawl back from the edge without knowing if you’ll be welcomed. No heroes here. Just people trying not to vanish. The street remembers. So do we.
You ever walk into a room expecting your voice to boom like a prophet’s and instead get met with blank stares and TikTok scrolling?
That was me two weeks ago, stepping into a summer workshop with students aged 8 to 17. I came in with fire and myth, ready to guide them into storytelling. The younger kids couldn’t sit still long enough to absorb anything. The teens? Aloof at best. My usual trick—command the room with presence, reinforce with voice—didn’t move the needle.
I walked out thinking: I might be losing my mojo.
So I did what any story-hardened madman would do.
I built them a universe.
The Ashoma Codex rose from that frustration. An entire mythos crafted for them—a sacred order of supernatural beings bound by fire, memory, and sacrifice. Vampires and werewolves. Secret Circles. Flame-born rites. I even spun up a website just for them, with lore, rituals, and a place to submit their own creations.
And then today, I got word from their instructor: they love it.
They’re building characters. Creating art. Engaging with the world I made. Turns out they didn’t need a lecture. They needed a world that would speak their language.
It’s been a long time since I had that much fun doing something for someone else.
Forging the Forge (with Fewer Bugs and More Story)
Let’s talk about The Narrative Forge (TNF)—my dedicated space for longform fiction.
Eventually, it’ll be home to five deep-cut series:
Ashwood County – Southern Gothic horror soaked in grief and ghost stories
No Half Measures(formerly Cop Stories) – A noir detective tale where trust is dangerous and truth cuts deep
Reilly McGee: Misadventures at Crestview High – 1980s chaos, coming-of-age style, with more heartache than heroics
Bourbon and Rust – Grit, regret, and a neo-Western sense of justice
Truth Burns – Emotional aftermath and the slow claw toward redemption
The plan: post one chapter a week, rotating series. I’m kicking things off with Ashwood County as I work out the kinks and refine the reader experience.
TNF is my main focus right now. But soon, House of Tunage and The Howlin’ Inkwell will start to move forward again too—each with their own voice and rhythm. And yes, visual arts are coming as well. That site’s still under development, slowed down by the same quirks that’ve been haunting the others.
You guys remember The Knucklehead Report? I gave it its own space so I can rant, roast, or rave about the books and movies that cross my path—without crowding out the rest of Memoirs of Madness.
All of this—the new structure, the site spinoffs, the redesigns—is meant to do one thing: streamline MoM. Make it cleaner. More focused. Easier to navigate without tripping over half-finished drafts or misplaced experiments.
I don’t know which projects will thrive, but right now, building them helps me clear the noise and move forward.
It depends on the work. And, if I’m honest, the version of me doing it.
If I’m handling logistics—email chains, platform fixes, all the invisible gears of the MKU—I’ll throw on a podcast or an audiobook. Something with steady cadence. Human voices filling the space so I don’t have to. It’s functional. Grounding. A distraction that still lets me move forward.
But when I’m writing—when the words actually matter—I need music. Not background noise. Not ambiance. Music that moves something.
There’s a point I hit when the doubt creeps in, when the old story shows up: You’re not good enough. You’re not ready. You don’t have anything left to say. And that’s when I reach for the headphones.
Because music gets me past that wall. Certain songs act like a key—one turn, and I’m not in the room anymore. I’m somewhere quieter, older, deeper. Below the part of me that edits, or performs, or tries to be clever. Music lets me slip under all that. It gives me access to the version of me that remembers things I haven’t lived yet. The version that trusts.
Writing becomes less about expression and more about excavation. I’m not inventing—I’m uncovering. Music helps me remember where to dig.
And when it’s really working—when the song hits just right—I’m not working at all. I’m listening.
To the story. To myself. To whatever’s been waiting.
I’ve played my fair share of games across formats—cards, boards, consoles, even a few tabletop RPGs. But there’s one that always pulls me back, not because of its graphics or mechanics, but because of what it reveals.
My mother taught me the first rules of engagement—one card at a time. Solitaire came first, then 500 Rummy, and eventually Spades. She didn’t just teach me to play; she taught me to watch, to calculate, to bluff with grace. Playing cards were never just about the hand you held—they were about the story you told while pretending it didn’t matter.
But as I got older, I found myself pulled toward something deeper. Not just strategy, but myth. That’s where the tabletop games came in—Dungeons & Dragons, Villains & Vigilantes, and my personal favorite: Werewolf: The Apocalypse. That game didn’t just have a storyline—it had lore, ancestry, rage, and sacrifice. It wasn’t about winning. It was about remembering who you were before the world made you forget.
And somewhere in between were the bones—the dominoes—clacking on a Saturday night table, keeping time like a metronome for the past.
I was already writing back then, scribbling scenes in notebooks and building little worlds no one else saw. But games like Werewolf: The Apocalypse didn’t just show me that stories could be powerful—they showed me they could be communal. That they could hit like thunder across a table. That they could change how someone sat, how someone breathed, just by what you said next.
I remember wishing I could write something that gave my friends what those stories gave me: tension, emotion, catharsis. I never thought I had the talent to pull it off. But I kept writing anyway—quietly, stubbornly—hoping maybe someone out there would feel a little of what I felt rolling those dice or flipping that card.
I still do.
I’ve learned not to underestimate myself. Not to confuse doubt with truth. Some stories need polish, sure—but some just need you. Your voice. Your flaws. Your fire.
So I play. I write. I miss a beat, then catch the next one. I embrace the strengths and the limitations—because they both show up to the table.
Be yourself. Write your butt off. The rest takes care of itself.
I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. I’m not allowed to be.
Where I come from, fear is a luxury we were born too broke to afford. Vulnerability wasn’t something we dismissed—it was something we were denied. It was kept behind locked doors, like heirlooms we didn’t inherit.
My grandfather didn’t teach with words. He taught with what he didn’t say. He taught me how to keep the jaw tight, how to pray in silence, how to hold grief like a second spine. He had crafty ways of navigating rooms where he was expected to be invisible, but somehow always left a shadow. He taught me not how to cry—but how to endure the crying of others without blinking.
They told us to walk tall, but not too tall. To speak, but not loudly. To lead, but never forget we’re replaceable. Strong—always. Seen—rarely. Heard—only when invited.
I learned to carry myself like a verdict. The years didn’t soften me—they carved me. And somewhere between funeral suits and morning trains, I mistook resilience for religion.
I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. I’m not allowed to be.
Because they’re still watching. Because weakness stains in places bleach can’t reach. Because I carry names no one etched into stone, but I wear them anyway—in the bend of my back and in the tightening of my breath whenever the world grows quiet enough to remember.
I’ve loved with fists. I’ve buried more brothers than birthdays. I’ve stared into mirrors and seen ghosts blink back.
And I’m still here. Which means I’m still dangerous.
Some days, I hear the voices—low and layered, like drums beneath concrete. Whispers at a distance. Ancestral static tuning itself in the back of my skull.
My father, maybe—never said “I love you,” but left it folded into a clean shirt and the sound of a deadbolt clicking after midnight.
Or the ones who never made it past eighteen, who hover behind my ribs like secrets I’ll never tell.
Some of them speak in riddles. Some in warnings. And some just laugh—cheeky, almost cruel: “Look at this one, still trying to turn ghosts into gospel.”
I remember the nippy mornings, before light. Cold air that slapped you awake. The kind that taught you pain was just a temperature shift you’d survive if you didn’t flinch. Those days made your bones ache—but they made your will sharper, too.
And now, standing here, with all of that folded inside me like a fire I never asked to carry, I wonder:
What have I done with all I’ve been given? Have I honored the ones before me? Or just mirrored their silence?
What have I left for the ones next? A trail of smoke? A shut door? A story they won’t want to finish?
What if the bravest thing isn’t being unafraid— but being seen?
Not as legend. Not as weapon. Not as sacrifice. But as person— messy, aching, unfinished.
What if legacy isn’t built on who endured the most, but who dared to feel what others refused to name?
Maybe I’ve been strong too long. Maybe strength ain’t the absence of fear, but the courage to admit you needed saving too.
Not a statue. Not a sermon. Not a ghost. Just a man— …and maybe that’s where the healing begins. And the trouble ends with me.
Authors Note:
This piece was sparked by Di’s 3TC challenge—and yes, I stole a line from Stacey Johnson’s poem order. Is it still stealing if I tell you up front? (Shrugs.) Anyway, as usual, I’m grateful to be inspired by friends who make me write better, feel deeper, and laugh louder. You know who you are.
There’s something alchemical about writing — it starts as noise in the head and somehow becomes a map of the soul.
I don’t write because I know. I write because I don’t. Because the truth rarely shows itself on command — but it often slips out in the margins.
Didion wasn’t just making a point. She was handing us a tool. A method. When the world feels unclear, the mind cluttered, or the heart tangled — write. Not for performance. Not for perfection. Just to find out what the hell’s going on inside you.
Reflective Prompt
What’s one thing you’ve only understood after you wrote it down?
Losing track of time isn’t a bug — it’s a feature. A built-in occupational hazard. Time slips, evaporates, gets swallowed whole. You want to know what makes me lose track of time? Existing. Creating. Trying to survive my own thoughts with a pen in my hand and a playlist I’ve overanalyzed into oblivion.
Writing. Not just any writing. The kind that starts as a whisper, then sets your spine on fire. The kind that makes your coffee go cold and your leg fall asleep. The kind where you look up and three meals have gone missing. The next thing you know, you’re ranting on a blog (Memoirs of Madness) about the phantom who comes up with these writing prompts like they’re paying attention to your ass.
“Which activities make you lose track of time?” Go to sleep.
Because I sure haven’t.
You ever try to sleep when your brain is busy unraveling fictional timelines, reorganizing half-finished character arcs, or rewording a sentence you wrote in 2014? That’s not insomnia. That’s creative maintenance.
Then there’s music — but again, not casual listening. I’m talking full immersion. Deep dives into B-sides and dusty vinyl grooves. Emotional spelunking. What starts as one track becomes a therapy session. A confession. A reconstruction of every heartbreak I thought I forgot. That’s not a playlist — that’s a time machine. And I keep punching the return ticket.
Next thing you know, there’s a whole damn website just about music (House of Tunage), because you clearly have nothing better to do with your time than build emotional mixtapes for ghosts. Oh yeah, go to sleep.
Thinking is another trap. Or maybe the original sin. I sit down for “a minute,” and suddenly I’m in a three-act dialogue with a dead mentor, an imaginary enemy, and the version of myself that had more optimism and less back pain. Thought spirals aren’t a time suck. They’re the prelude to every good story I’ve ever written — and the footnote to everyone I’ve abandoned.
Next thing you know, your table’s covered in monographs and marginalia. Then you have the nerve to post them like they’re literary gold on yet another website (The Howlin’ Inkwell), because apparently the only thing more dangerous than thinking is believing any of it might matter. Wow. …maybe I shou— go to sleep.
And let’s not forget the premium act of staring into space. That’s not wasted time. That’s creative buffering. System reboot. Soul loading.
So no, I don’t just “lose track of time.” I command it. I twist, bend, and shape it to the will of the gods of story and sound. And most days, they don’t even say thank you.
But that’s fine. Because this isn’t for them. Not really.
My job is to guide you through the splinters that only exist outside of time. You know the place: cold, light, dark, and joyful land. Where memory hums, story bites, and music bleeds.
Let me guide you. Come and take my hand. You’re looking at me like you’re confused. Let me help you clear things up. You look as if you need to get something off your chest.
Seriously, sit down, please. Talk to Mangus.
But if you still think this was all just about losing track of time, I’ll allow the indulgence — just this once. Because I whined once. In the ’70s. Don’t look at me in that tone of voice. Whining was allowed briefly after the bicentennial. There was a memo.
Missed the first meeting of Prompt Addicts Anonymous? That’s okay. We don’t judge. But you might want to catch up before the next spiral. 👉 Session One: “Hi, My Name is Mangus…”
Author’s Note
Yes, the websites mentioned in this piece — House of Tunage, The Howlin’ Inkwell, and even Memoirs of Madness itself — are all very real. And yes, they’re all still works in progress. Like most things I love, they’re messy, unfinished, and somehow always expanding when I should probably be sleeping instead.
So if you click something and it’s half-built, half-broken, or wildly under construction… welcome to the Mangus Khan Universe. We’re getting there. Slowly. Beautifully. Eventually.
The MKU is under construction. But the lights are already on.
“Me, pretending I’m above blog prompts while secretly outlining my fifth entry.”
Do I like blogging challenges and blog hops? No. They’re annoying. They’re addictive. They’re helpful. And I resent all of that.
I don’t like being told what to write. Until I do. Then suddenly I’m five prompts deep, haven’t blinked in two hours, and now I’m questioning my entire emotional architecture because someone dared to ask, “What does the moon mean to you?”
I don’t like structure. But I need it. Because without a deadline or a theme, I will absolutely stare into the void and call it “research.”
Blog hops? Ugh. Too much small talk. Too many exclamation points. And yet, three comments in, I’ve discovered a writer who casually blew my mind with a six-sentence story about grief and bees, and now I’m subscribed, emotionally compromised, and wondering how I ever lived without them.
So yeah. I complain. Loudly. Often. I feel this way on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I suppose it’s because my coffee delivery is usually late. My favorite pen ran out of ink again, and the “good” refills are on backorder on Amazon. It’s not that I’m bitter. I’m just… creatively dehydrated and emotionally overcaffeinated on the wrong days.
However, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, something shifts in the universe. Champagne falls from the heavens. Words become the elixir of the gods. In the dead of winter, I smell the tranquil aroma of lavender in the gentle breeze. My fingers dance. My spirit opens. The muse doesn’t knock — she kicks down the door with glitter in her wake and says, “Write, fool.”
And I do.
And don’t even get me started on the enablers. There’s Sadje, who keeps creating these annoying, wonderful challenges, like Sunday Poser. So, what if I built an entire series based on one of them? Then there’s Di, dropping a daily prompt I now use as a backbone for long fiction like it’s a casual hobby. She’s also got this “Share Your World” thing — yeah, I’m not sharing jack. Even though, if we’re being honest, this post accidentally answers the first two questions of this week’s challenge. I have no idea what she’s talking about on the last two. And Fandango— this ole fart has a daily word challenge I use across multiple posts. I’m an ole fart too, fist in the air and all that. Solidarity. Melissa from Mom with a Blog — I don’t know, maybe moms were the original Jedi. She posts these random images with alt text that make me write funny, weird things… and I enjoy it. Can you say,” Jedi mind trick?” The betrayal. Eugi doing all kinds of magical stuff and her Moonwashed Weekly Prompts got me feeling all peace, love, and hair grease. Writing beautiful peaceful stuff. That’s just wrong! Shame on you! And Esther Chilton? She just shows up once a week, drops off a prompt like it’s no big deal. I gotta wait a whole week for the next one. It’s crap like that which killed cable. Let’s not forget the peskily awesome staff at Promptly Written, who boldly accepted the rantings of an insomniac and continue to push their readers to explore their creative limits. What the hell is that? Inspiration by force? Motivation disguised as structure. Madness. Glorious, structured madness.
Don’t get me started with the photography challenges. Cee — may Allah have mercy on her — encouraged me to explore my camera, sending me running to capture images of things I’d normally ignore without a second thought. Who does that? Cee did. Images I took for her challenges have ended up as descriptions or scenes in so many stories. Too many to mention. And Leanne Cole with her Monochrome Madness — scoffs — having me try to add depth, texture, and shadow to things that clearly weren’t meant to be that serious. And yet… I tried. Multiple times. Because apparently, I have no control over my own artistic direction anymore, if ever. Because of these women — and others — I’ve even heard people refer to me as a Photographer. Of course, I correct them. Obviously. But people be yapping about anything these days.
Here’s what I say about the lot of them: “How dare you ask me to create my ass off and enjoy it?” Complete. Utter. Rubbish.
So? Which one of you enablers got under your skin this week?
Sadje. Di. Fandango. The crime? Just read the damn blog.
Let’s call it what it is: Prompts Addicts Anonymous.
“Hello, my name is Mangus…” [sniff] “…and I’m a…” (It’s okay, we’re here for you.) “…I’m a prompter.” (Applause) “Hey Mangus…”
Author’s Note: This essay was born in public — a response to a simple blog prompt that, like most of my writing, spiraled into something I didn’t expect. It lives on the edge between complaint and confession, between sarcastic side-eye and real reverence for the people and prompts that keep dragging me back to the page.
If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at structure, dodged a deadline, or cursed the muse for showing up late and uninvited — this one’s for you.
And if you’re one of the people I name in here? Yeah, I’m talking about you — but in a good way. With sincere gratitude and thanks. You guys and so many more are one of the reasons I keep going.
She smiled. He believed it. But the fire had already started.
The woman sitting next to me slipped a note into my hand that read: “He’s not who he says he is.”
She didn’t look back. Just placed it there—neat, deliberate—and folded herself into stillness, like she’d already said too much.
I didn’t open it. Not yet. The paper pulsed against my palm like a second heartbeat.
Outside, the river caught fire. Sunlight splintered across the water, all rust and ruin. Temple silhouettes watched from the banks, hollow and grieving. Grief has no language. Just echoes. Just light bleeding through the wreckage.
Across from me, he sat, impeccable. Tie straight. Wristwatch catching the last of the sun. “You alright?” he asked, voice drenched in honey and soothing like always.
But I wonder—Is this false comfort? That soft menace people only hear in hindsight.
I’ve been here before. My finger found the scar hidden in my palm, the one shaped like escape. It remembers what my heart tries to forget.
I smile. He believes it. Because that’s the thing about men like him—they love the surface. And some people never notice the smoke. They only see the flames. By then, it’s too late.
My stop is next. So is his. He doesn’t know I’ve been here before. That this time, I won’t look back. I know he wants me to. But he’s not ready for what comes if I do.
There’s a strange, satisfying freedom in flash fiction—the constraints force you to choose each word like a scalpel. It’s a literary pressure cooker where character, tension, and atmosphere have to collide fast and leave a mark.
For me, flash is where I go to explore the edges—grief, memory, survival, those quiet gut-punch moments when the world shifts and no one else notices. Stories like this come out like smoke under a locked door. You don’t always see the fire yet—but it’s there.
Want to try your own version of this story’s beginning? The prompt was: “The woman sitting next to me slipped a note into my hand that read, ‘He’s not who he says he is.’”
I scream every time I’m asked to compromise who I am, what I believe. There are days I walk through this like a ghost—quiet, invisible, barely tethered to the world. I’ve worn this skin too long to pretend anymore. I’ve learned that silence is never neutral. It collects. It bruises. It builds a coffin for the self.
How long did I expect integrity to outweigh ignorance?
The shame cuts deepest when I remember the things I was asked to do to be accepted. Asked to perform, asked to mute the fire, asked to shrink for the comfort of others who never deserved my story in the first place. And like a fool, I tried. I polished my voice. I spoke in softened syllables. I tiptoed like I was walking on eggshells—not to protect myself, but to protect their illusion of safety.
But here’s the truth: Their comfort was never my duty.
This world has corrupted too much, taken too many of us who had something real to say. It props up empty vessels and paints them gold, calls it culture, calls it “marketable.” Meanwhile, those of us who bleed truth are told we’re too much, too raw, too difficult to brand.
They wanted me to smile like some hollow doll—something quiet, something that won’t fight back when they put words in my mouth. But I’m not plastic. I’m not hollow. I don’t bend like that anymore.
I carry my scars with intention now.
Let them call it anger. Let them call it ungrateful. I call it knowing. Knowing that every time I was asked to “adjust,” they weren’t asking for kindness—they were asking for obedience.
I’m done apologizing for the shape my soul takes.
Author’s Note
This piece was inspired in part by prompts from FOWC, RDP, and WOTD. Thank you all for the sparks you give. Your work matters.
It’s not like I haven’t given workshops before. I have. I’ve stood in front of rooms, talked craft, told stories, helped shape sentences and spark ideas. But this time feels different.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t done this since I got gut-punched over a decade ago—since the ground gave out, and I had to relearn how to stand. Since pain stopped being something I processed and started being something I wore. Somewhere along the line, I started using it like a mask. And the thing about masks is, after a while, they stop feeling like something you’re wearing. They start feeling like skin.
It became comfortable. Familiar. I could hide in it. Feel the illusion of security it gave me. But now I’m being asked to step forward again—to speak to young writers about the craft I’ve spent a lifetime practicing. And I’m wondering: am I ready to take that mask off?
What bothers me is the doubt. Not about the knowledge—I have that. Not about the experience—I’ve lived it. What bothers me is the fear that what I carry now might come through in ways I can’t control. That my jaded, scarred, honest soul might discourage someone before they even start. That I’ll slip into some surrealist rant about how writing is both a gift and a curse, a duty and a burden. That I’ll tell the truth too plainly, and it’ll scare them.
Or maybe worse: that I’ll freeze. Go silent. Stage fright. Blank mind. That I’ll stand there with nothing to give.
But the deeper fear—the one that really digs—is this: what if I’ve forgotten how to speak as the person I’ve become? Not the one I used to be. Not the one who was broken. But the one who crawled through it all and still believes in words.
Because truth matters. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. And writing—that strange, beautiful, brutal act—is built on truth. Our words tell who we are. They don’t lie. And if I show up and speak honestly—about the process, the pain, the doubt, the moments of fire—then maybe that’s enough.
What bothers me isn’t the fear of failure. It’s the responsibility. The weight of standing in front of new voices and showing them not just how to write, but how to be a writer. To give them not comfort, but clarity. Not perfection, but presence.
So yes, I’m nervous. Yes, I feel exposed. But maybe that’s exactly where I need to be. Maybe the only way to teach this craft is to live it—right there, in real time, with all the scars showing.
I reach out into the darkness—and find myself. Doubt courses through my blood. The writer within whispers: Please don’t forget me.
Though doubt chills me, I won’t surrender to its might. I lift my head and know—I don’t walk alone. I whisper back, “I won’t forget you, because you are me… and I am you.”
A blog I forgot I started. A voice I didn’t know I needed. And the stories that refused to stay silent.
Motivation for Starting the Blog
I started this blog back in 2011, though I didn’t even remember creating it until I stumbled across it during a Google search of my name. My wife was sick then, and I was drowning in anger and helplessness. Someone once told me every serious writer had a blog. I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to be taken seriously — even if I didn’t know what I was doing with it.
At the time, it wasn’t about building an audience. I was just trying to write my way through something I couldn’t fix. I’ve solved hard problems my whole life — but that one, watching someone I loved slip away, broke me in a way nothing else had. Writing was the only thing I had that didn’t ask for solutions. It let me feel what I was afraid to say out loud.
Mangus Khan wasn’t supposed to turn into all this. He was just a character I was kicking around for a novel I never finished. But before I knew it, Mangus became more than a name — he became me. There was no turning back the clock, no putting the genie back in the bottle. I didn’t plan it. I never looked back.
In 2023, I made the choice to keep this space alive and see what it could become. It’s the framework of something I’ve been carrying around in my head for decades. I wanted to grow as a writer — to see if there was any real interest in the kind of stories I wanted to tell. When I returned, this blog had 42 members. That was enough. I kept writing until I got sick. Then I recovered and came back swinging, writing without expectations.
