I stared at her from across the table, she stared back at me. Our teacups had lost their steaming tendrils, I don’t know why I’d bothered to make tea, it just seemed like the thing to do.

My house wasn’t spectacular, but it was clean and comfortable, I’d made sure of that. I thought she could be comfortable here, and that’s what she needed after all she’d been through. I saw the places where her ...

I claw my way from inside my home,

The sand gives under my hands in soft and useless fistfuls of nothing

that sticks in grit to my skin.

It is in my eyes,

It is in my lungs.

I choke it up to no avail, it hooks in tight to everything except itself.

I hear my baby crying, then

Nothing.

Where is my wife?

I want to scream for her, but I can’t inhale.

It flooded in like water,

Sand is not suppose...

I wasn’t supposed to be scared, I was a big girl, eight years old.

I was ready for my own room, mama said. We painted it together, blue with little white daisies in the corners. I hoped they would brighten up the dark places, I was wrong.

I lay in bed, listening to

the scuttering.

A new sound came, like short nails running over textured glass. My window is textured glass.

I held my breath and cou...

I have a spotty family history.

My grandmother was impregnated and forced to marry my grandfather when she was only sixteen.

She died, an opioid addict, in her 70’s.

I never knew her when she wasn’t strung out.

I never knew that til it was way too late.

I miss her dearly.

My grandfather was so resentful of her,

he gave her two more children,

adopted a fourth,

then left her for another woman.

...

I find more frequently as I grow, an understanding of darkness festers within me.

She used to be a beautiful woman, teasing and mischievous, an aunt to my familiar mother; the crystal dawn in early morning.

Youth is ever so kind.

I loved the darkness, she cradled me, I ran to her in diapers despite the protests of my father— the dusk.

I never knew I was meant to fear her, not until her disease be...

It’s hard to be inconspicuous when you’re hanging upside down.

I stared at the woman, probably longer than I should have, while she hung there in the little park tree by the coffee shop on 10th street looking rather defeated. I didn’t catch the whole of the interaction that took place between her and that dog walker, but I could tell by the results that it had been rather embarrassing. Then agai...

She stood

At the wet mouth of the beast before her with nothing but the fire inside, preserved by wool and cotton packed around her hands and wrapped around her neck.

Teeth had grown there

Like needles threatening to crash down in death so painful and gruesome that it would slip and melt back into the memory of humanity without ever having a single true witness to its horror.

She looked

At them di...

I was on a second date, she said “I love you,” and I just looked at her.

Typically my response is to laugh, and I say ‘typically’ because this exact sort of thing has happened at a shockingly high frequency for me.

I’ve never considered myself particularly attractive; quite the opposite, actually, I don’t think very highly of myself at all.

I can’t hold down a job for more than a year or so, I am...