This is it. I have nothing left to say. I have no new thoughts. The words “Stop, Stop it, Please Stop Please Stop” ring out in my brain blaring again and again every time something new enters my mind. An alarm I cannot silence, a desperate prayer I cry out endlessly. I don’t think I’m talking to him; I think I’m talking to me. Violently begging my brain to stop firing, misfiring the way that it does.
Continue reading “Whiplash by Bryn Ledlie”
I left a woman in bed recently. Suddenly. Left her lying, hips scooping toward something I couldn’t give her.
I’d been mouthing the rungs of her ribcage, climbing higher, an ardent mountaineer, when she shifted and with her, the light. The blue glow of the stereo conspired with the beams of a passing car and her arching spine to reveal the vase, winking in the corner. Her exposed neck bloomed white as the skin on the back of mine chilled.
I could just make out the glint of quick-blinking eyes as she took in the sight of me, hopping away and into a pant leg, then feeling for the doorknob in the dark.
He lights a cigarette on their small balcony that overlooks the main children’s park beneath. It’s dark already, so the only rumbling he hears is from lonely street dogs and teenage couples. He takes long deliberate drags from it, letting the smoke settle on his lips for a moment before deciding to blow it out. He watches as the smoke meets the air, blurring the horizon underneath him. His wife approaches the balcony from their living room. He hopes she would not scold him again for smoking. He knows it’s bad for him. As soon as she steps out, he starts, Continue reading “On a Balcony in Bucharest by Irina Popescu”
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