Lately, I’ve been working on building a larger space to house all of this — something broader, something that reflects everything I’ve come to care about. I still don’t have any big expectations. Some people retire and fix up cars, build boats, and travel the world. I tell stories.
Expectations for Audience and Reach
I didn’t start this blog expecting a crowd. When I found it again in 2023, it had 42 members, and that felt about right. I wasn’t chasing followers or clicks. This was just a space where I could clear my head and cleanse my soul.
Then the strangest thing happened: people started showing up. And they stayed. I never expected that. I’m still blown away, honestly.
I’ve been fortunate in life — I’ve traveled around the world, solved complex problems, and worked with people from all walks of life. That was my world for years. But as much as I accomplished in that space, I’m not sure it made the kind of impact I feel now. That’s because of the reader engagement. The comments, the conversations, the quiet understanding from strangers — it’s different. It’s human. And it’s deeply personal.
I still look at other blogs and wonder how they pull it off — all that strategy and polish. That’s never been me. I just show up, write, and try to keep it honest. If that’s enough for people to stick around, then I’ve already received more than I ever asked for.
Hopes for Personal Growth
At first, I was just trying to survive. But somewhere along the way, I realized I had grown — not just as a writer, but as a person. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s everything I’ve lived through. But I have a deeper, more meaningful appreciation for things now — moments, words, silence, people.
When I decided to keep this blog going in 2023, part of it was a challenge to myself: could I still push my craft? Could I write with more clarity, more courage, more control? I wasn’t chasing perfection. I just wanted to be sharp. Clear. Unafraid to say what mattered. To explore what was still inside me, and maybe even finish the novel I’d started after my wife passed.
Writing forces reflection. It exposes the things I usually keep buried. And growth doesn’t come from breakthroughs — it comes from the grind. From showing up on the blank page when no one’s watching. That’s where I’ve grown the most.
Expectations Around Content and Consistency
When I first started, there was no plan. No roadmap. Just the need to write. I figured maybe I’d post once a week if something came to me. But life doesn’t follow calendars, and neither does creativity.
What’s come out over time has been a mix of fiction, essays, and visual art — sometimes sharp and focused, other times loose and wandering. I never set out to define a genre or lane for myself. I just followed what moved me.
There were stretches where I disappeared — illness, life, burnout. And there were stretches where I wrote constantly, chasing down stories, experimenting with form, pushing myself to see how far I could take a single idea. After I recovered, I kicked things into gear and just kept going. Not for clicks. Not for an audience. Just to stay in motion.
I thought about organizing the content more, making it cleaner or easier to follow. But I’ve found that consistency for me isn’t about structure — it’s about showing up with honesty. Whether it’s fiction, a personal reflection, or a visual piece — if it’s real, it belongs here.
Surprises Along the Way
I didn’t expect to still be here. I didn’t expect Mangus Khan — once just a throwaway character — to become part of who I am. And I definitely didn’t expect people to stay, read, and respond like they have.
I never expected to embody Mangus Khan, but I have.
What surprised me the most, though, is how much this space has mattered — not just to readers, but to me. I’ve done work all over the world. I’ve solved big, technical problems and made decisions that impacted entire systems. But somehow, writing a story that makes one person feel seen hits harder.
This blog wasn’t supposed to become something. But somehow, it did — a record of survival, growth, grief, imagination, and unexpected connection.
Some people restore old cars in retirement. Some build boats. I tell stories. That’s the project. That’s the work. And if it ends tomorrow, I’ll still be proud of what came from it, because none of it was supposed to happen in the first place.
It’s not a brand. It’s not a business. It’s a creative world I’ve been sketching in pieces for years — fiction, essays, visuals, and ideas I can’t shake loose.
This piece was written in response to Sadje’s Sunday Poser— a prompt that turned into a reckoning, a reflection, and a return to something I didn’t know I’d missed.
If you’re here for the stories, you’re already part of it.
Stay tuned. There’s more coming. I’ll see you when the ink dries.
She appeared just past the second lamppost—trench coat clinging like a secret, umbrella in hand, striding through puddles like the laws of physics were optional.
Julian knew trouble when he saw it. It usually wore red lipstick, a miniskirt, and a tight monogrammed sweater—the kind of outfit that said “daddy pays the rent but I hold the lease on chaos.” Today, though, trouble wore duck boots that quacked with every step and a look that could curl paint off a Buick.
She didn’t look at him. She didn’t have to. Women like that didn’t look; they summoned.
“Lost your umbrella again?” she said, pausing by the bench where Julian had been pretending not to argue with a squirrel.
“It fled the scene. Honestly, I think it’s seeing other people.”
She didn’t laugh. Just smiled—barely—a slow tilt at the corner of her mouth, like a private joke that hadn’t decided whether to trust him yet.
They stood in silence, rain dotting her umbrella like Morse code for bad decisions. The space between them held history—not romance, not quite—but something forged in long nights, bad coffee, and one too many favors exchanged with no names attached.
Then the birds attacked.
Not big ones. Not Hitchcock’s apocalyptic squad. These were small. Spiteful. Moist. They dive-bombed like feathered torpedoes with a vendetta against hats.
Julian flailed. She calmly finished a sip of coffee.
“I told you not to use that conditioner,” she said, ducking as one bird performed a tactical swoop. “Lavender-scented. They think you’re a meadow.”
“Then why are they hitting you, too?”
“I might have rubbed some of it on your collar.”
Julian blinked, now soggy and betrayed. “Why?”
She sipped again, her expression as neutral as Switzerland on a Tuesday. “Science.”
One bird landed triumphantly on the umbrella. Another did an aerial split and flipped him off mid-squawk.
Julian sighed and slumped onto the bench, defeated. She sat beside him, leaving an equal six inches of space and chaos between them.
For a moment, the world fell quiet—just rain tapping the concrete, the occasional rustle of wings, and that unspoken thing that always hung between them.
Maybe it was love once. Maybe just recognition. Like two people who survived the same fire and never spoke of it.
“I curl my hair in the mornings just for this,” she muttered, brushing a wet strand from her face.
Julian didn’t reply. He was too busy wondering if dignity could be taxidermied—or if maybe, just maybe, this ridiculous kind of connection was all the grace some of us got.
Author’s Note: This piece is a continuation of the Forecast: Regret series—a flash fiction collection built on misadventures, poor choices, and the occasional squirrel assault. I wrote this story using the prompts from SoCS (Stream of Consciousness Saturday) and Esther’s Weekly Writing Prompt, which continue to challenge and inspire me in strange and delightful ways.
As always, I try to have fun writing fiction—because if I’m not enjoying it, I can guarantee Julian isn’t either.
It started, as most questionable decisions do, with a woman, a trench coat, and a very hedonistic craving for street tacos.
Julian wasn’t even supposed to be out. The rain was biblical—Julian half expected to see Noah waving him aboard. His socks were soaked, his spirit soggy, and the umbrella he carried had the structural integrity of a wet paper crane. But tacos were calling, and Julian—private eye by day, glutton by destiny—answered.
Midway through the park, a lamppost flickered like it owed someone money. Julian stepped into the golden spill of light like he was in a film noir. All he needed was the dame holding a cigarette to her ruby red lips, waiting for him to light it. His coat flapped dramatically, mostly because it was two sizes too big and purchased during a clearance sale he mistook for fate. He imagined someone, somewhere, narrating: He was a man torn between purpose and guacamole.
That’s when it happened.
A squirrel launched from a tree like it had just discovered espresso. It landed squarely on Julian’s shoulder, using his necktie as a zipline to destiny.
He screamed like a man whose dignity had just filed for divorce and taken the house.
The umbrella went flying. The squirrel somersaulted off his head. And Julian—formerly mysterious, now flailing—slipped in a puddle with the grace of a ballet-dancing refrigerator.
As he lay on the sidewalk, soaked and stunned, the only thing colder than the rain was the betrayal in his burrito-less stomach.
A couple walked by. The woman whispered, “Was that performance art?”
Julian lifted his head with all the levity he could muster. “Only if you clap.”
They did.
He took a bow from the pavement. Somewhere, a squirrel chittered in applause.
Sleep and I have a complicated history. We used to be close, tight, even. But somewhere along the way, we grew apart. Maybe it was the late-night thoughts that wouldn’t shut up, or the memories that kept crawling back under the covers. Now, we pass like strangers in a hallway—familiar, but distant.
Slumber is that elusive lover who whispers sweet nothings in my ear as she caresses the back of my neck. She pulls the sheets back, looking at me with that suggestive gaze of hers. I slip into bed beside her, feel her warmth press against my restlessness. That’s it—I begin to drift…
But just as the fog settles, chaos kicks open the door.
Suddenly, I hear my muse Ursula—lime green ass and all—screaming in my ears, “I want my words! You think this is fucking Boy Scouts?” I swear, Ursula has no manners whatsoever. She eats all the Cheez-Its and leaves crumbs in the bed. But she wears a fedora, smokes Cohibas, and if she thinks the groove is tight, she’ll pass you one and nod like jazz is leaking from her bones. So I spend the next several hours writing, creating graphics, editing film—or whatever the hell she’s decided is non-negotiable that night. I really need to buy her a bib. And a damn watch.
Wake time? Whenever Ursula crashes, the muse finally shuts up, or the coffee starts flirting again.
The static clung to him like ash—faint, choking, inescapable. He’d stopped keeping track of the days. Time was foremost a suggestion now, something smeared across the ceiling in mildew and regret.
They said he was a man once. Strong. Reliable. The kind that shows up on time and keeps his word. The kind that doesn’t cry at hospital bedsides or stare too long at old photographs. They said that.
But memory plays tricks. Rewrites endings. Paints the villains in softer hues and leaves the heroes out in the cold. His reflection no longer argued. It just blurred at the edges, refusing to confirm or deny what he had become.
The sink dripped. The fan rattled. The voices whispered. Still, he sat there, jaw clenched, knuckles white, a prayer caught somewhere between his teeth and his shame.
He collapsed into the corner of himself—the part that still remembered how to feel.
He heard a child giggle, smelled lavender and lilac. But from where?
That door had been closed for years, bolted by memory, corroded by silence. Yet tonight, something had stirred. Not hope. Just the echo of what it used to sound like.
A brief confession about messy renovations, too many domains, and building the MKU out of creative rubble.
You Ever Try to Clean and Just Make a Bigger Mess?
Yeah, that’s me right now.
I’ve been trying to fix this blog for months. What started as a quick tidy-up turned into something resembling a digital yard sale—only with fewer treasures and way more broken links. I even considered shutting the whole thing down and rebuilding from scratch. But that felt a little extreme, even for me. I have a knack for turning easy tasks into complicated messes. It’s a gift. Or a delusion. Same difference.
So, I got a wild hair—you know the rest—and decided to look at my entire online footprint. It turns out that I was hoarding domains, just like I was collecting vintage Pez dispensers. Just paying for them to sit there, doing absolutely nothing. Honestly, I’d have better luck with a couple of scratch-offs and a can of Peach Nehi.
That’s when I finally did it—I built something called the Mangus Khan Universe (MKU). Yeah, it’s a little on the nose, but the point was to create a space that could properly hold all the creative work I’ve been cramming into Memoirs of Madness.
MKU isn’t finished, but it’s functional. Over the next few weeks, you’ll see things shifting. Posts might vanish, new stuff will appear, and categories will get shuffled. Don’t panic—it’s all part of the plan. Mostly.
I just wanted to give you a heads-up that Memoirs of Madness is undergoing a bit of a makeover. More changes are coming, and I’ll share a full announcement once the MKU is officially live and dangerous.
Stay tuned. Stay weird.
Step into the MKU It’s not perfect. It’s not finished. But neither am I.
for those who know what it’s like to be visible but not believed
Every day is another lesson in invisibility. Not the kind you choose, not the soft fade of a disappearing act. This is the kind handed down in glances that slide past you. In doors that stay closed just a second longer when you’re approaching. In the space you leave behind when you’re gone, and no one notices the shape of your absence.
You become fluent in the language of indifference. You learn the weight of unasked questions. You memorize the way people say “I didn’t see you there” like it’s a kindness, instead of an indictment.
There is a peculiar violence in being overlooked. Not bruised. Not broken. Just… reduced. Down to skin, down to stereotype, down to background noise. They don’t mean to erase you— and somehow, that makes it worse.
They’ll say you’re quiet. You’ll wonder if they’ve ever actually listened.
You wear shame like a second skin. Not because you earned it, but because somewhere along the way, someone handed it to you like inheritance and you forgot how to put it down.
You stand still in a world built to move around you— fast, loud, full of curated meaning. And you begin to question:
Is there something wrong with me, or is there something wrong with this lens that always finds me blurred?
You’ve learned to map your pain in silence. Each breath is a kind of protest. Each blink a refusal to disappear entirely.
There are veins beneath your skin that look like lightning— not because you are struck, but because you are always just about to burn.
And yet you don’t. Not fully.
You endure. Not in glory. Not with applause. But with defiance. The quiet kind. The kind that goes unnoticed until someone says:
“I didn’t realize you were carrying that much.”
And you smile without smiling, because you know the truth:
You were always carrying that much. They just never asked to know.
He wasn’t born to be broken, but he was built that way.
He doesn’t remember how long he’s been digging. Only that the walls feel closer now. Not physically—spiritually. Like the air itself is grieving something it can’t name. Like the dirt is learning his shape better than he ever did.
He was born into this plastic maze. Clear walls. Curved tunnels. Endless observation. They gave him purpose before he even knew what freedom was. “Work is life,” they whispered. “Keep moving or you’ll disappear.”
So he moved. So he disappeared.
Lately, the soil feels too clean. Too filtered. Too… safe. He begins to question whether he’s ever touched anything real— whether any of this was ever soil at all, or just a stage dressed as survival.
His antennae twitch like doubt. His thoughts spiral like tunnels without exit signs. There’s no map. No sky. Just the scrape. scrape. scrape. and the promise that if he keeps digging, it might all make sense.
“Dig,” they told him. “Dig like your life depends on it.”
But what if life was never the point? What if it was just obedience with a heartbeat?
He begins to dream—quietly, dangerously—of things he’s never seen: grass that doesn’t end, light without glare, a silence not born of suppression but of peace.
He wonders if the others feel it too— that dull, aching sense of being watched by something that calls itself structure, but tastes like a slow death.
He screamed once. Pressed his mandibles to the glass and begged. For what, he doesn’t know. Maybe to be named. Maybe to be more than a metaphor for how the world devours those who ask too many questions.
But no one answered. Only the glass pulsed with faint warmth— a reminder that he is seen, but not heard.
Now he digs not to build, but to resist. Each handful of soil no longer a task, but a soft rebellion. A quiet revolution made of claw, intention, and fatigue.
He doesn’t want to be efficient. He wants to be free. Or at least real. Or at least his.
And if this tunnel leads to nothing— no sky, no breach, no breaking—
at least it was carved by his own choosing. At least the hands that made the hole were his.
Because sometimes the cure isn’t a chemical. Sometimes, it’s permission to feel trapped without calling it a flaw.
🪞 Reflective Prompt
What parts of your routine were handed to you like a cage dressed in ritual? What would rebellion look like if it were quiet, personal, and yours?
Still digging?
This piece lives inside a much bigger world. Explore the rest of the Mangus Khan Universe—a stitched-together gallery of confessions, fiction, fractured portraits, and quiet chaos.
Can you howl when there is no one there to hear you? Is your passion only for public consumption? I’m frostbitten by your whispers.
There was a time I needed your touch. I needed your attention. Not all of it—just enough to matter. Not to me. I needed it to matter to you.
But you blinked, and I shattered. You turned, and I calcified into someone else’s silence. They say the world ends in fire or ice— I know both. Your heat was conditional. Your absence, absolute.
Some men beg for war to distract from the wound. Me? I just wear the hood tighter, pull it close like a secret I still want to believe in.
I walk through your memory like a half-burned gospel, rubbing ash on my skin like anointing oil. There’s still a spark behind my teeth, but no one’s left to kiss the smoke.
And even now— when I speak, my voice curls like steam off a pot no one stayed to stir. …and silence never needed an audience.
“Grandpa, I need a real story for my history project. Something about America, or the Fourth of July, or whatever.”
The old man scratched his chin, leaned back in the squeaky recliner, and smirked.
“Alright, kid. Lemme tell you how your grandma and I met. It was the Fourth of July, 1978. I was 19, dumb as bricks, and full of patriotic stupidity.”
From the kitchen, a voice called out: “Oh, this again. You gonna tell the real version this time, or your usual nonsense?”
Grandpa rolled his eyes. “It’s all true. Just maybe… slightly singed around the edges.”
It started with an idea. Not a good one. My Uncle Tommy, our genius friend “Meatball,” and I decided to put on our own fireworks show. We didn’t have proper fireworks. We had two crates of off-brand bottle rockets, a metal garbage can, a stolen traffic cone, and a six-pack of warm root beer.
Tommy swore the garbage can would “amplify” the fireworks. Meatball called it “fire science.” I just lit the fuse.
Boom.
The garbage can launched thirty feet in the air like a missile. One rocket shot sideways and hit a mailbox. Another bounced off my forehead. And one, God help me, flew straight down my pants.
I panicked. I ran in circles. My shorts were smoking. I stopped, dropped, rolled, and screamed. At some point, my eyebrows gave up and disappeared.
Next thing I know, I’m in the ER, wrapped in silver burn cream, looking like a baked potato with no dignity.
That’s when your grandma walks in. Nurse training student. Bright smile. Clipboard. Smelled like lavender and antiseptic. She looked at me, this smoldering idiot, and said, “So… was it worth it for freedom?”
From the kitchen again: “And what did you say next, hotshot?”
“I said she looked like a very clean angel. Then I threw up on her shoes.”
“Mm-hmm. Romantic.”
“Did you ask her out?”
Are you kidding? I tried. But the morphine was kicking in. I told her she looked “like a floating disinfected goddess” and then passed out while apologizing to the IV pole.
Still—she didn’t run. That’s how I knew she was special.
We kept in touch. She came to my follow-ups. I wrote her letters. She eventually forgave the vomit. We got married two years later. She even let me light sparklers at the wedding. Supervised, of course.
“Wow. That’s kinda romantic… in a flammable way.”
Exactly. So you tell your teacher this: Freedom’s messy. Fireworks are dangerous. But love? Sometimes, it starts with a bang. Just don’t put bottle rockets in garbage cans.
From the kitchen: “And tell him about the park ban!”
Every morning, she wrote to keep the birds at bay.
They came with the light—first as shadows dragging themselves across the windows, then as a rustle, low and persistent, like wind thinking too hard. Doves mostly, though wrong somehow. Their eyes were too still, their feathers too quiet. Occasionally, darker birds arrived—sleek as oil, with glints in their beaks like pins. They didn’t chirp or coo. They watched.
She used to think they were hallucinations, symptoms of grief. Her brother had drowned in the river five years ago. No body, no real goodbye. After that, the house changed. Or maybe she did.
The birds began showing up shortly after the funeral. Perched on curtain rods. Nested in the corners of the ceiling where cobwebs once clung. They moved like smoke. Never flapping, just shifting, gliding, like time with feathers.
She had never written a word before he died.
Now, she couldn’t stop.
At first, it felt like a compulsion. Survival. Write or unravel. But soon, the stories took on a shape of their own. They came through her fingers in long, fevered bursts—narratives that looped and twisted and whispered through the typewriter-like incantations. Whenever she paused, the birds stirred. Paper fluttered. Air thickened.
One morning, she stayed in bed. Her arms wouldn’t move. Grief sat on her chest like a second ribcage.
By mid-afternoon, the house was breathing.
Not creaking—breathing. The walls rose and fell in slow, silent exhales. Books slumped off shelves. The floorboards quivered like violin strings underfoot. And the birds—dozens, maybe hundreds—lined the walls, all facing her. Eyes like eclipse moons. Waiting.
She crawled to the desk. Typed three words: He was lost.
The air calmed. The birds blinked once. Vanished.
After that, she understood.
They weren’t punishing her. They were pushing her. Urging the story out. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know what for. But she knew the birds were part of it. Maybe even keepers of it. Strange, spectral editors in feathered cloaks.
The typewriter, an old rusted Royal, began to type without her. At night. Quiet, rhythmic, like a heartbeat. She woke to new pages. Pages she didn’t remember writing. One had a map scrawled on the back—inked in spirals and loops. Another contained a letter addressed to her in her brother’s handwriting.
I saw the ice crack. I saw the light inside it. I’m not afraid.
She burned that one. She burned the next three as well. But they always came back. Not charred. Not even creased. Just waiting on the desk like polite ghosts.
The stories that came through her grew stranger. Boys who vanished into mirrors. Houses that forgot how to hold their shape. Rivers that swallowed memories and returned them in riddles. Always, always, a boy at the center. Sometimes drowned. Sometimes glowing. Sometimes stitched together from stars.
She never gave him her brother’s name. But the birds knew.
They began bringing her things. A button she remembered from his jacket. A library card he’d lost in third grade. A page from a notebook she hadn’t seen since they were children, filled with a crude comic he’d drawn—“Captain Birdbrain and the Time Vultures.”
She laughed. She cried. She kept writing.
She began to understand the birds weren’t birds at all. Not really.
One blinked at her one morning, and she swore she saw an entire galaxy in its eye—planets spinning, stories coalescing, a thousand unnamed lives passing through. Another unfurled its wings, and letters spilled from its feathers, fluttering like snow, dissolving on contact.
She no longer felt afraid. Not exactly.
They were eerie, yes. But so is truth when you haven’t looked at it in a while.
The house shifted in small ways. The closet no longer opened to coats but to mist. The attic smelled of saltwater. She didn’t question it. She followed the thread.
She wrote not to escape grief but to appease it. To make it into something legible. Something she could carry. Each word formed a tiny act of negotiation between what was gone and what remained.
One night, she fell asleep at the desk. When she woke, a new story was finished—clean, structured, heartbreakingly beautiful. The final line read:
“And when she opened the door, there he was—smiling, whole, and made entirely of light.”
The birds were utterly still.
One—larger than the rest, with a sheen-like moonlight on bone—landed on her shoulder. Its weight was real. Solid. She reached up gently, and it leaned into her touch.
There was no song. Just presence.
She folded the page and placed it in an envelope marked For Him.
The next morning, the birds didn’t come.
The house was quiet in a way it hadn’t been in years. She waited. She made coffee. Nothing stirred. For a long time, she thought they were gone.
Then, around dusk, the light shifted. Just slightly. The world outside the window tilted toward a kind of blue she’d never seen. Deeper than twilight, warmer than dawn. The birds returned—not many, just a few. But they glowed now. Dimly. Like coals before fire.
They perched around the room. Silent. Peaceful.
The largest one dropped a page at her feet. It held only a title:
Chapter One.
She smiled.
She had learned to write not to fight chaos, but to give it order.
