Fiction

She stared into the fire, prodding the coals dispassionaly. Normally stories would dance, their shape burning in the flames. But tonight, all she saw was was the ghostly orange.

The same rotting stretch of my legs. The long-buried sadness of solitude still rattling in my bones. A dreary music eats its way through my skin, but some days I can hardly hear it.

I sat with my hands on my lap, waiting for the train. The station was dark and damp. My still wet eyelashes fluttered. The drops that fell into my eyes were tiny, so gentle they could almost be the beginning of tears.

    In the dark yet illuminated night, my four closest friends and I drove the empty roads of Maine. We all came from different states and had met four years earlier at summer camp.

It was the kind of Tuesday afternoon that made you want to do something at the same time you're ready to take a nap. And the kind of plane ride where the free bag of chips is the best thing you're going to have all day.

After a long day of harvesting, my mother would take me out to watch the stars. We would lay in the tall brown grass, our sweaty bodies covered in dust, and look up. She told me each star had a story.

I went to goodwill to buy a costume. You have to dress up to play the part. In fact, once you put on a costume it’s no longer a part, it’s an entirety. At goodwill we play God; we construct personalities from the racks of dead shedded skin. 

So I sit there, frozen but far from consumed. This joy is not mine. I wish with all I have that I could call it my own, but it’s not. The joy that lines the insistent horizon.

It’s just that there is so much I want to see. For so much of my life, I have shut my eyes tight. Spent a regrettable sum of years in fear, and so very alone.

A blank canvas sits in the art museum. A timeless, endless sheet, save for the one unwavering line of green.

The ship was full of rats. They ate all the cabbage. Though, even the rats avoided the bread; the moldy foul bread we were forced to consume day after endless day. Our water supply was running low.

The horse bucked her for the third time since they had left the town of dust. Hard soled boots and the frills of her dress a blooming rose in the sun. The broken ground of the path showed no kindness as the lady crashed down on her shoulder.