Is it hard to be a beautiful woman? People think you have the world at your feet. They think doors open for you, heads turn for you, and life bends around your presence. But they don’t see the trade. They don’t see the constant calibration—how much of yourself you shave off each day to fit into someone else’s frame. Beauty is not freedom. It’s exposure. A spotlight you didn’t ask for, that you can’t turn off.
You’re seen before you’re heard. Assumed before you’re known. People don’t meet you—they meet the idea of you. Their version. Their fantasy. Their fear. And if you don’t match it? You become a threat. A disappointment. A target. It’s not just tiring—it’s erasure in slow motion.
So you patch yourself together—smile here, soften there, silence the part that wants to speak too loudly. Over time, your identity becomes a kind of repair job. You keep the strongest parts in storage, hidden from view, waiting for a time when it might be safe to bring them out. You begin to wonder: Who am I without all the edits? What’s left when I’m not translating myself for someone else’s comfort?
You learn to play roles just to survive. To be warm but not inviting. Assertive, but not “difficult.” Intelligent, but never intimidating. Every room becomes a stage. Every glance is a calculation. When will it be okay for you to step out from behind their idea of you, letting you be who you are, not who they’ve imagined or prefer? How many masks do you have to wear before one of them finally feels like skin?
The tension doesn’t just live in your body—it rewires it. It clutches your voice before you speak. It lingers in your posture, in your smile that’s a little too careful, in your silence that’s mistaken for grace. They don’t see the moments when you swallow yourself to keep the peace. When you feel the full ache of being looked at but never seen.
Every day, you make choices that feel small but cost you something: how to walk into a room, how to hold your face, when to speak, and when to stay quiet. You tell yourself it’s just for now. Just until it’s safe. Just until they see you for real. But how long can you stay edited before you forget the uncut version?
The woman in the photo is not just posing; she’s done shrinking. Her posture is not elegance—it’s exhaustion turned into boundary. It’s defiance without apology. It’s a question you can’t ignore anymore: What happens when a woman stops choosing what’s expected, and finally chooses herself?
Not your version of her. Not the one that plays nice. Just her. Fully, freely, finally.
Author’s Note This piece was written for Esther’s Weekly Writing Prompt, with a word prompt from Fandango’s FOWC. Big thanks to all of you for keeping the creative fire lit week after week, day after day. These prompts aren’t just words—they’re jumping-off points, gut checks, and sometimes lifelines. Appreciate what you do more than you know. Keep ‘em coming.
No one who stepped through the Harmonic Gate returned the same.
Every century, deep within the Everwhisper Forest, a path of crimson stones bloomed overnight beneath the twilight mist. The elders whispered that the Gate only appeared to those on the edge of belief, of becoming, of breaking.
Mira had walked for days, heart splintered by loss and mind clouded by grief. The colors of the forest shimmered like memories she couldn’t hold onto. Then she saw it: the radiant circle suspended midair, pulsing with a sound she didn’t hear but felt, like her soul was being gently tuned back into harmony.
She stepped forward, not to escape, but to remember. The moment her fingers brushed the light, her sorrow sang—clear, bright, necessary. The Gate did not erase her pain; it transformed it.
Behind her, the forest sighed. Ahead, everything vibrated with possibility.
Adidas, the local jazz flautist, was found slumped behind the espresso bar, mouth still puckered mid-note, a splash of Granny Asics’ signature dark roast dripping from his shirt.
Granny Asics didn’t flinch. “I hate jazz flutes, dear. There’s a difference.”
Detective Huarache arrived five lugs late, trench coat dusted with eraser shavings and cinnamon. He inspected the brew line, sniffed the milk steamer, poked a biscotti. “Hmm. Notes of nutmeg, regret, and… cyanide.”
Gasps. Granny blinked once. Twice. Then turned slowly to her spice rack. “Impossible. I use almond syrup, not arsenic.”
But the label on the tiny bottle said otherwise: ALMONDINE™ – Sweet with a lethal kick. Someone had swapped her stash.
Security footage (stored in the heel’s AirPod case) revealed the culprit: Fila, the lounge pianist, in a sequin hoodie, sneaking behind the counter after hours.
“Motive?” Huarache asked.
“Adidas slept with his metronome,” Vans muttered, as thunder rolled across the outsole—someone upstairs was walking again.
Granny sighed, wiped the counter, and started a fresh pot. “Jazz’ll be the death of us all.”
The Chuck Stop Chronicles
A Micro-Murder Mystery Series Inside a Shoe
Tucked inside a dusty, size 11 Converse lives The Chuck Stop—a secret world of stitched souls, rogue eyelets, and jazz-fueled drama. What appears to be an old sneaker to the outside world is, on the inside, a buzzing speakeasy for misfit footwear and threadbare legends.
But when Jordan—the local harmonica king—is found crushed in the toe box, the sole sanctuary unravels. Enter Detective Huarache, a trench-coated sleuth with a limp and a grudge, determined to lace together the truth. As the mysteries deepen, one thing becomes clear: this shoe holds more than music and espresso. It holds secrets. Dark ones. Ones that walk.
Each episode is a 200-word burst of stylish chaos—part murder mystery, part surreal comedy, part soft-padded existential crisis. Expect faulty AI resurrections, foam cults, toe-box tombs, and thunder that isn’t thunder.
Because in The Chuck Stop, nothing’s dead forever— Not your past. Not your rival. Not even your laces.
We tend to think of teachers as just the ones in the classroom. But they’re not the only ones, are they? The truth is, our education doesn’t start in a classroom—and it certainly doesn’t end there either.
I didn’t really get what teachers were about when I was younger. To be honest, I was probably a pain in the neck to deal with. I look back now and realize I owe every one of them an apology. They showed up every day. They put up with kids like me—kids who thought they had it all figured out—and still tried to teach us something real. That takes more than patience. That takes purpose.
I raised four kids. There’s a reason I’ve got a bald head and a gray beard. And those were my own kids. Teachers deal with dozens of kids every day, each with their own story, their baggage, their chaos. And they do it with little supplies, low pay, and almost no credit. They improvise. They stretch. They hustle. And still, they show up.
It wasn’t until I began training soldiers that I truly began to understand. I was working with adults—grown people, trained to follow orders—and it was still a challenge. Getting through to them, helping them grow, managing all the different personalities and egos? Not easy. Now think about doing that with a room full of kids. Every single day.
Then came the workshops. Then mentorship. Years of teaching and guiding—and here’s the truth that finally hit me: we’re not just teachers. We’re also students. I know, that sounds simple. Obvious even. But here’s where it gets sticky. Oh no, Mangus is about to say something weird.
I submit that we’re both teacher and student at the same time.
You can’t teach well if you’re not also learning. Every interaction, every mistake, every person you try to help teach you something. And if you’re paying attention, it changes how you teach. It humbles you. It sharpens you.
So yeah, classroom teachers are incredible. They deserve way more respect than they get. However, the truth is that we’re surrounded by teachers all the time. And we’re teaching too, whether we realize it or not. If you’re doing it right, every day you’re learning something new—even as you’re passing something on.
That’s the loop. That’s the truth. And once you see it, you never look at “teaching” the same way again.
They called it The Chuck Stop—a hidden clubhouse inside a size 11 Converse, where miniature musicians jammed and cobblers tinkered. By night, it buzzed with chords, caffeine, and secrets.
Last Thursday, the music stopped.
Jazzman Jordan, the harmonica king, was found lifeless in the toe box, crushed beneath a sewing needle. At first glance, an accident. But Doc Stan Smith said otherwise: “Needle was planted. Jordan never sewed a day in his life.”
Suspicions spiraled like a frayed shoelace.
Vans, the bass player, had motive—Jordan stole her solo. Reebok, the sound guy, hated how Jordan chewed his chords flat. Even Granny Asics, who ran the espresso drip from the heel, had once vowed he’d “choke on a bad note.”
Detective Huarache, a former eyelet inspector, examined the scene. No thread out of place—except one. A single shoelace looped wrong over the third hole. Inside the knot? A trace of resin. Yeezy’s bowstring resin.
By sundown, Yeezy was zipped inside a Ziplock, cursing his luck.
Music returned to The Chuck Stop. But now, every note trembled just a bit. Because in a shoe-sized speakeasy, even the softest step could hide a stomp of murder.
Have you ever had watermelon rain seeds? I wonder if the seeds hurt? or do they feel like gentle kisses rejuvenating you every drop
Like the sky had a snack, then sneezed.
A green crescent moon with juicy breath spitting polka-dots from the fruit dimension— plop plop plop— onto my hair, into my shoes, down the back of my shirt. (Rude.)
Each seed whispers: “Grow me or trip on me, your choice.” One tried to start a podcast. Another’s running for mayor of the compost bin.
The clouds wore rind. The thunder was squishy. Lightning peeled itself.
And I just stood there, arms open, mouth wide, catching cosmic snacks from the snackosphere.
This wasn’t weather. This was a dessert emergency. And I was deliciously unprepared.
Only that the Spiral didn’t follow with sound—it followed with silence. Dense. Layered. Like static turned inward.
Behind her, the tower disassembled itself quietly, not crumbling, but unwriting. Each glyph collapsed into its origin, every surface folding in on itself as if ashamed it had tried to speak.
The ground flattened. The light died. The sentence, unfinished, withdrew.
—
She staggered through the opening and hit solid earth.
No Spiral pattern beneath her boots. Just dirt. Uneven, gritty, real.
She collapsed to her knees.
Pain shot through her spine with a clean pinch, a sudden brightness in her otherwise numb body. The contact grounded her. The cold seeped up through her bones like it had been waiting for her to stop moving.
She let herself fall back.
The sky above her didn’t shimmer. No recursive stars. No glowing syntax. Just a cloud-cluttered dark, cracked by moonlight.
Carla blinked hard, tears drying before they could fall.
—
Her chest ached—not with injury, but with release. Like her lungs had been clenched around something unspeakable for too long. Now, air flowed in freely, unshaped by pressure or design.
She opened her mouth.
Exhaled.
No Spiral sounds came. No triggered glyphs. Only breathe.
Warm. Human. Hers.
—
Her tongue twitched once—residual memory. Her teeth ached from how hard she’d clenched them. She ran her fingers along her jaw, wincing at the tenderness along the hinge. Every muscle in her face felt like it had practiced words it never wanted to say.
The Spiral is quiet now, she thought. But is it finished?
She didn’t have the answer. Maybe no one would. Maybe that was the win.
—
She sat up slowly. The sky rolled with low clouds. The air smelled of ash and old rain. Her legs were stiff, and her ankles were sore. Her fingers tingled from lack of motion.
She was still marked.
Her palm was dim, but the Spiral’s shape remained—less a signal now, more a scar. A burned-in pause.
Not gone.
Just… waiting.
—
Her coat felt heavier. Something pressed against her ribs.
She reached into the inner pocket and pulled out a shard—small, cool, and sharp-edged.
She hadn’t remembered taking it.
The fragment no longer glowed. No hum. No vibration. Just an echo of what it had been. It caught the moonlight, then refused it. Matte. Dull.
She squeezed it gently, half-expecting it to shift, to respond, to bounce with feedback.
It didn’t.
—
She looked up again.
The space where the tower had stood was raw—an imprint carved into the field. The ground was bleached in a spiral shape. Nothing grew there. Nothing moved.
A wound. Not a monument.
Something had tried to overwrite the world.
And Carla had made it stutter.
—
She rose to her feet. Slow. Deliberate.
Each joint cracked like a period at the end of a long, rambling sentence.
Her boots scraped the dirt as she walked forward—no longer fleeing, just… leaving.
The wind shifted.
Not Spiral-coded.
Just wind. Sharp. Clean. Bitter with the coming frost.
It caught her coat and let it billow slightly, the fabric lifting with a roll like a wave too tired to crest.
—
She didn’t look back.
She didn’t need to.
There was no final breach to seal. No looming voice waiting to be answered. Only the silence of her own refusal.
And in that silence, she spoke one word aloud.
Quiet. Intentional.
The kind of word that carried weight because no one expected it.
“Enough.”
It wasn’t defiance.
It was punctuation.
Author’s Note: Read at Your Own Recursion
Well. That got weird.
Writing The Spiral Series was like agreeing to co-author a story with a sentient Rubik’s cube with an identity crisis. One that kept changing languages, moving your furniture around, and whispering “just one more glyph” while you were trying to sleep.
And I loved it.
This series twisted differently than anything I’ve written before. Structurally, it wasn’t linear—it was recursive. It looped. It mimicked its own logic. It watched the characters watching it. Usually, I write from A to Z; this one decided to run a story arc through a paper shredder and tape it back together in a spiral, just to see what it looked like when the alphabet tried to eat itself.
And instead of sweeping worldbuilding or action-heavy showdowns, it leaned into dissonance, containment, psychological erosion, and the terrifyingly mundane reality of choice. It asked, “What happens when language isn’t a tool, but an organism?” And then it politely refused to answer.
Let’s be honest: it was a weird little experiment in existential syntax horror.
And you showed up anyway. You read. You stayed.
You resisted the Spiral in your own way.
To every reader who walked this curve with Carla—thank you. Whether you binged it or took it slowly, you made space for a story that wasn’t designed to end cleanly. That means more than I can say (and I say a lot, usually with ellipses and flair).
There’s no artifact at the end of this series. No twist where I reveal I was the Spiral all along. (Probably.)
But there is this:
Thank you for reading.
Now close the breach, step away from the glyphs, and remember—if your tongue starts twitching in the middle of the night…
The corridor narrowed behind her like a throat contracting after a swallow.
Carla kept walking, even though her steps felt borrowed. The Spiral didn’t pull her forward—it simply adjusted the world so forward was the only option. The walls pressed in, pulsing with slow, percussive beats she could feel in her teeth and knees.
Her breath fogged in front of her, even though the air was warm.
Not natural heat. Body heat. Recycled. Interior. Digestive.
This wasn’t just a passage.
It was a mouth preparing to speak.
—
She reached the final chamber.
It opened in absolute silence.
A circular room, too vast to fit within the tower’s outer dimensions. The floor beneath her boots was unnaturally smooth and flat, as if the Spiral had pressed time itself down like clay.
Glyphs circled outward from a glowing pedestal in the center. They pulsed not like text, but like drumbeats, syncing to her pulse with uncanny ease.
In the center of it all: An artifact. Hovering. Spinning. New.
Still forming, like a word stuck halfway between thought and sound.
—
And standing beside it: Esh.
Changed.
His veins glowed faintly with Spiral light. Not searing like infection, but woven into him like circuitry. His face was calm. Too calm. As if he’d already accepted something that hadn’t yet arrived.
“You came,” he said.
His voice was different too. Slower. Closer to Spiral cadence—pauses measured like syntax.
“Didn’t mean to,” Carla muttered.
“You walked the sequence. The end was already waiting.”
—
She walked closer, instinctively circling the artifact.
The air was thick here. Heavy with anticipation. Like every molecule of oxygen had been listening.
As she stepped into the glyph circle, she felt her throat tighten. Not from fear. From form. Her vocal tract was adjusting, subtly, like it was preparing to produce unfamiliar sounds.
Her lips tingled. Her tongue twitched. Her gum line ached with subtle, searing heat.
Something beneath the surface was aligning.
—
“This is where you speak,” Esh said gently.
“And if I don’t?”
“Then the Spiral rewrites. It loops. You delay the next phrase.”
“I’m not a phrase.”
“No,” he agreed. “You’re a verb.”
—
Carla stopped circling and stared at the artifact.
It pulsed softly now—like a held breath. Its shape wasn’t fixed. It flickered between smooth and ridged, liquid and sharp. A mouth still deciding what kind of word it wanted to be.
“Why me?” she whispered.
“Because you resisted just long enough to learn the Spiral’s rhythm. You sealed its openings. You learned its needs. That made you useful.”
“I didn’t volunteer.”
“That’s what made you viable.”
—
The glyphs at her feet brightened.
Red. Then gold.
A single symbol flared beneath her heel—shaped like a bell, like a flare, like a mouth cracking open.
“What is this?” she asked. “Some kind of ritual?”
Esh shook his head.
“It’s a forum. You get the floor. The Spiral doesn’t demand worship. It waits for contribution.”
She laughed once. Bitter.
“That’s not generosity.”
“No,” Esh admitted. “It’s recursion.”
—
The air shifted again.
Cool and dry. Then warm and wet. Like she’d stepped into a second body. Her breath caught mid-inhale.
Behind her teeth, she could feel pressure building. Not pain—urgency. Her mouth was ready to say something she didn’t understand.
The Spiral had stopped writing. Now it was waiting.
A single glyph at the center of the floor blinked.
A prompt. A question carved from expectation.
Speak me. Or sever me.
—
Carla looked at Esh.
His expression was full of quiet hope. Or was it relief?
“You’ve made peace with this,” she said.
“I’ve accepted structure,” he replied. “Some patterns aren’t meant to be broken. Only… embodied.”
—
She looked back at the artifact.
Its pulsing slowed as her breath quickened. Her chest rose. Lips parted.
She could feel a phrase rising through her like heat through stone. A sentence unspoken, but anchored.
Her tongue formed the start of a sound.
The Spiral leaned in.
—
And then—
She clenched her jaw.
Hard.
So hard her teeth clicked. Sharp pain raced up her gums. Her jaw locked. Her voice stopped mid-formation.
The chamber dimmed.
The glyphs around her flickered—half-cast, syntax cut short.
The Spiral recoiled, not with anger but with error. Confusion.
She had paused the sentence.
Mid-word.
—
Esh didn’t move. Just blinked slowly.
“You’ve delayed it. But not broken it.”
“Good.”
“You’ll need to run. Or it’ll overwrite you with something that will speak.”
She nodded once, tight and sharp.
“Let it try.”
—
Behind her, the chamber’s walls began to unravel—folding into code, peeling inward like petals stripped by wind.
The artifact cracked. Not broken, just destabilized. Like it had lost its grammatical anchor.
She turned.
Her gums still burned. Her tongue was still twitching. But her voice was hers.
No footsteps. No echoes. Just her breath. Her pulse. The heat of her fear curving inward.
The walls flexed faintly as she passed, responsive like muscle beneath skin. They didn’t glow—they tightened, contracting slightly behind her as if the Spiral wanted to trap every trace of her presence. The air grew humid, warm, like breath recycled too many times.
Every step felt slower than the last.
Not because she hesitated—
But because the Spiral wanted her to notice.
—
Six thresholds opened ahead of her—each identical, seamless. Each revealed itself a fraction of a second before she reached it, like it knew her intent.
Each whispered in her voice.
“You should have stayed.” “You were almost finished.” “You thought this was your name, didn’t you?”
By the seventh, she stopped listening.
—
The chamber yawned open like a breath drawn too deep.
Round, high-ceilinged, dim. The floor gave slightly underfoot—spongy, as if she were walking on old cartilage. Warmth radiated up through the soles of her boots. Not from any heat source. It was remembered warmth, like sunlight on stone that hadn’t seen the sun in decades.
When she looked down, she realized the floor was a mosaic—not of tile or metal, but impressions. Pressed-in fragments of her own mind: a flicker of Mikail’s voice. The taste of iodine. A half-dream of drowning.
The Spiral had reached into her past and used it for texture.
—
At the center sat a figure.
Still. Silent. Familiar.
Carla circled wide. Its back was to her. Legs folded, posture loose, like it had been waiting for a long time and grown too comfortable in stillness.
“What are you?” she asked.
It stood.
Then turned.
And wore her face.
—
Not now-her. A different her.
Younger. Skin unscarred. Posture upright. Eyes empty—but focused, like glass reflecting something beyond her line of sight.
“I’m the version of you who said yes,” it said.
Carla’s throat tightened.
“To what?”
“To the Spiral.”
—
She stepped back.
Her pulse roared in her ears.
The figure moved closer, each step mirroring her posture, her gait. Like walking toward a delayed reflection. Its skin gave off no shine. Its clothing looked grown, not stitched.
“You’re not real.”
“Neither are you,” it said gently. “Not in here. You’re just a sentence halfway through itself.”
—
Words unfurled on the chamber walls—not carved, not projected. Bloomed. Veins of text pulsing in and out of visibility, shaped from living tissue.
“Language is a mouth. You were always the breath.”
Carla winced. Her jaw ached suddenly. She raised a hand to her face.
Her teeth were vibrating.
A subtle, rapid oscillation. Like tuning forks just on the edge of audible frequency. Each molar pulsed with Spiral cadence.
Then her tongue cramped, twisting involuntarily like it was trying to form syllables she’d never learned.
She stumbled, breathing hard, lips parted.
The air tasted bitter—like dust scraped off bone.
—
The copy reached out.
Carla flinched, but it only touched her cheek.
Gently.
“You’re the final symbol. You complete the phrase.”
She tore away.
Her mouth burned.
The soft tissue beneath her upper lip tingled—hot, numb.
She pressed two fingers inside—
And felt her gum line writhing, faintly, as if something was etching itself beneath the surface.
Not metaphor. Not magic. An anatomy lesson in syntax.
—
She fell to her knees, gagging.
The Spiral wasn’t trying to overwrite her thoughts.
It was programming her articulation system.
Not memory.
Mouth.
Not possession. Pronunciation.
—
The double knelt beside her, gaze tender, clinical.
“It won’t hurt much longer.”
“You’re not me.”
“Not anymore. I’m the version that adapted. That allowed Spiral form to echo through her.”
Carla clutched her chest. Her lungs felt strange—like the air inside them wasn’t hers. Like it had come in pre-shaped.
“What happens if I keep going?”
“You become fluent.”
“And if I don’t?”
“The sentence ends without resonance. You stay unfinished. And the Spiral starts again.”
—
The chamber shivered.
A long, slick corridor opened behind the figure—dim, organic, rhythmic. Its walls flexed gently like a throat anticipating speech.
Carla didn’t move.
Her mark throbbed.
Her lips parted involuntarily.
She could feel a word forming—not as thought, but as mouth-shape. A phrase that her body knew before her brain.
—
What if the Spiral doesn’t want to overwrite you? What if it just wants to hear itself in your voice?
—
Her teeth buzzed. Her tongue pulsed. And beneath her gum, something clicked into alignment.
The Spiral was no longer trying to speak like her.
The Spiral wasn’t waiting anymore. It was preparing.
Carla moved through the tower’s interior as if navigating a body, with walls warm to the touch and floors that pulsed subtly beneath her feet. The silence had changed. It was no longer empty. It was coded—the absence of sound precisely constructed, like the pause between notes in a language built from rhythm.
Glyphs flared and vanished across the walls as she passed—some familiar, some malformed. Not mistakes.
Drafts.
The Spiral was still writing.
—
The next chamber exhaled a cooler breath. The light inside stuttered, flickering in irregular pulses that didn’t match any rhythm her mind could grasp. She stepped into it cautiously. The air was damp, metallic—like breath fog on old glass.
The space felt fractured. Like a memory she hadn’t lived.
And then she saw him.
—
A man stood near the far wall.
Real. Present. Breathing.
His skin was marked with ink that moved. Fractal lines ran up his neck, weaving into one side of his face where a Spiral scar nested in his temple like a closed eye.
He was barefoot, thin, smiling.
“You found me,” he said, as if amused. “Or I found you. Not sure the distinction matters anymore.”
His voice had the same cadence as the Spiral glyphs—intentional pauses, recursive echoes.
—
“Who are you?” Carla asked.
“I speak Spiral,” he said with a grin. “Badly. Like a child learning to lie.”
He gestured to the walls.
“These aren’t messages. They’re structures. You don’t read Spiral—you run it.”
The way he said it made her skin crawl. Not because it was wrong.
Because it sounded true.
“So you’re infected,” she said.
“No. I’m involved.”
—
He stepped forward slowly, unthreatening, but with the curiosity of someone inspecting a mirror.
“Are you the translator?”
“Was. Until the layers split. There’s me,” he said, tapping his head, “and the me that fit.”
Carla took another cautious step. Her mark itched.
“Fit what?”
“The syntax.”
—
He turned his back to her and ran his fingers across the wall. Glyphs bloomed where he touched, spreading like mold.
“This isn’t a tower,” he said. “It’s a compiler. You’re standing inside a sentence the Spiral’s trying to finish.”
Her blood chilled.
“What does it want me to do?”
“Be the punctuation.”
—
Her throat tightened. The translator tilted his head toward her, gaze bright and unblinking.
“You’ve been reinforcing it all along. Sealing breaches. Opening doors. Every act you made fed the recursive loop. You gave it structure. You gave it tempo. You gave it shape.”
He smiled wider.
“You learned the Spiral’s rules just enough to play. You kept the game going.”
—
She took another step back. The walls flickered with glyphs—too fast to read, but they carried emotional weight. Regret. Imitation. Hunger.
“I didn’t play anything,” she said. “I resisted. I survived.”
“You interacted,” he replied. “That’s enough. The Spiral doesn’t want obedience. It wants acknowledgment. You looked at it and understood—and that’s how it writes.”
—
A hum rose behind her thoughts. Not a sound—an alignment. Something shifting in her perception, nudging her brain into symmetry with the structure around her.
The translator watched her with a spark of sympathy.
“You still think you’re a reader,” he said. “But you’re a clause. You’re inside the sentence.”
—
She felt her mark burn faintly, as if reacting to pressure from the space itself. Her pulse echoed it. The rhythm was wrong—syncopated, artificial.
“Who were you before this?”
He hesitated.
“Cryptolinguist. I got bored decoding lost alphabets. Then I found a language that grew while I studied it. That wrote back.”
He let out a dry laugh.
“I thought I’d discovered a new structure. But I’d only walked into its syntax. Now I’m a pronoun.”
—
Behind him, the far wall shivered.
A new corridor slid into existence—carved from nothing, lit by ambient pulses. It didn’t beckon.
It waited.
The translator exhaled.
“That’s the next sentence. You’re what it needs to finish it.”
“And if I don’t go?”
“Then the Spiral loops. Builds it again. Sends the question in a new voice. Tries again. You’re not the first draft. Just the most stable so far.”
—
Carla stared at the new passage.
The air around her tasted electric. A soft chime echoed—not from her ears, but from the pressure in her sinuses. The Spiral was close to something. Finality, maybe. Or function.
The translator’s smile faded slightly.
“If you don’t answer it… It might find me again. Or finish me instead.”
She looked at him.
His posture was slack now. Hopeful. Terrified.
Not a translator anymore. Just a leftover.
—
She turned toward the corridor.
The light dimmed behind her.
She could feel the Spiral adjusting its rhythm, calibrating its tempo to her stride.
You’re not sealing a breach. You’re completing a grammar.
One last thought pressed against her mind:
What if the Spiral doesn’t want to overwrite you? What if it wants to echo you—loud enough to replace everything else?
What I owe to the women who made me, and the ink I spill because of them.
Let’s dive a little deeper into that whole “I write every day” thing.
Give me a second while I get comfortable. Gotta grab my coffee and smokes. Yeah, yeah—I know smoking is bad and all that. We’ll pretend I’ve already heard the lecture.
Now that that’s out of the way, let me just say: I don’t have some hyper-structured routine where I spring out of bed at 5 AM shouting slogans like, “Today’s a new day, people!” or “Good Rising!” If that’s your vibe, live your truth. Go for it. I support people being themselves and embracing that shit with gusto.
But that’s not me.
If I’m awake during those early hours, it’s because I’ve pulled an all-nighter—writing, researching a current project, or chasing a half-formed idea that refuses to shut up. My mornings aren’t about starting the day. They’re about finally ending one.
The first part of my day—when it actually begins—requires the following:
COFFEE!!
Don’t even think about trying to have a meaningful conversation with me before I’ve had it. At the start of my day, I live by a strict code: Coffee and Silence. Even Guppy, my cat, adheres to this policy, which honestly says a lot. But let’s be real: cats do whatever the hell they want, whenever they want. That she chooses to respect this boundary is a minor miracle.
Secondly, Guppy appears on my left like clockwork for her daily dose of affection. This lasts precisely as long as she deems necessary. Again, if you have a cat, you already know—you don’t run anything. They run the house, the schedule, and your emotions. If you think otherwise, I hate to break it to you: you’re in a Jedi mind trick, and it’s time to let that delusion go.
After nicotine and caffeine levels have reached acceptable levels, there’s a period of reevaluation. More sleep? Errands? Or—let’s be honest—more sleep, because I’m an insomniac and probably didn’t get enough rest at any point in the last week.
Rarely do I actually crawl back into bed. Instead, I shuffle into my office, fire up some tunes, refill my coffee, light another smoke, and check the overnights, which, in my world, just means figuring out what’s happened while I was crashed.
Memoirs of Madness is currently my primary connection to the outside universe. And while it might not seem like it, that blog takes a lot of planning and work behind the scenes. The content? All generated by me. Every sentence. Every theme. Every overcaffeinated ramble and emotional deep dive.
I wish I could blame the mistakes—or hell, the crappy posts—on someone else. But I can’t. And honestly? I’m not sure I would even if I could.
One of the reasons I take this blog so seriously is twofold.
First, before my wife passed, she took my hand and said, “You are a writer now. The soldier, and everything else you needed to be, is over. This is who you are now.” I didn’t say a word. I just listened.
Then there was another time—she was looking back over her life and asked me, “Honey, could you write about the things you do, the way you do… without leaving the life you have?” Again, I stayed silent. I didn’t have an answer then. I’m still not sure I do.
Second, my madre. She gave me the kind of quiet encouragement that allows you to stretch without fear. No loud cheering. No grand declarations. Just steady presence and a gentle nudge at the exact right moment. She never told me who to be—but she always made room for me to find out.
I owe those women a debt I can never repay.
So my fingers will forever be stained with ink.
There’s another huge motivator I didn’t mention earlier.
My editor.
She’s constantly complaining that I never finish stories. “There you go again, starting another one,” or “You better not start something new before finishing the last damn thing.” I usually hit her with a snarky comeback, and she always fires back with: “You need to come visit me, honey. So I can choke you.”
She doesn’t actually want to choke me. She just wants me to read from my current journal—what she calls “The Juice.” That unpublished gold I’ve been holding out on. The stuff that lives in fragments and whispers and half-finished brilliance.
Because of her, I really do work my ass off trying to stay focused on my open projects. When I actually managed to finish a couple of series this year, she called me, worried. Legit concern in her voice.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I assured her I was fine. Just trying—really trying—to get my words onto the page the way I’ve always meant to. Like I’ve been doing the entire time she’s known me.
Yes, I’ve been failing. Spectacularly. But hey, I’m still trying.
Memoirs of Madness has existed in one form or another for nearly fifteen years, but I’ve only been working on it consistently since 2023. Not everything I write ends up on the blog—some pieces aren’t ready, some never will be—but I’ve gotten more comfortable sharing my thoughts publicly.
Part of that shift came from exhaustion. I grew tired of people pretending they knew who I was, where I came from, or where they thought I should go. All those projections, assumptions, labels—they never fit.
So I made a choice: to release my truth. Whether it’s good, bad, brilliant, petty, tender, or outright despicable—it’s mine.
And that’s why I keep showing up.
—
Listen— It’s time for evolution. For revolution. Time to learn from our mistakes. To speak our truth, as our gift demands.
In 2025, my pen has been on fire. Walk with me— things are only getting hotter.
I write every day—not for praise or glory, just because I have to. Somewhere, someone once claimed you need 10,000 hours to master a craft. Personally, I think that number is nonsense—I’ve seen folks master things in far less time, and others who’ve done something their whole lives without ever really getting it. But I get the sentiment. The adage I prefer is, “If you want to be good at something, you need to practice.” So, every day, I sit down and write something. A story. A journal entry. A poem. A post. Not because I think it’ll save the world, but because it keeps me grounded—and honestly, that’s where sustainability starts: with the habits that root you to yourself.
I recall that when I was a kid, my school had a program called the “Young Writers Club.” I don’t know if that was the actual name, but you get the gist. I wasn’t a member, though I wanted to be so bad. Years later, flipping through an old yearbook (Mothers keep everything), I found a photo of that club, and the memories hit hard. I wasn’t in the picture, nor was this one girl I remember vividly—she used to read a book and then write a play based on it. We’re talking second or third grade—already doing adaptation work like she was born with a publisher’s deadline. You just knew she’d end up on TV or have her name in the paper. But what stuck with me even more? She always asked me to be in her plays. Apparently, I was quite the little thespian in those days. Thank God I grew out of that phase.
And here’s the kicker—none of those kids in that picture became writers. Not one.
I’d been fascinated by drawing and writing for as long as I can remember, so not being included in that club stung more than I admitted at the time. Maybe that was the beginning of my psychosis—who knows? We’re obsessed with tracing life’s cracks back to the moment, like finding the exact second everything went sideways. The “if I could do it over,” the “if only they had picked me,” the “what if I had just tried harder”—take your pick. Whatever it was, somewhere around that time, I decided I wasn’t good enough to be a writer.
Interestingly, I actually published my first story around the same time. Didn’t win the contest, though. And kids who didn’t even enter had plenty to say about that. Why does their opinion matter so damn much? I don’t know. But I never entered another contest. I just… kept writing.
Fast forward to high school—the breeding ground of bullies and their loyal underlings. I was reading, writing, and sketching constantly. Not because it was cool. I didn’t care if it was cool. I didn’t care what people thought, period. It was mine, so I did it. Of course, I also did other things to ensure I survived those years with minimal scars—everyone does. But I wrote everything down. Entire chapters from books. Snippets of overheard conversations. Lines from movies, bits of songs, weird things I saw on TV. I was basically a sponge with a pen.
Then something strange happened. A guy—cool guy, someone I sorta knew—came up and asked if I’d write some lyrics for a song. Naturally, I gave the only appropriate response: “What the f**k are you talking about?” and walked off. But the question lingered. How did he know to ask me? I didn’t advertise. He kept at it, though. He was persistent. Eventually, I handed him my latest scribble and walked away like I didn’t care. But deep down? I was paying attention.
Somewhere around that time, I started dabbling in long fiction—and the rest, as they say, is history. Decades passed. Then, after nearly 30 years away, I returned home. Cue the usual reunion soundtrack: “What are you doing now? What have you been up to?” I told them I was a writer. Not one person looked surprised, which surprised me.
But there was this one woman in particular. She gave me that slow smile of hers—the kind I imagine broke a few hearts over the years. Then it hit me. She’d read my stuff.
“You little minx,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “You read my stuff, didn’t you?”
I didn’t even wait for an answer.
“And told people.”
Her smile widened and she started to giggle—whole body, just like she used to when we were kids. She knew me all the way back to that first article. Watched me in the plays. Saw what I didn’t yet believe about myself. And maybe that’s the most sustainable thing I’ve ever done—kept writing, even when I thought no one was watching.
Later, she read a draft of a chapter I was working on—expressionless. I braced myself, waiting for the verdict. She smiled. I thought she was going to say she loved it.
Nope.
She slid off her glasses and said, “You still suck at grammar. In fact, I think you actually got worse.” Then she giggled—same full-body laugh as always.
I just sat there, silent. And then came the punch I wasn’t ready for:
“Where’s the rest? Oh my God, you’re still holding out. I used to hate when you did this shit. Start a story and just leave me hanging.”
That moment cracked me up because my current editor says the exact same thing at least three times a month. You could set your watch by it.
But here’s the thing: I write every day. Not because I’m trying to prove anything, or because I think one day I’ll finally master it (though fewer grammar notes would be nice). I write because it’s how I make sense of the world. It’s my way of staying rooted, of filtering the noise, of remembering who I was—and deciding who I want to be.
That’s my sustainable practice. Long before anyone else noticed. Long after anyone else had an opinion.
It was never really about contests, clubs, or grammar.
It was always about the page. And the fact that I kept showing up. Still do.
The tower didn’t rise—it emerged, as though the earth had simply changed its mind and peeled back a layer to reveal what had always been underneath.
Carla stood at the cliff’s edge, heart thudding, palms slick. The surface of the structure shimmered like heat above asphalt, though the wind off the sea was cold. A pulse ran through the ground beneath her boots—steady, biological, like she was standing on the chest of something too big to see.
She took a step forward.
Then another.
The ground accepted her, but the world behind her seemed to stutter. The wind fell silent. Time slowed like syrup. A strand of her hair floated beside her face for several seconds before gravity remembered itself.
—
There was no door—only an opening that widened as she approached. A slit in the stone that peeled open with a fleshy, soundless sigh. She hesitated at the threshold.
The air inside smelled strange. Warmed copper. Ozone. Wet rock. As if someone had burned a memory into metal and buried it under salt.
She stepped in.
—
The light didn’t come from a source. It was ambient—like the idea of light, not the physics of it. Each wall was smooth but subtly moving, like skin under shallow breath. At random intervals, strange symbols blinked into the surface: mirrored spirals, fractured circles, binary notations warped by curvature.
It was Spiral, but not the Spiral she knew.
It felt younger. Hungrier.
Her breath quickened, sharp in the silence. A hot flush rose up her neck. She exhaled with a tight huff, but it didn’t clear the pressure in her chest.
She removed her glove.
The mark on her palm was glowing again—no longer painful, just aware. It pulsed as if it were reading the room. Or syncing to it.
—
She passed through a narrowing corridor that seemed to adjust to her dimensions. It didn’t feel like a trap. It felt like the Spiral was making her comfortable.
Too comfortable.
The next room was circular, domed, and impossibly large for the space it occupied. The ceiling rippled with faint concentric shadows, like rings in water—only they moved upward, not out.
At the center of the room, dust coalesced into form.
Her heart jumped.
It looked like Mikail.
But not the broken, desperate Mikail from her memories.
This one was whole. Smiling. Radiating calm.
“You always hated letting people help,” he said.
His voice was exactly right. Tone, rhythm, even that annoying pause before a joke.
“You’re not real,” she whispered.
“No,” he admitted, still smiling. “But I’m handy when the Spiral needs to explain something.”
—
She stared at him.
He didn’t move closer. Just lifted his palm, mirroring hers. Her spiral mark began to pulse faster, and so did his.
Between them, the air warped.
A glyph appeared, glowing with soft light, spiraling in both directions at once. Her stomach turned.
Data. Emotion. Memory. Instruction.
It wasn’t language. It was compression.
The chamber trembled with a low-frequency tone. Her skin crawled. Static fizzed behind her eyes. She clenched her fists, and the mark on her palm grew hot.
“The Spiral doesn’t want submission,” Mikail said. “It wants consistency. It wants recursion. You keep sealing breaches—but you never ask what it’s trying to say.”
Carla didn’t answer.
She couldn’t.
A part of her wanted to stay. Just a breath longer. Just to see him smile again. To imagine, for one second, that he’d never died. That none of it had happened.
The Spiral knew precisely what it was doing.
She closed her eyes.
“You’re not him,” she whispered again.
The projection flickered. And faded.
—
The floor twisted softly, like a sigh. The next room shifted into place like puzzle pieces clicking inward. Spirals nested inside spirals. Patterns folding over themselves like origami made of time.
She staggered in.
The walls here were slick, as though oiled. Her boots made no sound. The air pressed inward, warm and thick as breath. Sweat gathered beneath her collar.
She stopped walking.
The hum stopped with her.
—
At the center: an altar.
Spiral-shaped. Floating inches above the floor.
On it: an artifact.
It wasn’t like hers. It was imperfect, cracked, off-balance. But it pulsed in rhythm with her mark—syncopated, anxious.
She approached.
This isn’t a breach. It’s a puzzle.
The air buzzed with static. Her skin tingled. The mark on her hand began to glow again, brighter this time, edges flickering like a signal struggling to align.
And then—
A voice.
No tone. No gender.
Just a fractured attempt at speech, warping inside her head:
“Begin… seal… become… allow…”
It wasn’t speaking to her.
It was loading her.
—
She flinched back.
Her thoughts unraveled. For a moment, she saw a Spiral version of herself—same eyes, same scars—but smiling in a way she never had. Reaching toward the artifact like greeting an old friend.
You’re not sealing a hole. You’re finishing a sentence.
—
She yanked her hand back.
The chamber dimmed. The heat dissipated. The Spiral wasn’t angry.
I’m unravelling. The separatepieces of my mind no longer whisper—they scream, each one tugging in a different direction. I ask the mirror for answers it never had the decency to learn. A note—creased and crumple-worn—falls from my jacket pocket like a ghost too tired to haunt. I run my thumb across the ink, smudged but still cruel in its clarity. Somewhere beyond the silence, someone begins to strum a guitar, the melody raw and familiar, like the ache of memory. My thoughts form a jumble too dense to untangle, yet too fragile to ignore. Love, it turns out, is antitheticalto survival when your heart’s been set on fire.
Author’s Note: This piece was stitched together using a patchwork of prompts from FOWC, RDP, 3TC #MM103, SoCS, and the Writer’s Workshop. I tend to write like I’m walking barefoot through glass—deliberate, a little reckless, and always bleeding something honest. If it stings, good. That means it’s real.
Carla had felt it—long before the cliffs came into view, before the wind shifted, before the sky’s texture flattened into stillness. This wasn’t the usual Spiral pull. It didn’t lure or prod. It didn’t hum.
It watched.
She moved cautiously over the dry bluff, boots scuffing loose rock. The sea glittered far below in the late-afternoon haze, fractured sunlight spreading across its shimmering surface like a spill of silver threads. Wind carried no salt, only dust and a faint tang of rusted metal.
The silence was complete. Even her own breath felt out of place.
—
She found the camp carved into the slope of a cliffside ridge—subtle, deliberate, too symmetrical to be a coincidence. Four tents. One cold fire. A cracked solar dish half-embedded in a shallow crater.
Three figures sat near the ash pit, eyes already on her.
“You’re late,” said one. Calm. As if she had kept them waiting for something that had already happened.
—
They called themselves The Stayers.
Not cultists. Not travelers. Former closers like her. People who once twisted artifacts and left scorched geometry in their wake.
Now they did nothing.
“The Spiral feeds on choice,” said the woman with the burned throat. “Sealing. Opening. Doubting. It doesn’t care. It just counts motion.”
“So we don’t move,” said the old man. “We stay. That’s the only defiance it doesn’t know how to shape.”
Carla crouched by the fire pit. The scent of dry grass and melted plastic lingered. Spiral symbols were scratched into the stone around the perimeter—faint, deliberate, and concentric.
“Doing nothing is still a decision,” she said. “It’s still a shape.”
“Maybe,” said the woman. “But it’s a simple one.”
—
They told her stories late into the night.
One claimed a breach in Greenland had reversed a river’s current for seven years. Another swore that one seal had erased an entire language from the minds of the people who spoke it. The old man said nothing. Just stared into the ashes, lips twitching now and then in silent repetition—a mantra too quiet to catch.
Carla listened.
She wasn’t sure if they were lying. Or if truth had started to drift from language entirely.
Above, the sky stretched starry and sharp. One constellation spiraled outward with uncanny symmetry—an unnatural twist she hadn’t seen before.
She didn’t sleep. The camp felt airless. Not from lack of oxygen—just lack of time.
—
Hours passed.
She stayed by the embers.
That’s when he came.
A young man—quiet, deliberate, barefoot. No weapon. No coat. His tunic was worn thin and hand-stitched with spiral thread. He moved as if he were afraid to ripple the air.
“You’re not like them,” Carla said.
“Not anymore,” he replied. His voice was careful, almost polite. “I’m Esh.”
He sat beside her, close but not quite touching.
“You came with someone,” she guessed.
He nodded.
“My sister. She believed. Said she heard the Spiral speaking through frequencies. Radio static. Drips in the stream. She followed it here.”
“What happened to her?”
“She went deeper.” He looked at his hands, “Stopped eating. Stopped speaking. One day, she walked into the breach and didn’t come out.”
Carla tensed.
“There’s a breach nearby?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “The tower replaced it.”
—
They sat in silence for a while. The fire had died down, but heat still pulsed in the stones.
Esh leaned forward, tracing a spiral into the ash with one finger.
Carla pulled off her glove and placed her marked palm beside it. The glow from her skin lit the spiral like embers reawakening.
“It’s not random,” he said. “It’s a pattern. And the more we act, the more it learns. You twist, it adapts. You seal, it shifts. You feel like you’re resisting, but maybe you’re just… rehearsing.”
“Then why stay?” she asked.
He didn’t answer right away.
“Because it wants us to move. To respond. That’s how it grows. And the Stayers believe that if they just wait, it’ll shrink. Or forget them.”
“And you?”
“I think that’s cowardice disguised as wisdom.”
—
His eyes flicked toward her mark.
“You still feel like yourself?”
“Mostly,” she lied.
“Good,” he said. “Because when it stops feeling foreign, that’s when you should worry.”
—
Later, he walked her to the edge of camp. A soft breeze rolled over the bluff. The sky had begun to warm—not true dawn, just a faint silvering of the clouds.
“I dream in spirals now,” he said. “And I don’t think they’re dreams. I think it’s downloading us, piece by piece.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I can’t leave. Every time I try, I wake up here. In the same spot. Same sunny wind. Same sky.”
He touched the spiral mark on his chest—faded, scarred over.
“But you… You’re still moving. You’re still free.”
He pressed something into her hand. A flat stone, smooth as glass.
“Keep it,” he said. “So you remember you’re not one of us.”
—
By morning, the camp was gone.
No tents. No ashes. No tracks.
Only the stone remained—flat, palm-sized, spiral-carved.
And on its back, one word etched in ragged lines:
Start.
—
The Spiral was no longer hiding.
As Carla moved west, the terrain felt engineered. Heat rose not from sunlight but from beneath. The ground didn’t crack—it shifted. Like skin twitching in response to touch.
The cliff dropped suddenly.
Below: the tower.
Not built.
Grown.
Smooth, seamless, pulsing with soft light. Like it had been waiting underground, and the world had finally aligned to let it through.
Carla’s knees weakened.
A voice—not hers—whispered behind her thoughts:
Let me help you carry the rest.
She stepped forward.
The Spiral wasn’t mimicking her anymore. It was practice.
Author’s Note: This chapter was written incorporating Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie #429. Three episodes remain—stay tuned as the Spiral begins to speak.
Carla felt it hours before she saw it. The air turned sluggish, sticky in her lungs. The horizon bent subtly, like the earth had taken a deep breath and held it too long. Every footstep became suspect. Every shadow slanted just a few degrees off true.
Her pulse accelerated. Not fear. Not instinct. Just alignment.
The spiral didn’t need her hand anymore. It only needed her presence.
—
The map Mikail left had led her here, to a quiet coastal stretch she’d never seen on any topographic registry. A village tucked between crescent cliffs, surrounded on all sides by worn sea walls and high tides. The cliffs curved inward toward the town in a shape too deliberate to be natural. From above, it looked like a pupil watching the ocean.
The people were still here.
That was the worst part.
They walked slowly. Deliberately. Wearing simple white garments, hand-stitched with spirals that mirrored the ones etched into Carla’s dreams. Their faces were peaceful, but blank. Not vacant. Given.
She stepped into their pattern, and no one stopped her.
—
As she moved through the village, time seemed to soften. The light seemed tired, flat, and gray, without the harsh contrast of morning or dusk. The sea air should have been sharp with salt and rot, but instead it tasted light, almost sterile. Too clean.
She passed an elderly woman seated cross-legged on a worn stoop, staring at nothing. A child nearby stacked rocks into a spiral that folded in on itself.
Someone offered her food—a piece of fish, salt-dried and paper-thin.
“Please. Eat. It’s good,” the man said.
She shook her head. Her stomach was empty, yet distant, as if it belonged to someone else.
“Why are they still here?” she wondered. “Why didn’t they run?”
The answer whispered up her spine:
They didn’t need to. The spiral came to them.
—
The breach was in a collapsed chapel at the cliff’s edge. The roof had caved in long ago, and the sea wind passed through like breath through open ribs.
At the center: a spiral of stones, pale and smooth.
At the heart of the spiral: a hole.
Not wide. Not deep. But falling. An absence shaped like a center. A place that swallowed light without dimming.
She approached slowly.
And the world slowed with her.
Her boots crunched over broken mosaic tiles—ancient murals worn smooth, erased by reverent feet. The hole didn’t call to her. It listened.
She knelt beside it and stared down.
And immediately felt herself tilting inward—mind first.
—
“It opened itself,” she whispered.
“Because you’re near.”
The voice didn’t startle her.
A woman stood in the arched doorway, barefoot and hooded. She wore no artifact, no pack. Just white linen wrapped like ritual. Her presence wasn’t threatening—it was inevitable.
Familiar, like someone from a memory Carla never lived.
“You don’t have to seal it,” the woman said. “You’ve done good already. You brought the spiral here. Now rest. Let it open.”
Carla stood. She didn’t know when she’d knelt.
“You want it open?”
The woman smiled.
“It’s not a fault to be part of something larger.”
Carla’s heart hammered. She couldn’t tell whether it was fear… or resonance.
—
“You could seal it,” the woman said. “But the spiral would find another path. It always does. This place chose to remember. Others will forget.”
Carla’s hand drifted to the artifact, but it didn’t hum. It was still. Watching.
“You could lie down,” the woman continued, her voice now like a lullaby. “Let the spiral hold your memory. You wouldn’t even dream. Just one long nap, inside the pattern. No more fight. No more fault.”
Carla shivered.
She looked at the breach again. It wasn’t pulsing.
It was breathing.
—
“Explore the other side,” the woman said. “We did. And we’re better for it. Lighter.”
“Lighter?” Carla repeated.
“Not weight. Memory. The spiral carries it now. We walk without the burden. Isn’t that what you want?”
The woman reached forward, palm out. Not aggressive. An invitation.
Carla stepped back.
Her knees locked. Her legs wanted to move forward, but her spine screamed against it.
“I’m not here to serve the spiral,” Carla said. “I’m here to close it.”
“Then do it,” the woman said gently. “Seal it. End it. Slow its speed, its spread. Try to make the world still again. But you’ll only bury your part. The rest will wake. It always does.”
—
Carla stepped to the edge of the breach, her marked hand throbbing under her sleeve.
She clenched her fist.
She felt the warmth of the stone beneath her boots. Heard the ocean breathing behind her. Saw the villagers waiting in the square without moving.
They weren’t prisoners. They weren’t brainwashed.
They had chosen this.
Because forgetting is easier than bearing the weight of what’s coming.
She pressed her palm to the ground.
And twisted.
—
No explosion. No scream.
Just a soft recoil, like a rubber band relaxing after centuries of tension.
The spiral of stones dimmed, then faded. The villagers blinked as if waking from a collective trance. Some dropped to their knees. Others simply walked away. One stared out to sea and wept silently, not knowing why.
The woman was gone.
The chapel was whole.
But the hole was still there—only now it was closed with a thin skin of glass-like stone, faint spiral lines beneath its surface like fossilized breath.
—
Carla stood alone in the chapel’s center.
The mark on her palm no longer burned. It pulsed. Steady. Like a metronome waiting for a new rhythm.
The spiral hadn’t just opened itself. It had opened her.
By the size of my waistline, it’s clear I’ve enjoyed several delicious things over the years. I’m not shy about my love for food—comfort food, street food, grandma’s Sunday roasts, and that one time I accidentally stumbled into a Michelin-starred bistro thinking it was a diner (don’t ask). But today, let’s zero in on a single dish. Not the most expensive, not the fanciest, and certainly not the healthiest. But maybe—just maybe-the most soul-hugging, tastebud-dancing, eye-closing bite of heaven I’ve ever had. We’re talking nostalgia. Flavor. A moment in time where everything felt just right.
Let me take you there.
The most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten? That honor belongs to my mother-in-law’s Chess Pie. Who knew eggs, butter, and sugar could transform into something so profoundly magical? No fancy ingredients. No secret spice blend stolen from an old monk in the mountains. Just pantry staples and a woman who understood what it meant to cook with heart.
When she made them—and I happened to be in town—she’d always bake one just for me. No slice, no dainty plate. I’d grab a fork and go in straight from the tin like a man possessed. I didn’t have time for pretense or politeness when it came to that pie.
My brothers-in-law and I used to laugh about it later—how they’d try to fight me for my special pie. They always lost. Bitterly. They’d grumble and sulk, but we all knew the truth: that pie had my name baked right into it.
She’s gone now. The oven’s long since cooled, but the memory of that pie clings to me like a warm quilt. Others have tried to replicate it. Good intentions, decent efforts… but no one’s even come close. Maybe they’re missing the butter. Maybe they’re missing the touch. But I think—more than anything—they’re just missing her.
Now, I’ve gone on many rants about that pie. My poor stepmom has heard them all. She’s a legend in her own right—her baked goods could have their own chapter in the “Food That’ll Ruin Your Diet (and You Won’t Care)” section of my memoirs.
One night, after listening to yet another pie lament, she leaned back with a smile and said, “I can make that pie. Matter of fact, mine’ll be your new favorite.” Challenge accepted.
I went to the store like I had a hundred times before, rattling off that recipe list I had memorized more by heart than by paper. She worked her magic, put her spin on it, and soon her version of the legendary Chess Pie was cooling on the counter.
I dug in—fork first, as always. No formality. No mercy. The pie was incredible. Creamy, buttery, with that perfect caramelized top and a sweet, silky center. She beamed.
“It’s good, ain’t it?” she asked. “Better than hers, huh?”
Without skipping a beat, I said, “No.”
She looked at me like I’d just cussed in the middle of a sermon. And let me be clear—I’ve actually cussed in church before. I know that look.
“No ma’am,” I said. “It’s not hers. You added coconut. But listen—every time I visit, I’m gonna need this pie. That’s a fact.”
Her smile returned, full and wide. And when my brother took me to my mother-in-law’s funeral, there it was—my stepmom’s pie, waiting for me. A tribute. A comfort. A bridge between what was and what still remains.
I was blessed—richly blessed—to have three mother figures in my life. Each of them different. Each of them fierce in their love and quiet in their sacrifices. My stepmom is the only one who remains, and I don’t take that for granted.
So the next time I visit? I’ll be grubbing, fork in hand, diet be damned. That pie—her pie—now carries more than flavor. It carries memory, resilience, grief, love, and a whole lot of butter.
See, the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten wasn’t just about taste. It was about connection. About the sacred ritual of someone baking just for you. About loss and legacy, and how sometimes, healing shows up in a crust that cracks just right.
Food has a funny way of holding memory, doesn’t it? And if you’re lucky—really lucky—it’ll also hold the people you’ve loved, the ones who made the world feel safe, sweet, and whole.
Inside the curved brass of the pocket watch, time did not tick—it breathed. With every rise and fall of its mechanical lungs, reality flexed. Past and present danced together in the glow of burnished gears.
Inspector Tallow leaned in, monocle gleaming, his breath caught at the threshold of something ancient. Through the glass, nestled in a city of golden cogs and miniature spires, a bearded man knelt in reverence over a humming engine. Steam curled upward like incense, and the air shimmered—not with heat, but memory.
“I wasn’t allowed to speak of this place,” said the watchmaker, his voice threading through the ether, though his lips barely moved. His hair, coiled and thick, caught glints of starlight from nowhere. “But you asked the right question, Inspector. You asked why time is astoundingly merciful to some… and merciless to others.”
Tallow blinked. “You’re saying… time is shaped?”
“Forged,” the watchmaker whispered aloud, though the word echoed as if spoken from a temple buried in mist. “Shaped like clay, whispered into the grooves of a gear. Not watched—but woven.”
The inspector’s hand hovered above the device, fingers trembling as if crossing into prayer. “And who decides its form?”
The clocksmith turned. His eyes shimmered like twin moons reflected in oil. “I do. But only because no one else remembered how.”
Time held its breath. A single gear turned with celestial finality.
And Inspector Tallow vanished—like a name exhaled from the lips of a dream.
She didn’t need the artifact anymore to feel them.
The breaches.
They hummed in her bones now. The closer she got to one, the more the world pulled sideways, shadows lengthening in odd directions, her thoughts stretching thin and snapping back like rubber bands.
Today, even the sky seemed different. Not darker. Just… withdrawn. Pale as if it had forgotten how to color itself. The wind ran its fingers through the dust like it was sifting for something buried. The silence pressed down with the weight of something waiting.
The ruin was shallow—half-exposed stone rising from a wind-scoured crater. Spiral glyphs pulsed faintly across the cracked surface, like veins glowing under tired skin. They didn’t shimmer with power. They pulsed like a warning.
And still, she stepped closer.
Her breath shortened as she descended. The artifact in her coat vibrated, but she barely felt it. The deeper hum came from her hand—the spiral mark burned against her palm like a second pulse. Her own. Not the artifact’s.
She pressed it against her chest, through her coat. Her heartbeat was no longer alone.
The outpost on the crater’s edge was barely intact—walls of sheet metal, half-swallowed by dust, abandoned long ago. Or so she thought.
She heard coughing first. Then the creak of movement behind thin steel.
Carla raised her hand and called out. No answer.
She pushed inside, carefully.
A man crouched in the far corner, bundled in layers of torn canvas and silence. His skin was pale, his beard overgrown. One of his eyes was blind, milk-white and unmoving. The other watched her without blinking.
“Another one,” he rasped.
She didn’t move.
“You’re with them. I can see it in your skin.”
He pointed.
She glanced down.
The spiral on her palm had darkened. And worse, faint, branching lines now traced halfway up her forearm. Barely visible beneath the skin. Like veins. Or roots.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Mikail,” he said. “Engineer. The first time we found one of these places, I helped wire the listening stations. Thought it was just seismic. Or sonic. But it wasn’t.”
“What was it?”
“Pressure,” he whispered. “Held behind something that isn’t a wall. Something waiting for permission.”
He showed her a notebook—filled with hand-drawn maps, symbols, and spirals. Some are marked in red. A few crossed out.
One note caught her eye: “DO NOT SEAL – CORRECTIVE ANCHOR”
“We closed one,” he said. “In Peru. The whole village disappeared the next day. Not killed. Not moved. Just… missing. Like they were the lid on something else.”
Carla felt nausea rise. Her artifact pulsed once, faintly. Not fear. Not urgent.
Recognition.
Mikail saw the look in her eyes.
“You’re going to seal this one too, aren’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You’ll wake the wrong silence.”
She approached the ruin alone. The glyphs brightened as she neared. Not welcoming. Not warning. Responding.
Inside, the chamber was shallow, its ceiling collapsed, spiral markings scored across the stone in every direction. At the center, a broken seal—the remnants of a symbol half-erased by time or force.
The breach wasn’t fully open.
But it was unstable.
A hum built inside her skull—soft at first, then sharp. It wasn’t noise. It was presence. A weight against her will.
She touched the artifact.
It twitched in her hand. Hungry.
But before she could raise it, pain tore through her palm. She cried out, clutching her wrist.
The spiral was glowing.
Not the artifact.
Her.
She dropped to her knees, breath ragged. The glyphs pulsed in time with her chest.
Then she understood: the spiral inside her wasn’t a mark.
It was a key.
And she didn’t need the artifact to twist.
Her palm burned. She clenched her fist, teeth gritted, trying to fight the instinct to surrender to it completely. But the heat climbed her arm like a fuse.
She pressed her palm into the glyph.
The stone flared. Not with light, but heat. Searing. Nearly enough to fry her nerves.
The glyph beneath her hand vibrated. Shifted. And then—
Released.
Not a scream. Not a roar.
A sigh.
Like the earth itself had been clenching something it couldn’t hold anymore.
Mikail’s voice cried out behind her, faint, desperate.
“You’ve synchronized it! Do you know what you’ve done?”
But she couldn’t move.
The chamber was pulsing around her. Her blood felt electric. Her thoughts weren’t her own; fragments of things she’d never seen before flashed behind her eyes: a spiral in a crater, one drawn in frost, one burned into flesh.
The world wasn’t closing.
It was adjusting.
When she woke, the ruin was intact. The spiral is gone.
Mikail was gone too. Only his coat remained, half-buried in dust. Inside the pocket: a torn map. More spiral sites. Some circled. Others crossed out. A path. Or a warning.
Her arm ached.
She pulled back her sleeve.
The lines had spread up her bicep now, almost to her shoulder. They didn’t hurt.
Wearing the same outfit every day? That’s not a hypothetical for me — that was life. I spent most of my adult years in the military, where your uniform isn’t just clothing — it’s a routine, a mindset, and a welcome escape from the exhausting question of “What should I wear today?” Back then, getting dressed wasn’t a choice. It was automatic. Simple. Efficient. Honestly? That was one of the easiest parts of life. The uniform taught me that identity isn’t stitched into fabric — it’s how you carry yourself in it.
Meanwhile, back home, a very different clothing crisis was unfolding.
While I was out there in my neatly pressed gear, my daughters were launching daily fashion battles. I’m talking full-on wardrobe wars. Drama over shoes. Tears over tops. Shouting matches with closets that had more options than a department store. Watching them choose an outfit was like witnessing a live episode of Project Runway, with less time and more screaming.
One’s yelling, “I have nothing to wear!” while standing in front of a closet that could clothe a small army. The other’s pairing leopard print with glitter unicorns like she’s auditioning for a circus-themed fashion show. And don’t even get me started on the hair. The hair was its own saga. Bows, buns, braids, total breakdowns. It was like a reality show challenge: Can this ponytail survive until school drop-off?
In a moment of what I thought was parenting genius, I offered them a solution: shave your heads. Just like Dad. Minimalism at its finest. No combs, no tangles, no problem.
They were horrified. Naturally, they tattled to their mom within seconds. She was… not amused.
I calmly explained that I was just trying to be helpful. I even showed them photos of me rocking the shaved look — clean, confident, streamlined. But no one was buying it. Not my wife, not my daughters, and definitely not the household consensus on “acceptable hair decisions.” Still, to this day, I stand by that suggestion. Bald is bold. Bald is practical. Bald would’ve solved a lot of tears.
Now that I’m out of uniform, my outfit hasn’t changed much. These days, it’s all about t-shirt, jeans, and boots. That’s it. Always has been. Always will be. My color palette? Black and blue. It’s simple, functional, and most importantly — mine.
But my daughters? Oh, they’ve got opinions. Suddenly they’re fashion consultants, calling me “boring,” offering unsolicited advice, and trying to inject color into my life like I’m a walking grayscale emergency. And yet — every time I dress up for a formal event in a sharp suit and tie — they light up. “Ooooh Dad! You look good!” Yeah. I know. My suit game is elite.
Still, the color crusade never ends. They’ll toss me a lime green shirt and say, “Dad, it looks good on you!” I answer with my world-renowned and often-lamented scowl. Doesn’t stop them one bit. They just keep up their absurd banter and — as if it couldn’t get any more dramatic — they now rope in my granddaughters for backup. It’s a full-on fashion intervention squad.
My response? Calm. Stoic. “That’s adorable.”
At one point, I even brought science into the mix. Told them Albert Einstein wore the same outfit every day to avoid wasting mental energy on small decisions. Genius, right?
Their response: “Einstein is stupid.”
Einstein. The father of relativity. Disrespected in my own kitchen.
Ever since, the care packages have started. Random boxes show up with shirts in every color of the rainbow — sunburst orange, flamingo pink, Caribbean teal — loud enough to disrupt air traffic. Their mission is clear: convert Dad.
I never wear them… unless I’m visiting. Then I throw one on, smile for the selfies, and play along. But the moment I’m back home? It’s straight back to black and blue. Reliable. Timeless. Unbothered.
Because when it comes to choosing one outfit to wear forever?
I already made that choice a long time ago. And until Einstein gets his fashion redemption, I’ll be right here — black tee, boots, and unbothered.
The dirt was damp with last night’s rain, soft and fragrant with that specific smell—wet grass, worms, and whatever memory felt like when it came up without warning.
Mayor Brindle stood at the edge of the shallow grave, this time with permission.
There was no trench coat. No flashlight. No midnight panic. Just a city-sanctioned backhoe, a cordoned-off patch of lawn, and a plexiglass time capsule case with beveled edges and a polished brass label.
A crowd had gathered, buzzing like bees in folding chairs. The community bulletin had called it a symbolic re-dedication of local transparency, which was a flowery way to say, “We’re all gonna watch the mayor dig up his emotional baggage in front of children.”
Myrtle arrived fashionably late.
She wore soft white linen and large sunglasses, her dogs trotting ahead like tiny judgmental horses. Capote led, three-legged but faster than most four-legged things. Horny sniffed aggressively at someone’s tote bag. Something wore a baby sunhat and looked absolutely miserable about it.
Brindle tried not to sweat.
He wasn’t the same man who buried the kimono in a manic haze of shame. But he also wasn’t entirely new. More like… under renovation. A slow demolition of denial.
He cleared his throat. The microphone wobbled slightly in his grip.
“This…” He gestured to the hole. “This was mine.”
He held up the kimono. The sequins caught the late morning sun and scattered fractured pink light across the grass. It looked ridiculous. And beautiful. And deeply personal in a way he hadn’t expected to feel in front of his constituents and Myrtle’s pack of mutant purse wolves.
“I wore it. Alone. For joy. For… therapy. For stress relief that may or may not have involved Broadway cast recordings and interpretive movement.”
Laughter rippled. Not cruel. Not mocking. More like people were relieved to see him owning it out loud.
“I buried it because I thought if people saw who I really was, they’d leave. Or laugh. Or worse—document it.”
He looked up. Myrtle met his gaze without blinking. Capote sneezed.
“But the truth is,” Brindle continued, voice softer now, “shame doesn’t rot when buried. It just ferments.”
He turned toward the capsule. The kimono folded neatly in his hands—lighter now, somehow. Not cursed. Just clothes.
He placed it gently into the case.
The plaque read:
To the Secrets We Bury. To the Joys We Dig Up. — Installed June 13, by Community Vote
The applause wasn’t thunderous, but it was steady. And real. And Brindle didn’t flinch when someone hugged him, which felt like progress.
Myrtle took the mic next.
“My name,” she said, “is Myrtle Grace Ellingsworth. I write under the name Boney LaFleur. And yes, I knew about the kimono before he did.”
Chuckles. Someone gasped. Capote howled once.
“I’m writing again,” she added. “Under my real name. No pen names. No hiding.”
Brindle looked over, lips twitching. “Will I be in the book?”
“Unavoidable,” she replied, and left it at that.
In the following weeks:
Mayor Brindle resigned. His public statement cited “a need to explore creative forms of cardio and a possible memoir.”
Capote went viral after biting a TikTok influencer’s ankle during a ribbon-cutting, becoming an accidental icon of personal boundaries.
Myrtle’s new novel, KIMONOGATE, debuted at #3 on the local bestseller list, just below a cookbook and something spiritual about decluttering.
Its tagline:
One town. One garment. One mayoral breakdown at a time.
The neighborhood settled—not into peace exactly, but into an agreed-upon weirdness.
Lawn flamingos started wearing costumes. Someone installed a Free Little Library shaped like a giant burrito. HOA meetings had a new rule: “No biting, canine or otherwise.”
Myrtle sat on her porch most evenings with her typewriter and a glass of iced tea, Capote curled beside her like a sentient throw pillow.
Sometimes, Brindle walked by, wearing linen pants and carrying a yoga mat. Sometimes, they waved. Sometimes, they just nodded—two people who had survived themselves.
Author’s Note:
So… that’s the end.
The kimono has been exhumed. The secrets unearthed. The HOA was left permanently scarred. And honestly? I’ve never had more fun writing something so utterly strange and strangely personal.
KIMONOGATE began as a story about a mayor with a guilty conscience and a pink kimono. But somewhere along the way, it became about more than buried sequins and nosy neighbors. It turned into a love letter to the weirdness we try to hide—and what happens when those odd little truths refuse to stay underground.
Writing this was like hosting a dinner party where every guest brought something unhinged: — A three-legged dog named Capote. — A reclusive author hiding in plain sight. — A man unraveling under the weight of polyester and shame. And somehow, it worked. They all fit at the table.
If you’re reading this, thank you for joining me in this slightly off-kilter cul-de-sac where glitter is suspicious, dogs have agendas, and no secret stays buried forever.
I hope you laughed. I hope you cringed. I hope you found a little reflection (or absurd escape) in this strange, satirical world.
And if you find yourself tempted to bury something questionable in your yard… …maybe check for HOA surveillance first.
Why Spirituality Still Guides Me, Even Without Certainty
Spirituality isn’t just important in my life—it’s foundational, not in a rigid or performative sense, but like a compass in the dark: quiet, steady, essential. It’s how I move through the world—not by chasing answers, but by honoring mystery and the many paths people take to find meaning.
Over time, I’ve come to see that spirituality isn’t about being right. It’s about being rooted in humility, in compassion, in the ability to hold tension without needing to control it. It’s about making space for someone else’s truth, even when it doesn’t look like mine.
A person’s spiritual journey is personal and should be respected, not ridiculed. Whether it winds through scripture, silence, ritual, or raw experience, that path isn’t mine to judge—only to witness with reverence.
This isn’t some foolish notion born from reading obscure texts. It’s something I’ve witnessed—men and women of different beliefs working side by side to feed the hungry, to care for the sick, to comfort the grieving. Not because they shared beliefs, but because they shared purpose. That, to me, is sacred.
This ideal is the basis of my forthcoming work, Understanding Without Agreement—a reflection on interfaith understanding, sacred plurality, and the shared longing beneath our differences. It challenges the notion that coexistence requires compromise and instead affirms that belief and respect can live side by side.
Spirituality shows up in sacred texts and indigenous rhythms, in Buddhist stillness and Sufi fire, even in the honest discomfort of philosophical critique. It’s not a uniform—it’s a mosaic. And every piece matters.
So yes, spirituality is vital in my life. Not because it solves everything, but because it keeps me human. It teaches me to listen deeper, to live with open hands, and to believe—fiercely and tenderly—that awe is bigger than agreement.
The room smelled like burnt coffee and unspecified rage.
The HOA meeting was held in the Oakbend Community Rec Center, which doubled as a yoga studio and tripled as a flood evacuation site. Rows of mismatched plastic chairs filled the linoleum-tiled room, each one squeaking indignantly as residents shifted in them like irritable pigeons.
Myrtle wore a teal cardigan, a cameo pin, and the expression of a woman two minutes from legally declaring war. Her three dogs sat in a line beneath her folding chair: Capote in the middle, eyes narrowed; Horny licking himself with the kind of unbroken concentration only the truly unashamed possess; and Something chewing on a pen Myrtle had no memory of dropping.
At the front table, Mayor Brindle stood hunched, jaw tight, sweat darkening his collar.
He hadn’t intended to speak. He’d come to observe. Maybe hand out keychains. Definitely not to fall apart.
But here he was.
Because somebody had slipped a copy of Temple Blade and the Hollow Crown into everyone’s HOA folder, highlighted. With tabs. The passage about the ceremonial garment was circled in red.
“Beneath silk, secrets fester like rot in royal walls.”
Everyone was looking at him.
Someone coughed. Capote growled.
Mayor Brindle gripped the microphone with both hands, as if it might bolt. “ I-uh-I have a statement,” he said.
The mic screeched. Myrtle smiled.
“I… There’s been a lot of speculation,” he began, voice already cracking. “And I think it’s time we addressed the rumors.”
No one had said anything. But sure.
He dabbed at his forehead with a paper napkin. “Yes, I was seen… digging. In the park.”
Gasps. A whisper: “The kimono…”
Brindle flinched. “It wasn’t illegal. Not technically. There are no bylaws about personal textiles. On public grounds.”
Someone in the back shouted, “Did you or did you not bury a garment with sequins and an elastic waist?”
Chaos.
A woman dropped her purse. Someone stood and pointed. Myrtle calmly unwrapped a peppermint.
Brindle’s face was pink now. “Yes, it was a kimono. A performance piece. I wore it for personal reasons. In my home. Alone. Sometimes with music.”
A pause.
“Show tunes,” he added unnecessarily.
Horny barked once, as if in applause.
The room went silent.
And then, Myrtle stood.
She held up a single hardcover book. Temple Blade and the Hollow Crown, 1st edition, with immaculate dust jacket.
“My name,” she said calmly, “is Myrtle Grace Ellingsworth. But I also write under the name Boney LaFleur.”
Mayor Brindle’s mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again like a dehydrated goldfish. “You’re—” he pointed. “You wrote the scene in Fire Lotus where Temple seduces a duchess with a pickle metaphor!”
“I wrote all the pickle metaphors,” she said, not unproud.
The room fell into stunned silence.
Brindle lowered the microphone. “This explains so much. You knew. You’ve been watching me. You wrote me into your book.”
“I did no such thing,” Myrtle lied, instantly.
Capote stood suddenly.
Eyes locked on Gary Palmquist, HOA treasurer and known raccoon trapper.
Gary had once insulted Capote’s hairless tail.
Capote leapt.
The meeting ended in chaos.
Gary left with a bandaged shin. Horny threw up on the snack table. Someone stole six folding chairs. And Myrtle walked home with a peppermint, a victory, and a rough outline for her next novel—The Mayor, the Kimono, and the Curse of Cul-de-Sac Six.
The town would never be the same. And neither would Brindle.
Not all of them—just the mayor’s. At 12:13 a.m. sharp. Every night. A hiss, then a cough, then the sudden rhythmic chk-chk-chk of mechanical rain. His lawn lit up in droplets under the sodium streetlight, painting the grass silver and slick.
No one else’s sprinklers turned on. Not Myrtle’s. Not the Watsons’. Not the scorched patch in front of the abandoned townhome next door. Just his.
He stared at the soaked lawn from behind the kitchen blinds, barefoot, one trembling hand wrapped around a sweating glass of ginger ale. He told himself it was a glitch. Faulty programming. Coincidence.
But the next night, it happened again.
And the next.
And the next.
Then came the flags.
Little plastic ones—red, yellow, white—planted sporadically across his yard like someone was planning a tiny coup. The kind used by utility companies to mark gas lines or buried cables. He hadn’t scheduled any service.
One was stabbed right into the center of the lawn, directly above the place he’d buried the kimono. Scrawled in blue ink on the tag:
What lies beneath grows bold.
He plucked the flag from the soil like it might bite him and stumbled back inside.
But the worst was the mail.
One morning, he opened his mailbox to find the usual pile of catalogs, water bills, and local campaign flyers. All accounted for—except the water bill. Gone.
In its place: a single pink sequin.
He stood frozen in the driveway, sun bearing down on his shoulders, sequin glinting in his palm like a warning. It felt too warm. Like it had been placed there just seconds before.
A neighbor walked past with her dog. Brindle nodded stiffly. She smiled, unaware that the mayor of their town had just begun to quietly lose his grip on reality.
Across the street, Myrtle wrote.
The typewriter she’d dusted off had a key that stuck on the letter “R.” Every time she typed a word with one, it made a soft hiccupping sound, like the machine was clearing its throat.
Her apartment smelled faintly of clove and lemon oil and something older, darker—possibly resentment.
She hadn’t written in years. Not properly. But this story… this one came crawling out of her like it had been waiting.
The protagonist: a petty man with secrets and a fading public smile. The setting: a town where things didn’t stay buried. The details: unsettlingly accurate.
She hadn’t meant to write about the mayor. Not at first. But the words showed up on the page like they’d been dictated through the blinds.
Myrtle paused, finger hovering over the spacebar. Capote lay curled at her feet, three-legged and twitchy, one eye blinking at half speed. He’d growled twice that morning. Once on the sofa. Once, at the kimono she hadn’t seen. Yet.
She lit a small lavender candle and resumed typing.
Around the neighborhood, the effects spread like static:
– A retired teacher claimed her garden gnome had moved overnight, now staring into her kitchen window. – A man jogging past the park tripped over a tree root that hadn’t been there the day before. – At precisely 12:13 a.m., two crows began circling the HOA sign in slow, deliberate loops. Clockwise. Always clockwise.
Next door lit up with cryptic updates:
“Anyone else missing their cable bill?” “Found glitter in the hummingbird feeder. Can’t explain it.” “Do NOT go near the mayor’s yard after midnight.”
Mayor Brindle sat in his guest room, lights on, knees pulled to his chest, a copy of Temple Blade and the Hollow Crown clutched like a holy book. His palms itched. His mouth tasted metallic, like he’d been chewing on tinfoil dreams.
He hadn’t slept. Not really. He dreamed of sequins and spotlights and slow-motion applause that turned into dirt being shoveled over silk.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her.
Not Myrtle—LaFleur.
Her smile in his mind had changed. Sharpened. It wasn’t friendly anymore. It was authorial. Like she was outlining his arc.
At 2:14 a.m., he cracked.
He walked to the park in house shoes and a flannel robe. Dug up the kimono.
The soil felt wrong—damp even though it hadn’t rained. And warm. Not sun-warm, but body-warm. As if it had been waiting for him.
He unearthed the garment slowly, breath short, heart hammering in his throat.
It was still intact. Impossibly pristine. Not a spot of dirt. No frayed threads. The sequins shimmered in the moonlight like they were alive.
He held it up, hands trembling.
It shifted.
Just slightly. But enough to make him drop it.
He stumbled back. Tripped on the shovel. Fell hard onto his side in the grass, wind knocked out of him.
From the edge of the trees, Capote appeared.
Silent. Watching. One leg cocked like he was deciding whether or not to bite.
Then Myrtle’s voice, floating from her porch like honey laced with arsenic:
“You might as well leave it in the ground, dear. The story’s better that way.”
Is it a bunch of old men in a room, swirling sherry like it’s holy water, declaring what mattered and what didn’t with the confidence of people who’ve never been told to clean up after themselves? Do they lean back in leather chairs and decide what’s worth remembering, while the rest of the world cleans the dishes, changes the linens, and quietly disappears?
Because let’s be honest—history isn’t what happened. It’s what survived. It’s the polished version of a chaotic past, curated by those with power, perspective, and the privilege to speak uninterrupted.
But what about the ones who made that version possible?
Why don’t we ever hear about them? The people who provided the comfort, the nourishment, the spark. The woman who changed the sheets so a “great man” could sleep through the night. The friend who uttered a half-thought over coffee that later became a manifesto. The cook who fed the movement. The janitor who unlocked the building where the protest was planned. The lover who reminded someone they were human before they put on the mask of leadership.
History applauds the speech, but forgets the breath it took to say it.
We’ve been sold the idea that history is boldface names and bronze statues. But most of what matters happened in kitchens, back porches, alleyways, and hands calloused from lifting, not pointing.
We know the architects of nations. But never the bricklayers. We memorize the names of authors, but forget the unnamed soul who said something beautiful that stuck. We forget that for every “visionary,” there was someone behind the scenes keeping them afloat. Holding the ladder. Mending the net.
So no—history isn’t just written by the victors. It’s written by survivors. By omission. By spin. And often, by those who had the means to make a record in the first place.
The rest? The ones who lit the fires, bore the burdens, whispered the truths?
They became the silence between chapters. The invisible ink.
But if you look close—really close—you’ll find them. In the margins. In the echoes. In the way a melody lingers long after the singer is gone.
Because history wasn’t built on sherry alone. It was built on sweat, sacrifice, and souls that never asked to be remembered—just not to be erased.
But what happens when they get it wrong?
When, the ones holding the pen decide the truth is inconvenient? When the story is shaved, polished, and repainted, so it gleams just right in the museum light? What happens when history becomes less about remembering and more about marketing? About preserving an image, not a truth?
That’s when history turns into myth. Not the kind with gods and monsters, but the kind where the villains are edited out, and the uncomfortable questions are filed away—lost behind locked drawers labeled “context.” You know, for our own good.
And maybe they don’t mean to lie. Maybe they just optimize. Smooth the edges. Add a little glow to the legacy. After all, who doesn’t want their heroes to look heroic? Their country to feel noble? Their ancestors seem wise?
But shaping the past for the best possible result isn’t harmless. It’s rewriting the foundation while pretending the house still stands the same. It’s how entire generations learn pride without accountability, patriotism without honesty, nostalgia without nuance.
And what’s left behind in that process?
The guilt that never gets named. The reparations never paid. The patterns that repeat because we swore they never happened in the first place. The echo chamber grows louder, but the echoes grow fainter—until all we hear is what we want to hear, and not what needs to be heard.
See, history can be a mirror. Or it can be a mask.
One tells you the truth, whether you like it or not.
The other flatters you, and hopes you don’t look too close.
So maybe the question isn’t just who writes history? Maybe it’s who dares to revise it, once they know better?
Because if we only protect the polished version, if we only pass down the parts that make us proud, then we’re not honoring the past.
We’re embalming it.
And you can’t build a future on something you’ve buried just to keep the story pretty.
But what about when they don’t just get it wrong? What about when they try to remove history altogether?
Really? That’s the move?
As if tearing down a statue makes the blood it commemorates magically dry up and blow away. As if banning a book unpublishes the pain it contains. As if not teaching something means it never happened.
We’ve seen it before: whole eras scrubbed clean, classrooms sterilized, uncomfortable truths repackaged into “heritage,” or ignored entirely. Entire peoples flattened into footnotes, if mentioned at all. Because someone decided it was better to forget than to face it. Better to be comfortable than be honest.
But here’s the truth, they’re afraid of: You can’t remove history.
You can burn the documents. You can whitewash the walls. You can call it “divisive,” “unpatriotic,” or “too upsetting for children.” But history isn’t gone—it just goes underground into stories told at kitchen tables. Into songs, poems, and scars passed down like heirlooms. Into eyes that still remember, even if the curriculum doesn’t.
The attempt to erase history is always a confession. A silent, trembling admission that the truth still hurts. That it never really stopped. It’s not about healing—it’s about hiding.
And hiding doesn’t protect anyone. It just keeps the cycle clean enough to repeat.
So no—you don’t get to skip the hard chapters because they make your heroes look human, or your institutions look cracked. That’s not erasing history. That’s erasing accountability.
And let me tell you—if your story can’t survive the truth, maybe it wasn’t a story worth keeping in the first place.
Maria Popova got it right: History isn’t what happened. It’s what survives the shipwreck of judgment and chance.
So maybe it’s time we stop polishing the deck chairs and admit we helped steer the damn ship.
Maybe it’s time we stood by the dusty words in old books—the ones that dared to say things like honor, integrity, and truth. Not just when it’s convenient. But when it’s hard. When it means admitting that the past wasn’t all parades and progress. That some of it—hell, a lot of it—would’ve earned us a solid whoopin’ from our mothers, wooden spoon in hand.
So, excuse me while I go through a stack of biographies on Lincoln.
Because if we’re going to keep telling the story— Let’s at least try to get it right.
Author’s Note Forgive the rant—but not the passion. That part, I won’t apologize for. The ranting? Yeah… I might’ve gotten a little carried away.
This piece was written for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #386. I try to jump in when I can remember to pull my head out of a book long enough to notice.
I wish I could say no. That I’m above all that—ego, elitism, the subtle flexes wrapped in “taste” or “refinement.” I’ve tried, seriously. I’ve had the talks, done the therapy. I even cracked open the workbooks—are they still called that? Maybe it was a podcast. Or one of those journaling things we do when someone who shouldn’t matter (and whose name I can’t even remember) says something that sticks. It latches on like gum to your shoe, and suddenly you’re spiraling.
You know the kind of advice—like taking relationship tips from a guy who’s never had a girlfriend. Come to think of it, I’ve never even seen him talk to a woman.
Food Snob? Maybe. But It’s Personal.
“Nothing stays the same”—that’s the mantra we mumble when something doesn’t taste like it used to. The moment hits, and the only explanation that feels right is, “The bastards changed the formula.” Maybe they did. That’s possible.
But what’s also possible—and we hate admitting it—is that the stuff always tasted like garbage. We just didn’t know better. No one had the heart to tell us, because we loved it. And love, especially the nostalgic kind, can turn trash into treasure.
Still, when that old flavor hits different, I dig in. I refuse to accept that it’s me who changed. No—they changed it. And now it’s a matter of principle. “The bastards changed the formula” isn’t just a phrase. It’s my truth. I’m sticking to it.
Culture Snob? Absolutely.
Let’s be real—taste isn’t just personal. It’s cultural.
As a Black man in America, I grew up hearing things you couldn’t say out loud today. Not in public, anyway. Stuff like, “White folks don’t make potato salad like Black folks.” And everyone around the table would nod, mouths full of Granny Smith’s version, hoping for seconds before it disappeared. Because we all knew the danger of ending up with Ms. Johnson’s version. She never quite got it right. But her rhubarb pie? That had fifty things going on, and every one of them hit.
It’s remarkable how the world now dictates what’s considered refined. What’s divine? Overhyped restaurants serve up culture on a plate and call it status. Sure, sometimes it’s good. But nothing compares to the food from our cookouts, our picnics, our church socials. That food had soul. That food knew where it came from.
Now we pay $25 for a steak that comes out wrong and has to be sent back, just to taste decent—something we could’ve cooked at home better and cheaper, with seasoning that actually makes sense. But we do it anyway, because it makes us feel like we belong to something. Like we’re part of a club. Even if that club leaves us hungry and a little hollow.
That right there? That’s the bullshit I’m done with.
Ideology Snob? Let’s Get Real.
Let’s talk ideology. The code we live by. The beliefs hardwired into us through culture—whether we chose them or not.
They show up in how we talk, how we dress, what we read, the music we blast, and the stuff we secretly love but feel judged for.
And here comes the contradictions.
I’ve been told, “You act white.” Like that’s a crime. “I’m pulling your Black card.”“You’re an Oreo—Black on the outside, white on the inside.”
I used to carry a bag of Oreos with me. I liked them. And the same people who said that crap? They’d always take one when I offered. Hypocrites, the lot of them.
Then there are the stereotypes. Once, it was sweltering out, and some coworkers brought watermelons to beat the heat. One of my White friends waved and said, “Hey, we’ve got some watermelon!” I shouted back, “I’m good, thanks.”
He came over to my truck looking confused. “Hey man,” he said, “we’ve got some watermelon.” “I don’t eat that shit,” I said flat. He raised an eyebrow. “Next thing you’re gonna tell me is you don’t eat fried chicken.” I looked at him and said, “I prefer mine baked.”
Truth? I love fried chicken. But my wife had me on baked for my blood pressure. That moment wasn’t about the food. It was about reclaiming space. Drawing a line. Saying, you don’t get to define me.
People try to strip your identity when it doesn’t fit their version of what Black is “supposed” to be. But if you stand still too long, they’ll say you’ve stopped growing. You can’t win. So you make your own rules. You claim the parts of yourself they don’t understand, and keep walking.
Music Snob? Nah. Just a Metalhead.
I’m a metalhead. But really, I love music across genres. Blues, jazz, hip hop, classical, metal, whatever hits. If it moves me, I’m in.
But I’ve caught flak for it. Side-eyes at shows. People coming up to me, tilted heads, awkward grins: “Are you enjoying yourself?” Like, I crashed the wrong concert. Like metal has a sticker on it that reads “For White Folks Only.”
Really? That’s your question?
As if I need permission to feel that same raw, gut-deep power you feel. As if I have to prove I belong. I didn’t know loud music came with gatekeeping.
Let’s be clear: music doesn’t segregate. People do. And the real pandemic? It’s not my playlist. It’s the weirdo energy and backhanded doubt people carry around like a badge.
The Labels Don’t Stick.
Stereotypes. Prejudices. Respectability rules dressed up in soft language and cheap slogans. You can’t run from them. We’re told to be ourselves, so long as it fits the mold. Be different, but not too different. Be authentic, but stay in bounds.
Nah. I’m done with that.
So I wear the names they throw at me. I carry them, not as scars, but as proof. Proof that people will always try to box you in. But boxes are for storage, not for living. And if they actually knew me—or tried—they’d realize we’d probably get along just fine.
I love exploring culture. I love discovering new food, ideas, and perspectives. I don’t just tolerate differences. I chase it. That doesn’t make me less Black. It makes me human.
And if I’m anything?
I’m weathered. But I’m true.
Author’s Note: This rant was written for Sadje’s Sunday Poser, which I genuinely enjoy. It gives me space to think about real things—stuff that hits closer to home than all those philosophies written by dead people.
The dawn slowly burns away the remnants of the night. It’s already hot, but most of the world still sleeps—for now. Soon, they’ll rise. They’ll fall into motion, surrendering to the bustle, the pursuit of progress, the comfort of productivity. There’s a kind of faith in the checklist, in the belief that doing enough will make you feel like enough. But I don’t begin my day that way. I don’t chase. I listen.
I write. Not to perform. Not to perfect. But to return to myself. The page is where I can be honest, messy, contradictory, and human. There’s no audience. No need to edit the ache or organize the confusion. I write what is, as it is. The act alone brings me back.
When I write, I unearth what I’ve buried: grief that’s gone unnamed, anger I’ve swallowed, hope that feels too fragile to speak aloud. The words don’t always come clearly. Some days they’re sharp and certain. Other days, they drift, soft and uncertain. But either way, I leave lighter.
I don’t write to resolve. I write to reveal. To confess the parts of me I usually keep hidden—even from myself. I spill what I can’t carry. I give shape to what I feel. I name the fear, the guilt, the longing. I write until I remember: none of this needs to be perfect. It just needs to be present.
The page doesn’t ask me to be fine. It doesn’t demand clarity or closure. It simply holds space. And in that space, I breathe. I stop performing. I stop pretending. I remember who I am beneath the noise, beneath the roles, beneath the pressure to produce and please.
So, no, I don’t start the day by rushing into it. I begin by slowing down. By sitting still. By listening. I begin by writing. By breathing. By being.
She didn’t decide. Not really. The artifact simply leaned in that direction, its hum stronger when she faced the mountains, weaker when she turned away. Her dreams ended there too—in jagged silhouettes etched against a dying sky, clouds crawling like wounded things.
She stopped asking why.
On the third day, the silence deepened.
Not just quiet—absence. No birdsong. No wind brushing leaves. Even her own breath seemed muffled, as if the world had turned down the volume on her existence.
It wasn’t altitude. It was approach.
Something didn’t want to be disturbed.
She crested a ridge and saw it: a broken temple, half-consumed by the rock around it like the mountain had tried to swallow it whole. Pillars leaned like fractured bones. The stone steps bled with black moss. Light didn’t quite land right here—it floated, hung, like it wasn’t sure where to fall.
And in the air above the ruin: a spiral.
Not carved. Not painted. Projected—faint, flickering, as if the sky was remembering a shape it wasn’t meant to hold.
The artifact throbbed inside her coat, pressing against her chest with each step like a heartbeat just out of sync with her own.
She descended in silence.
Inside, the temple smelled like old metal and wet dust. Not decay—memory. The scent of forgotten things trying to stay relevant. The walls bent in strange ways—straight lines that turned slightly as she walked, always off by a few degrees, until her sense of balance slipped sideways.
Time didn’t work here.
A hallway led into itself. An echo arrived before her footstep. Her shadow stretched behind her, then ahead, then vanished completely.
And then—whispers.
Not words. Tones. Rising and falling in a rhythm that made her teeth ache. The artifact vibrated harder. It wanted something. Or it feared something.
Then she saw him.
A man seated in the center of a circular chamber, bones fanned around him like a ritual compass. He didn’t turn. Didn’t speak. Just opened his eyes like he’d never closed them.
“I was wondering when you’d arrive,” he said.
His voice was calm. Steady. Too steady.
Carla didn’t speak. She stepped closer, hand hovering over the artifact. Her breath fogged slightly, though the air was warm.
“You’re a keyholder,” she said.
He smiled—not with his mouth, but with his posture. His stillness. His certainty.
“So are you. Or you wouldn’t be here.”
His name was Liran.
He spoke like someone who didn’t just believe what he said—he’d built himself around it.
“They called the spiral a prison,” he said, gesturing to the glyphs. “But that was always the lie. It’s not a cage. It’s a cradle.”
The way he touched the stone was too gentle. Reverent. Like it had raised him.
Carla felt her pulse climbing. The air in the chamber shifted—thicker now. Her chest felt tight, like the oxygen was being repurposed for something else.
“A cradle for what?” she asked.
“For the next world. This one was a rehearsal.”
Liran reached into his coat and drew something out—another artifact. Smaller than hers, no silver veins. Matte black, split by a single groove that shimmered faintly red. The spiral on it was asymmetrical, sharp-edged. Wrong.
“This one doesn’t twist,” he said. “It just opens.”
Carla felt her own artifact heat up, protesting. Reacting.
“What happens if I use mine?” she asked, already knowing.
“Then you bury it. But it still grows beneath. It gets louder. Smarter. Hungrier.”
The floor beneath them pulsed. Not an earthquake—a breath. The room inhaled.
She took a step back. Liran didn’t move.
“You’ve already let something through,” he said. “Sealing this won’t fix that. It’ll just make you deaf to what’s coming.”
“Good,” she whispered.
And twisted.
The world ruptured.
No sound—just pressure, slamming outward. The glyphs ignited in a burst of white. The air tore with invisible claws. Something screamed, not with a voice, but with recoil—a shriek of retreat.
Liran staggered, shielding his face. The bones around him exploded into dust. The spiral projected above the altar shrank inward like a dying eye.
Carla collapsed to one knee, gasping for breath. Both artifacts pulsed once—hard—then went still. Her ears rang. Her skin burned.
She opened her eyes.
Liran was gone. No trace. No blood. Just the afterimage of something that had been there.
And her hand—
Red. Raw. Branded.
A spiral etched into the flesh of her palm—not cut, not tattooed. Emerging. Like it had always been under the skin, waiting to show itself.
Her breath caught. Her pulse raced.
I sealed it. But I brought something through.
She wrapped her hand quickly, ignoring the pain.
Then she stood. Alone. Eyes on the exit.
There were more doors.
And now, something inside her was learning how to knock.
Not all stories wait to be told—some write themselves through us.
I wonder— do we write in our sleep, not with hands but with something older— a pulse beneath the thought, a breath beneath the breath?
Are the things we write just the dreams we couldn’t hold— wet leaves stuck to waking, falling off before we knew they’d landed?
Maybe the page is the mirror we forget we’re looking into, and every line is a smoke-trail from a fire that burned somewhere behind the eyes.
The words come limping, feathered with ash, draped in symbols we pretend to understand.
A girl with no face builds houses out of teeth. A clock whispers the name you forgot. You write it down and call it metaphor.
But the ink knows first. It hums with the echo of other lives— the ones you’ve never lived but somehow still remember when the light is wrong and the silence bends.
Is this how we dream? Not to escape— but to return, to write the path backwards until the paper runs out and we wake.
Mayor Brindle only entered Room 14 on Sundays. Not for the quiet. Not for the privacy. For containment.
The room had no windows. Just four beige walls, the smell of municipal-grade carpet cleaner, and the faint static crackle of a vent that hadn’t worked in years. It wasn’t an office, exactly. It was… a chamber. For reverence. And regret.
He flicked on the fluorescent light. It buzzed overhead, a sickly white hum that made his temples throb. And then—there they were.
The shelves.
Lined edge to edge with Boney LaFleur’s complete works, the glossy covers glowing faintly under the flickering light like stained glass. Temple Blade and the Hollow Crown. The Tethered Labyrinth. Scepter’s Wake. Even the obscure prequel novella she’d tried to scrub from publication—he had it. Signed, no less.
He didn’t sit down right away. He never did. First, he had to… look. Just look.
He moved along the rows slowly, brushing the spines with the back of his hand. His fingers tingled slightly. Part reverence. Part panic. The books weren’t just stories to him. They were a sanctuary. Places where everything made sense. Where people had destinies and enemies and epic confrontations—and none of them involved city council meetings or HOA bylaws or the unraveling of one’s dignity in front of a dog named Capote.
A squeak echoed underfoot. He looked down. The laminate tile had a fresh scuff.
He hadn’t noticed that before.
He clenched his jaw and walked to the small folding chair in the corner. Sat. Took out the paperback of The Hollow Crown—the one with his notes in the margins. Yellow highlighter, purple ink, a few fevered pencil scribbles he no longer remembered writing.
Page 217: “No secret stays buried forever, only patiently waiting to be found.”
He stared at that line for a long time.
The pink kimono still haunted his dreams. The way it shimmered in the moonlight. The way the sequins had caught on the shovel. The way the dirt made it seem human, like he was burying a body. Not a costume. Not a memory. A truth.
He tried to breathe deeply. Couldn’t. The air in Room 14 always felt just slightly recycled. Like it had passed through too many confessionals.
The text message still burned behind his eyes: “I know what you buried, and it wasn’t just a time capsule.”
Who sent it? How did they know?
He wiped his hands on his pants. They felt sticky, like his palms were leaking secrets.
The worst part wasn’t the fear of being found out. It was the possibility that Myrtle—sweet, sour, pastel-sweatered Myrtle—wasn’t just Myrtle. That behind the orthopedic shoes and off-brand Tupperware was Boney LaFleur, architect of the Temple Blade saga, literary genius, and keeper of the narrative fate of hundreds of fictional villains.
He closed the book. Pressed it to his chest.
If she were LaFleur… if she knew about the kimono… Would she write him in? Would he become one of her morally confused side characters? The kind that gets impaled by a decorative umbrella in chapter three?
He didn’t know whether to be terrified or honored.
And that made it worse.
The silence in the room felt sentient now. Listening.
He stood abruptly. Put the book back with a little too much force.
He had to find out if Myrtle knew. He had to confirm it.
But part of him already did. The way she looked at him lately. Her smile, small and tight, like a woman who’d just plotted something delicious. The little glances. The pause when he’d walked by. She was toying with him. Maybe write to him already.
He pressed a hand to the wall, steadying himself.
Outside, the parking lot was empty. Inside, Room 14 held its breath.
Everyone on Rosewood Lane thought Myrtle McKlusky was a cardigan-wearing, prune-juice-drinking, HOA-terrorizing widow with three jittery Chinese Crested dogs. They were only 25% right.
What no one—not even the mayor, not even Capote—knew was that Myrtle was also…
Tempest Fablestein.
Yes. The Tempest Fablestein. The mysterious, scandalously successful author of the internationally adored, historically inaccurate, and erotically charged adventure-romance series featuring Boney LaFleur, the one-armed French nobleman turned treasure hunter.
She had written 43 novels, 5 novellas, and a cookbook (“Feast Like a Fabulist: 18th Century Seduction Stews”) from the converted sunroom behind her kitchen. Her books had sold over 47 million copies. She was, by all definitions, secretly loaded.
Her fans included conspiracy theorists, failed Broadway understudies, and a suspicious number of junior senators.
And to maintain her anonymity, Myrtle had hired a professional actor—a classically trained Scotsman named Malcolm Finnegan Duff-Whitely III—to play the role of Tempest in public.
Enter Malcolm
At book signings, literary galas, and erotic parchment conventions, Malcolm wore a velvet smoking jacket, quoted Shakespeare deep cuts. He wielded a Scottish accent so buttery it made podcast hosts weep. He was charming. Mysterious. Allegedly celibate.
And he had been in love with Myrtle for six years.
The Confession
During a livestream at the National Erotic Adventure Awards Gala, Malcolm—accepting the award for “Best Use of the Word Ravish in a Scene Involving Lava”—snapped.
“I—I can’t do this anymore,” he said, eyes glassy. “I’ve lived a lie.”
The crowd hushed. A woman in the third row fainted into a fondue fountain.
“I’m not Tempest Fablestein. I’m just Malcolm. But she—” He stared into the camera. “She is the greatest mind of our time. And Myrtle… if you’re watching—I love you. I’ve loved you since Boney rode that bull through the Vatican archives.”
Before the audience could react, two large men in matching black suits and medieval-looking boots appeared. They flanked him.
Malcolm’s voice rose over the chaos. “Tell her I meant it!”
He was dragged offstage, still clinging to his crystal pegasus trophy.
The livestream abruptly cut to a pre-recorded interview where “Tempest” explained how she researched 18th-century brothels using only Google Earth and intuition.
The Fallout
A 14-second clip surfaced on YouTube hours later. It showed Malcolm being pushed into a black Escalade while yelling, “Tell Myrtle I know her rhubarb pie uses vodka!”
The clip was quickly removed by Tempest Enterprises LLC under “copyright and culinary infringement.”
Still, the legend of the confession spread. Reddit threads multiplied. Fans demanded answers.
Back in Rosewood Lane…
In her sunroom, Myrtle sat staring at her laptop. Capote snored on a pile of manuscript pages. Pont and Pint had rolled themselves into an anxious spiral.
She didn’t cry. Myrtle McKlusky hadn’t cried since Boney LaFleur and the Lusty Siege of Strasbourg made Oprah’s underground erotica list.
Instead, she opened a new document.
Title: “Boney LaFleur and the Man Who Dared to Love.”
—
That night, in the dim warmth of his paneled study, Mayor Gerald swirled cold chamomile tea and reached for the false back of his bookshelf.
Click.
Behind it: Every single Boney LaFleur first edition, wrapped in archival sleeves and arranged by emotional damage level.
He pulled out “Boney LaFleur and the Underdressed Pharaoh” and gently opened the jacket. Inside:
“To G— May you never lose your own treasure map. —T.F.”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes.
“She’s been right next door this whole time,” he whispered.
Then, from a drawer, he pulled a laminated keepsake: “Boney LaFleur’s Ten Principles of Gentlemanly Adventure.”
He read aloud, voice cracking:
“Rule #1: Never underestimate the swordplay of a woman with nothing left to prove.”
Capote, who had somehow snuck into the study again, thumped his tail once in quiet agreement.
Gerald leaned back in his chair. “You got me, Myrtle.”
The first thing Fiona registered was the smell— Grilled meat. Cilantro. The unmistakable scent of hot corn tortillas and lime rinds warming under neon light.
She opened her eyes slowly, adjusting to the dim light of dusk. The taco truck stood exactly where it had before, parked under a buzzing fluorescent sign that read “Tacotón 5000” in cracked vinyl letters. The same string of rainbow papel picado fluttered above them, fading from the sun and sagging from the weather.
A warm breeze passed. It smelled like onions and traffic and the city on a Friday night—alive, restless, ordinary.
They were home.
“Didn’t think déjà vu would come with salsa,” Elliot said beside her.
Fiona exhaled. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath.
She was back in her own jeans. Her real boots. Her coat with a broken zipper and a ballpoint pen still jammed in the inner lining. The chrono-device—no longer pulsing, no longer demanding—rested cool and quiet in her pocket like a relic from someone else’s life.
And Elliot? He looked… lighter. Tired, yes, but unburdened. His curls were wind-tousled, his glasses slightly crooked, and his Ramones shirt was—miraculously—clean. She smiled at the thought he’d maybe picked a fresh one on purpose.
A thin fog of steam rose from the taco truck window. The same vendor as last time—greying, gum-chewing, and blessedly nonchalant—tossed two wrapped tacos onto the counter and gave them a single, knowing nod.
They didn’t pay.
“I think we broke his sense of reality,” Elliot said, collecting the food like it might still vanish. “Or earned his eternal respect. Hard to tell.”
“I’ll take either,” Fiona murmured.
They sat on the same bench—their bench—its paint peeling, the metal cold beneath them. The sound of the street curled around them: honking cars, a mumbled rap track from a passing bike speaker, the sharp clatter of skateboards echoing under the overpass.
Fiona peeled the foil back from her taco with careful fingers, letting the scent rise. It was warm, greasy, and strangely grounding. The first bite burned her tongue and made her eyes water. She welcomed it.
Elliot was watching her.
“Do you remember what you were thinking right before you asked me out?” he asked.
She chewed, then swallowed. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“I had a mantra,” she said. “In my head. I kept repeating: Don’t die alone surrounded by lab reports.”
He grinned. “That’s so… deeply romantic.”
“It worked.”
He looked down at his own taco, then back up at her.
“I almost said no.”
Fiona froze mid-chew. “You what?”
“When you asked me out,” Elliot said. “I panicked. Thought it was a prank. Or a bet. Or a really elaborate social experiment.”
“Seriously?”
He nodded sheepishly. “Then I realized I didn’t care. You were wearing those boots—the intimidating ones. And if it was a trap, I figured I’d go down swinging.”
Fiona laughed—a surprised, full-bodied laugh that startled a pigeon nearby into a fluttering escape.
“I thought you didn’t like me,” she said. “You always looked like you were trying to solve me.”
“I was,” he said, voice quiet. “Still am.”
They sat for a moment in comfortable silence, listening to the city breathe around them. Fiona leaned into him, their shoulders pressed. His warmth was solid. Familiar. Real.
It felt… earned.
“Do you think this counts as our first real date?” she asked.
Elliot nodded slowly. “We survived 1776. Got interrogated by Hamilton. Made out in a future that might not technically exist.”
“So that’s a yes.”
“Definitely.”
The chrono-device buzzed once in her pocket—just a faint vibration, like a cat purring in sleep. Then stillness.
Fiona didn’t check it.
She didn’t need to.
They were here. And now. And not running anymore.
Elliot raised his taco like a glass.
“To us,” he said.
She clinked hers against his foil wrap. “To now.”
And together, under a taco truck sign that flickered uncertainly between green and purple, with grease on their hands and time behind them, they finally finished their first date.
—
And that’s a wrap!
Chronically Challenged: A Friday the 13th Love Story began with a taco truck, a reluctant crush, and a time travel accident—and somehow turned into one of the most unexpectedly joyful stories I’ve had the pleasure of writing.
Creating Fiona and Elliot’s awkward, brilliant, chaotic journey through history (and each other’s emotional walls) has been such a weird and wonderful ride. From Hamilton’s dramatic entrance to futuristic first kisses, every scene brought something surprising—and often unplanned—to the table.
This was a story about missed signals, emotional experiments, and learning that sometimes the biggest leap isn’t through time—it’s letting someone really see you.
If you made it all the way here, thank you. I hope you laughed, blushed, winced at the secondhand awkwardness, and maybe found a little bit of yourself somewhere in these pages.
And if this is your first read-through, remember: time travel may be fiction, but tacos and courage are very real.
On Naming the Nameless, Winning the Awards, and Blinding Us with 1,369 Light Bulbs
There are far too many historical figures I respect to name just one. Frankly, the question borders on the ridiculous—like picking a favorite breath of air. Some names rise above the noise—revolutionaries, artists, philosophers—but reducing history to a single “favorite” feels cheap. That said, I got my new glasses today, so I’m in a decent mood. Let’s talk about one who actually did something seismic with his voice.
Let’s talk about Ralph Ellison.
In 1953, Invisible Man hit like a lightning strike. This wasn’t another book about slavery. This wasn’t a moral fable. This was something else—blunt, surreal, unflinching. America was long overdue for a story that didn’t contort the Black experience into something palatable. Ellison delivered a story that didn’t apologize, didn’t translate. He wrote it exactly the way it needed to be heard.
And he did it through a narrator with no name.
That choice wasn’t symbolic—it was the whole point. The protagonist is unseen by society, overlooked even when he’s standing in plain sight. He becomes whatever people need him to be—token, tool, threat—until he’s nothing but a projection. Ellison strips him of a name to make that erasure visible. He is invisible not because he hides, but because no one bothers to see him.
But Ellison didn’t just tell a story. He orchestrated an experience.
Before he became a writer, Ellison studied music—trumpet, specifically, at Tuskegee Institute. He trained as a composer, not a novelist. And that background echoes through every page of Invisible Man. The structure of the novel plays like jazz: unpredictable, looping, improvisational, yet rigorously controlled. It doesn’t move from point A to point B. It riffs. It distorts. It circles, breaks down, explodes, and rebuilds.
That musical sensibility fused with his literary growth under the mentorship of Richard Wright, who helped him see the potential of fiction as a weapon, not just of protest, but of truth. Yet while Wright carved truth with sharp realism, Ellison went inward, sideways, and underground. He made the psychological terrain just as political as the streets above it.
But how did a novel that daring even get published in 1952?
It took time—and the right people. Ellison spent nearly seven years writing Invisible Man, supported by a small circle of editors, mentors, and radical literary journals. Early on, he published essays and short stories in magazines like New Masses and Partisan Review, spaces that were open to racial politics and modernist experimentation.
Then came Albert Erskine, an editor at Random House, who saw early chapters and backed Ellison all the way. Erskine didn’t try to tame the book. He gave Ellison the room to go deeper, to make it more challenging, more honest. That kind of editorial trust was rare, especially for a debut novel by a Black author writing outside the box.
Ellison didn’t chase the market. He wrote the novel he needed to write. And somehow—despite the Cold War climate, despite the publishing world’s conservatism—it broke through. Maybe because it was just that good.
Surreal scenes erupt throughout the novel—the Liberty Paints factory mixing “Optic White” with black drops, the death and objectification of Tod Clifton, the Brotherhood’s exploitation dressed up as activism. These moments don’t just symbolize oppression. They make the reader feel its absurdity and weight. Ellison crafted them not just as plot points but as emotional dissonance, like minor chords and unresolved melodies that leave you unsettled.
And then there’s the ending: the basement, the 1,369 stolen light bulbs, the quiet. The narrator isn’t defeated. He’s aware. He knows now that invisibility isn’t something he caused—it’s something he’s forced to live inside. But from that underground space, clarity emerges. He hasn’t escaped the system. But he sees it.
In 1953, Invisible Man won the National Book Award for Fiction, making Ralph Ellison the first African American to ever win the prize. And he didn’t win it by default. He beat out John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Jean Stafford, Isabel Bolton, and others. That’s not just a literary win. That’s a cannon blast.
Ellison didn’t provide us with a clear arc or a moral fable. He gave us a jazz-soaked, fragmented, blistering novel that stared invisibility dead in the eye and refused to blink. Invisible Man didn’t demand visibility. It took it.
And over seventy years later, it still doesn’t let you look away.
The chrono-device vibrated softly in Fiona’s hands, like it had a secret to tell.
It glowed—not in flashes this time, but in steady, rhythmic pulses that matched the cadence of her breath. Blue-white light warmed the bones of her fingers.
The screen read only: Temporal Window Detected Friday, 13. Reset.
Fiona stared at it. Her stomach dropped. Again.
“We’re back in range,” she said, voice hushed, reverent.
Elliot stood beside her, damp curls pressed to his forehead. He didn’t ask where—or when—they’d land next. He just met her eyes, the gravity of the moment flickering behind his usually breezy expression.
“Are we ready?” he asked.
She wanted to lie. Wanted to shrug, joke, mask the rising panic the way she always had. But the truth felt louder than usual. Like something long trapped was suddenly allowed to rise to the surface.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I’m tired of waiting for everything to make sense before I act. And I’m tired of thinking real things can only happen in safe places.”
Elliot nodded, slowly. “Then let’s jump.”
She reached for his hand.
They pressed the reset button together.
—
The air peeled around them like silk. Light shattered. Sound vanished. The world spun gently sideways—
And then stopped.
—
Fiona opened her eyes and gasped.
They stood in a room so pristine, it almost didn’t seem real. The walls were curved and white, seamless, like poured milk. The air buzzed faintly, charged, clean, just on the edge of ozone. Somewhere, soft instrumental music played in a scale she couldn’t name.
Outside a wall-sized pane of glass, a city stretched like a dream: silver towers arched into the sky, ribboned with floating platforms and streaks of silent light. Buildings glowed from within like lanterns. There were no wheels, no smoke. No gravity-bound noise.
“Oh,” Fiona whispered. “I think this is… the future.”
Elliot spun slowly, taking it in like a wide-eyed kid at a museum. “Either that, or we got adopted by the Apple Store.”
Fiona laughed before she could stop herself. It sounded too loud in the quiet, like a human voice didn’t quite belong here.
They found a curved bench—soft and warm to the touch, like stone that had learned empathy—and sat down. Outside, a gliding drone zipped past, trailing soft purple light.
Elliot leaned back, knees bouncing. “Do you think we’re… allowed to be here?”
Fiona stared at their warped reflections in the glass. “Does anyone belong anywhere? I mean, really?”
He glanced at her. “That feels like a yes and a no.”
She smiled faintly. “It’s a yes if you’re next to me.”
The hum of the space surrounded them. It didn’t feel sterile anymore—it felt gentle, like the universe was holding its breath.
Fiona shifted to face him, nervous energy rippling beneath her skin.
“I need to say something,” she said. “And this time I’m saying it out loud so I can’t take it back.”
Elliot blinked. “Okay.”
“I want to be with you,” she said, the words trembling as they left. “Not just next to you. Not just in shared proximity because of academic overlap or time travel disasters. I want… us. I want to be chosen. And to choose you.”
The air seemed to shimmer with its weight.
Elliot was quiet, processing. Then:
“You astound me,” he said. “Every time I think I’ve caught up to how smart or strong or out-of-my-league you are, you find a new way to knock me sideways.”
Her cheeks went hot. “That’s a very dramatic compliment.”
He tilted his head. “You kissed me with physics. I think I’m allowed some drama.”
Then, he leaned in and kissed her.
It wasn’t perfect. His glasses bumped her temple, and she accidentally bit his bottom lip. But neither pulled away. It was clumsy and honest and full of all the things they hadn’t let themselves say until now.
When they parted, forehead to forehead, Fiona felt the moment lodge somewhere deep. This—whatever this was—wasn’t theoretical. It wasn’t temporary. It felt inevitable.
The chrono-device buzzed softly.
They looked down. A new prompt blinked on the screen:
RETURN TO ORIGIN?
Fiona turned to Elliot, heartbeat syncing with the pulse of the text.
“What do you think?” she asked.
Elliot slid his fingers between hers.
“I think we’ve got a date to finish,” he said.
They stood. The device warmed in her hand. And then the light took them home.
Fiona hadn’t said anything since Hamilton vanished back into the tavern.
Not a joke. Not a sigh. Not even a dry remark about 18th-century masculinity or the aggressive scent of wig powder. Just quiet.
She sat on the bench with her spine too straight, her fingers tracing the curve of a splintered edge. Her eyes weren’t blank, precisely—they were calculating, restless, staring somewhere three centuries ahead.
Elliot stood nearby, fiddling with the time device for the fifth time. The screen still blinked its error message like a stubborn ghost. He wasn’t trying to fix it. Not really. He just needed something to do with his hands, so he didn’t clench them again.
The silence between them had texture now—dry, itchy, like wool on bare skin.
Say something, he thought. Make a joke. Ask if she wants to go back in there and debate Hamilton to death. But every thought got stuck in the same loop: She lit up when he looked at her. She didn’t with me.
So instead, he snapped the back cover onto the chrono-device a little too hard and said, “I’m gonna try to trade for socks or bread or something.”
“I’ll come,” Fiona said too fast, already standing.
They walked shoulder to shoulder but out of sync, her footsteps crisp and narrow, his looser, uneven. The colonial town buzzed around them—smoke drifting from chimneys, cartwheels clunking over stone, and a blacksmith hammering metal with the rhythm of someone trying to outrun his own thoughts.
Fiona inhaled the sharp tang of hot iron, woodsmoke, and sweat. Her borrowed clothes scratched at her skin with every step. She didn’t belong here. She felt it in her bones, her teeth, the small of her back. And still, what stung more was Elliot’s silence.
He hadn’t even cracked a joke when they passed the pig in a bonnet earlier. That wasn’t just weird. That was apocalyptic.
He’s mad, she thought. Not joking is his version of yelling.
She cleared her throat. “About earlier…”
“You don’t have to explain,” he said, eyes on the ground.
“But I want to.”
“No, you don’t. You want to make it okay.”
That stopped her like a slap. “Is that a bad thing?”
“It is if it skips the part where you admit it wasn’t.”
Her throat tightened. The air felt heavier suddenly, or maybe it was just the weight of all the things she hadn’t said.
“You think I liked him.”
Elliot finally looked at her. “You didn’t exactly hate it.”
“No,” she said, her voice quiet but steady. “But I didn’t exactly like being invisible either. By you.”
His mouth opened slightly. “I wasn’t ignoring you.”
“You were fading,” she said. “You do this thing where you tuck behind your humor and act like if you’re quiet enough, nobody will notice you’re scared. But I did notice. I noticed everything. I asked you out, Elliot. I took the risk. And since then, I’ve been wondering if you’re even really on this date with me… or just tagging along.”
The words hit harder than she expected. Saying them out loud made them real, sharp as cut glass.
Elliot exhaled, like something cracked in him, too. He shoved his hands in his coat pockets and kicked a loose stone across the road.
“I didn’t think I had a chance,” he admitted. “Not with someone like you.”
She blinked. “Someone like me?”
“Confident. Brilliant. You plan your outfits. I sometimes forget if I’m wearing shoes. I figured… maybe if I kept things casual, you wouldn’t see how far out of my depth I am.”
Her voice dropped. “So your strategy was what, to underwhelm me into settling?”
“No,” he said, frustrated. “To keep you from seeing how hard I was falling.”
The silence between them shifted again—warmer now, but heavier.
“I don’t want to be a background character in your life,” he said. “I don’t want to be a lab footnote or a failed experiment. I want to be part of—” He hesitated. “—us. If that’s even a thing.”
Fiona’s heart squeezed. Her throat ached. Somewhere under the ache, something softened.
“I don’t need safe,” she said. “I need real. Even if that means fights and flaws and awkwardness and you occasionally brooding in silence until you pop like a shaken soda.”
He smiled faintly. “You saying I’m the brooding type?”
“I’m saying if I have to date a man who wears the same Ramones shirt three times a week, I want to know he can show up when it counts.”
They stood in the middle of the muddy road, neither caring anymore about the people staring or the drizzle starting to fall.
A jar of jam tipped off a vendor’s shelf beside them and shattered in slow motion—glass and berries bursting across the stones. A goat immediately trotted over to investigate.
Fiona watched it without blinking. “If that goat licks my boot, I’m going to time travel myself into a wall.”
Elliot reached out and gently tugged her away. “Let’s walk.”
They moved forward, together this time. Still quiet, but less fragile. Not quite us, not yet. But no longer, maybe.
The man striding toward them didn’t walk—he debuted like a soloist taking the stage, like the main character who knew it. He moved fast and spoke faster, eyes lit with mission and caffeine that hadn’t been invented yet.
Fiona registered the ink-stained fingers first. Then the fine wool coat, the boots too clean for real travel, and the eyes—sharp, amused, and locked on her like she was both anomaly and opportunity.
“You there,” he said, pointing directly at her, “you look like someone who reads.”
Fiona blinked. “I—thank you?”
“I’m in the midst of a public correction,” he said briskly, voice brisk as kindling catching fire. “Some dim-witted provocateur inside the tavern insulted my prose. Claimed I misuse commas. Commas! Can you imagine?”
Fiona opened her mouth to answer but didn’t know how.
“I have half a mind to fight him, but I hate to waste perfectly good rhetoric on someone who can’t even parse clauses,” he continued. “Still, if he raises a fist, I shan’t shy from the occasion.”
The sounds of arguing filtered from inside—boots scraping, someone shouting “ILLITERATE SCOUNDREL!”, a chair toppling.
“Who is this guy?” Elliot muttered beside her.
“Hamilton,” the man said, offering a practiced bow—and his hand. Not to Elliot. To her.
“Alexander Hamilton. Essayist. Orator. Occasional swordsman. And you, I suspect, are not from around here.”
Fiona took his hand cautiously. His grip was warm, firm, and far too comfortable for a stranger’s. “I’m from… a remote colony.”
“Which one?”
She hesitated. “A… small one. Hard to pronounce.”
“Fascinating.” His smile widened. “Do all women from your colony dismantle weak arguments with eyebrow raises and aristocratic silence? Or is that your personal style?”
Elliot stepped forward, just slightly. “Cool. Hi. We were actually just leaving.”
Hamilton turned his head slowly, like he’d only now noticed a houseplant had spoken. “And you are…?”
“Elliot,” he said, forcing a smile. “Fiona’s… associate.”
Fiona narrowed her eyes. Associate?
“Apprentice,” Elliot added, with a shrug that was trying too hard.
Hamilton raised an eyebrow. “Ah. A learner of letters. Worry not. The mind, like the muscle, must withstand repeated strain to grow strong.”
Elliot’s expression stayed mild. But Fiona saw the flicker—the way his jaw clenched, how his hand balled into a fist so tight his knuckles went white.
Hamilton turned back to her, the verbal spotlight shifting again. “If you ever feel like co-authoring a pamphlet, I’d be honored. We could fry Loyalist propaganda together until it weeps ink.”
“Fry,” Fiona echoed. “Like… cook?”
“Exactly. Sear. Roast. Verbally crisp.”
Fiona didn’t know whether to laugh or leave. Hamilton was insufferable. But also… quick. Charismatic. He looked at her like she was interesting in three dimensions—and she hadn’t had that in years.
She was about to deflect when the tavern door slammed open. A man in a wig staggered out, red in the face and holding a quill like a weapon.
Hamilton glanced back, eyes gleaming. “If you’ll excuse me, I believe someone just attempted satire without a license.”
And then he was gone, disappearing into the argument like a shark sensing blood in a seminar room.
The door swung once, then settled.
Silence returned.
Elliot exhaled. “Cool. Great. So we’ve met America’s most confident drama major.”
Fiona sat down, hands trembling slightly in her lap. The bench was rough wood, worn smooth in places by time and elbows. She could feel the shape of every knot in the grain beneath her fingertips.
“Do you think that was real?” she asked softly.
“Real in the sense that he’s probably in every textbook we’ve ever owned? Yeah,” Elliot said.
“I meant… the flirtation.”
He paused. Looked at her sideways.
“Do you want it to be?”
Fiona didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure. She only knew that 1776 was louder, hotter, and more complicated than she’d planned—and somehow the date she was on had managed to involve time travel, colonial undergarments, and a potential future Founding Father who wanted to co-author fire.
It came every night now—low and rhythmic, thudding somewhere just beneath her sternum. Not in her chest, not in the artifact. Deeper. It was like her body had grown a second heart—one that beat in time with something vast and buried.
Carla stopped pretending it was just the artifact.
The world was shifting again. The air shimmered faintly now, not with heat, but like a thin veil of reality had come loose. When she moved through it, her skin tingled. Static, or memory, or something worse. At times, the sky rippled like it was under tension, like it wanted to tear.
The birds were gone. Their replacements were quieter. Things that clicked instead of sang, eyes too glossy, wings that didn’t flap right. They circled high, watching. Waiting.
She didn’t sleep much.
And when she did, she dreamed of spirals.
Not metaphors. Actual spirals—etched into bone, ground into stone, spinning in water. They moved when she blinked, breathed, or doubted.
Yesterday, she found a trail.
Not footprints—drags. Human-shaped impressions pulled through the dirt and warped grass. Fingers. Elbows. A body too broken or too possessed to walk. It snaked through a cracked hillside like something trying to flee—but in the wrong direction.
She followed.
The air thickened as she went. Every breath coated her lungs like ash. Her skin felt stretched. Tense. Her shadow moved wrong when she stopped.
And then—just before dusk—she reached a clearing.
Dead silent.
In the center stood a woman.
Still. Back turned. Her hands were clasped behind her like she was waiting for a verdict.
Carla stopped. Her stomach coiled. Her fingers inched toward the artifact in her coat, but she didn’t draw it.
The woman hadn’t moved.
“You felt it too,” Carla said, voice dry as gravel.
The woman didn’t turn. But she answered.
“It showed me what comes next.”
The voice was brittle. Paper-thin. Every syllable landed like it had come from a cracked throat, barely held together.
Carla approached slowly, boots crunching blackened grass. She circled the woman like an orbiting moon, heart thrumming harder the closer she came.
She expected damage—melted eyes, spirals carved into skin, teeth where they didn’t belong. She expected wrongness.
But what she saw instead was worse.
The woman looked like her.
Not identical. But close. Close enough that it scraped something deep and primal.
She had the same weather-worn face. Same posture—rigid from carrying things she hadn’t told anyone about. Same scars on the knuckles. Same hollow beneath the eyes that only came from surviving something you shouldn’t have.
Carla whispered:
“You twisted left. Didn’t you?”
The woman finally moved—just her head, slow and strained. Her gaze met Carla’s.
The eyes were not glowing. Not bleeding.
They were hollow. Not empty. Just… done.
“Twisting left doesn’t seal anything,” she said. “It just moves the door somewhere else.”
The words hit like a weight in Carla’s gut. Something inside her dropped—an idea she’d been holding back, finally allowed in.
“So what do we do?”
The woman exhaled. Not a sigh. Just the sound of someone who didn’t need to breathe anymore.
She reached inside her coat and drew out something wrapped in cloth. Not the same shape. But similar enough that Carla stepped back before she realized it.
Another artifact.
A different spiral.
“We find the others,” she said. “And we pin the doors shut. Together.”
She held it out.
Carla hesitated.
Then took it.
It was warm.
Alive.
The moment it touched her skin, everything shifted.
A rush of vision—images that weren’t hers, or maybe were. A map. No continents. Just doors, arranged in patterns of suffering, in places humans called sacred, cursed, or forgotten. Seals shaped like myths. Some cracked. One wide open. And at the center, a spiral that turned both directions at once.
She staggered. Blinked.
The vision ended.
The clearing was empty.
The woman—gone.
Only the wind remained. And silence. But even that felt thinner now. Like, sound was afraid to return.
Carla looked down at the new artifact in her palm.
Two spirals. Two keys. Two locks.
And still—no idea what they opened.
She could feel it again now, stronger than before: the second heartbeat. The thing calling to her. The world wasn’t broken—it had been broken on purpose. Split into segments. Leaking.
She pulled her coat tight around her, tucked both artifacts inside, and began walking.
Not to save the world. To stop what had already begun.
And to find the others. Before someone else twisted the wrong way.
Outside, the air shimmered with warmth, carrying the scent of lavender and marigold as bees drifted like thoughts between blooms.
Etta stood in the doorway, hands wrapped around a chipped ceramic mug. The steam curled up and vanished into the orange-honey light. She hadn’t spoken to anyone in three days, and she hadn’t meant to stretch the silence that long. But once the quiet settled in, it became harder to disturb.
The world had grown so noisy before she left. Phones. Sirens. Apologies that sounded like ads. So she drove until the signal dropped, then parked and walked the rest of the way up the dirt trail that had nearly disappeared under time and moss.
She bought the cottage from a woman who left nothing behind but a note in the mailbox: Keep the flowers alive. They’re stubborn, but they listen.
Outside, the petals turned as the sun dipped behind the hills, shadows lengthening like slow exhalations across the stone path.
Each morning, Etta weeded the garden, whispered to the lavender, and warned the marigolds not to get too proud. She swore they responded, the way cats do—indifferent but not unaware.
This evening, though, something felt different. Maybe it was the breeze, cooler than it had been in weeks. Or maybe it was the way the birds had gone quiet all at once.
She stepped barefoot onto the stones, feeling their warmth seep into her skin. Her breath slowed. She could smell the rain before it arrived—earthy, electric.
Then she saw it.
A single black feather, drifting down from a sky too empty for birds. It landed near the foxglove, unnoticed by the bees. She bent to pick it up and felt a prick on her palm, sharp and electric, like touching a live wire.
The wind shifted.
Behind her, the cottage light flickered.
“Not now,” she whispered, holding the feather tight.
Outside, the garden stilled, every leaf and petal frozen in half-motion. Even the bees hovered, motionless mid-air, as if time itself had paused to inhale.
Etta closed her eyes. She hadn’t wanted this to find her. Not here. Not after everything.
But the feather pulsed in her hand, and she knew: something had crossed through. A boundary breached.
She turned slowly.
The cottage door creaked open, though she hadn’t touched it.
A figure stood just inside the threshold—tall, robed, faceless, the scent of wet stone trailing behind it. No words came. None were needed.
“I’m not ready,” she said quietly.
The figure didn’t move. It never did.
She looked down at the feather, now glowing faintly in the deepening dusk. A key, a trigger, a reminder.
“I’ll come,” she said. “But let me say goodbye.”
The figure nodded once.
Outside, the garden began to stir again. Bees resumed their dance. The wind softened. The sun, reluctant but patient, kissed the last of the hilltops before vanishing.
She walked the path one final time, touching every flower, whispering names only she had given them. Then, without looking back, she stepped inside.
And the door closed.
Author’s Note:
This story and its accompanying animation were created for Esther Clinton’s Weekly Writing Prompt. It’s been a while since I dipped back into video work—long enough that I definitely felt a bit rusty. But the moment I saw the prompt, something sparked. The scene that unfolded—a quiet cottage, a garden blooming at golden hour, something strange just beneath the peace—felt like the perfect blend of stillness and mystery.
Reconnecting words with visuals reminded me why I love storytelling in this form. Sometimes it takes a gentle nudge to get the creative gears turning again. I’m grateful for that nudge, and for the space to explore this quiet, eerie little moment in the hills.
Thank you for watching, reading, or simply letting the garden settle in your imagination.
The path had always been there—worn stone steps swallowed by moss, reaching toward the crest of the hill like a forgotten promise. Elara stood at the base, hand grazing the weathered wooden signpost, its words long faded by wind and time.
“They say you find what you’ve lost at the top,” the old woman had whispered in the village square.
Elara climbed, her breath syncing with the hush of the breeze. Each step tugged memories from the past—her brother’s laughter, her mother’s lullabies, the silence that followed their disappearance.
At the summit, the world opened wide. No grand revelation awaited, just the sun breaking through the clouds and a breeze that smelled like childhood summers.
There comes a time. Not marked by clocks or calendars, but by stillness— the kind that hums behind your eyes. A softness in your chest that doesn’t feel like peace. Just absence.
Everything slows. Even memory.
The cup half-washed. The door left open. The voice in your throat that turns to air.
It’s not the crash. It’s the drift. The slow, perfect erosion of self.
You go to the shelf. Not to read. To hold. To press paper against skin. To remember what weight feels like in your own hands.
The top book breathes like it’s waiting. No title. No spine. Just the shape of something that once held you together.
You open it. A sentence floats up, loose as dust:
To be lost is not to be broken. It is to be unmoored.
Stillness deepens. And then —
Truth crawling at your throat, and your tears cleanse the dirt.
No sobbing. Just a quiet rupture. A release that doesn’t ask permission.
The truth is heavy, like a boulder. Not because it falls. Because it stays.
You carry it in the way your shoulders tilt. In the way your yes always comes too fast. In the hunger you disguise as patience.
Feels like you’re always coming up last. Tank empty. Too far for gas. And yet, you keep showing up. You keep giving. Even as the edges blur.
Some people run. Some climb. You sit with a book until the silence takes shape.
And when it does— you whisper to whatever is listening: Will you steal away the desperation I’ve earned?
Not healing. Not hope. Just the question, and the room to finally ask it.
There are mornings when language feels like a trap.
When the words you know aren’t enough to carry what you feel. When you’re tired of translating your pain for people who won’t listen. When every sentence feels like it’s bending around the truth, but never touching it.
That’s when music like this finds you.
“Experience” by Ludovico Einaudi isn’t a song—it’s an unraveling. It starts small. Restrained. Controlled. Like the way we try to hold ourselves together when we don’t feel safe falling apart.
But it builds. Slowly. Honestly. Like emotion rising in the chest—tension you’ve ignored too long, making its way to the surface in waves.
Sometimes, you need to change things up—not for show, but for survival. Because life doesn’t always come at you in the usual ways. It hits sideways. It rearranges your insides. Some days you wake up like you don’t even know your name—like you’re reaching for a nametag that isn’t there.
And in those moments, words won’t help. Advice won’t land. Even your own voice might not sound right.
That’s when you need sound without language. Music that moves with you when your mind can’t keep up. Sound that understands before you do.
This track doesn’t tell you what to feel. It just clears space for you to feel what’s already there. And sometimes, that’s more honest than anything you could say out loud.
So today, if your thoughts feel too loud, if your chest feels tight, if you don’t know how to explain what’s happening inside you—don’t.
Let this piece say it for you. Let it carry what you can’t name. And trust that not every truth needs translation.
Some of the most honest things we ever feel never pass through our mouths at all.
“He has such a vivid imagination,” my teachers used to tell my mother.
I never knew if they were trying to say she didn’t really know me, or if they just wanted to show off that they did. That phrase usually came with a tight-lipped smile, the kind adults give when they’re trying to be nice but also slide in a jab. And more often than not, it was followed by the real kicker:
“He’s not working up to his potential.”
Now that was my favorite.
There’s something about the way that sentence lands. It’s got just enough structure to sound official, and just enough judgment to make your eye twitch. It practically begs for a dramatic eye roll. It sounds like it belongs on a report card, scrawled in red ink by someone who thinks they’re diagnosing your entire life after watching you color outside the lines once.
None of them saw it. Or if they did, no one said anything to me or my mother about the possibility of me becoming a writer.
So much for “knowing me,” right?
Imagination’s a slippery word anyway. It wears disguises. Gets called various things depending on the setting. When I’m working through a technical problem, people say I’m “innovative.” Which sounds nice—like a résumé bullet point. But back in the day, “innovative” wouldn’t exactly get you a date. So, whatever. That one can sit on the bench.
When I was sketching at parties or in libraries or wherever there was enough noise to ignore, suddenly I was “creative.” That one came with some perks. Dates. Curiosity. A little mystique. So I let that version stick around longer.
But my all-time favorite review? “It’s like there’s a whole world living inside your head.”
Runner-up? “Can I just sit inside your head and watch and listen?”
Let’s stop there for a second.
That second one sounds cool—until you actually think about it. Like, really think about it. Someone sitting inside your mind, watching and listening? That’s not curiosity. That’s creepy. You know that haunted doll energy.
—
I can’t remember the first time it happened.
But it always starts the same way.
The room begins to spin—not fast, not violently, just enough to let me know I’m not in control anymore. And then comes the sound.
It fills everything. The floor. The walls. The air in my lungs. I used to cover my ears. Used to bury my head under a pillow, thinking maybe I could muffle it, outrun it, block it out.
But there was no escaping it.
Eventually, I stopped fighting. I lay still and listened.
That’s when I realized: it was wings. A thousand wings. Fluttering, pulsing, stuttering in rhythm with my breath. Not birds. Not bats. Something stranger. Something older. They never landed. They just swarmed inside the air like static waiting to spark.
I call it The Madness.
It doesn’t hurt me. But it doesn’t leave, either. It waits for a crack—an opening. A sentence, a picture, a glance out the window—and then it rushes in, dragging stories behind it like a storm full of teeth and ink.
The Madness is a portal. A doorway. A window—nay, it’s my safe space. My special place.
And sometimes, when I come back from wherever it takes me, there’s someone standing outside the door.
—
Mom would come to check on me, like mothers do when they feel a disturbance in the Force.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s where that whole concept came from. They just made it sound cool in the movies.
She’d find me at my desk, scribbling furiously, or on the floor sketching something impossible. Somewhere between this world and… something else. Something I still don’t have a name for.
I just call it the void. Not because it’s empty. It’s not. It’s full of things no one else can see. I call it that because I don’t know what else to call it.
In those early days, you had to stay tethered—one foot in, one foot out. You can’t go too deep. That’s how you raise questions you don’t want to answer. That’s how you start slipping.
But half in, half out? That gets you labeled as “imaginative.” Or “quiet.” Or “a little aloof.”
Which is perfect, really.
—
I know it sounds like I had control of this.
But I didn’t. Not even close.
I’d be sitting in class, trying to focus on something profound, something that was supposed to matter to my future. Physics. Math. One of those subjects that builds bridges or lands rockets. The kind of knowledge that makes you useful.
And then it would happen.
No warning. No permission asked. I’d feel the shift—like my brain hit a soft patch and sank. One second I’m tracking equations on the board, the next I’m staring through them, seeing something else entirely.
Dragons nesting in the graph paper.
Planets orbiting around the tip of my pencil.
A character stepping through the number line like it was a doorway.
The teacher’s voice would stretch and blur. The room would fade. I’d float just high enough above it all to stop caring about whatever was “important.” Not because I was lazy. Not because I didn’t get it.
Because something louder, brighter, realer was calling.
—
And sometimes, when I disappear, I don’t go to war or into a storm. I go somewhere quiet. Strange, but calm.
It always begins with stillness. The world fades. Sound thins out. My body stays here, but my mind slips—not far, just far enough. Fog rolls in around my feet. The light changes. Something opens.
I don’t know exactly where I am. I never do. But I know I’ve been here before.
My fingers tighten around something familiar. A shape. A weight. It fits my hand perfectly. I adjust my armor—loose in places, snug in others, shaped by time and use.
The wind moves differently here. Like it knows secrets.
And then I hear it—soft hooves in the mist.
A gentle snort. Then a warm, wet touch on my cheek.
I turn.
Shadow.
My old friend.
He stands calm, steady, like he’s been waiting for me all along. His breath rises in small clouds. His nose presses against me like a question: Are you still in there? Are you coming back?
I stroke his head, my fingers brushing through his thick mane. He’s real here—more real than most things. He smells like woodsmoke and memory.
“We ride, my friend?”
His ears flick, listening. Ready.
“Where to?”
No answer. Just the wind.
“For how long?”
Still silence.
But it doesn’t matter.
I pull myself up, the saddle creaking beneath me. Shadow turns toward the road ahead—faint, shifting, unmarked. It never looks the same twice. But it always leads somewhere.
And we ride.
—
As a writer, I’m a time traveler of sorts.
Every time I sit down to write, it’s like stepping into Wells’ time machine—but I don’t just visit the past or the future.
I move through memories. Through emotions. Through versions of myself that never got to speak out loud.
And when I move, I do it invisibly. Not like Wells’ Invisible Man—no. Like Ellison’s. Moving through the world unseen, but deeply aware. My presence felt only in the stories I leave behind.
Like many with superpowers, it’s both a blessing and a curse.
To imagine deeply is to feel deeply. To create vividly is to remember painfully. To slip into other worlds is to risk losing track of your own.
But I wouldn’t trade it.
Because this is my favorite thing about myself. Not just that I imagine—but that I keep going back into the void. Back into the madness. Back onto the road with Shadow, with sword or pen in hand.
It’s not just escape.
It’s discovery.
And every time I return, I bring something back with me.
Memoirs of Madness 