Brief Stories

Her Hands Are Always the Same

Her hands are always the same, soft and firm as old well-worn leather and covered with fine traceries of scars. Some of the scars you recognize—the finger she almost lost slicing onions when she laughed too hard at one of your jokes, the scattered dots where bees objected to her plucking a chunk of honeycomb, the shiny burn-scars on her fingertips that she’d had to beg your help with. Most of them you do not. She was already ancient when you first met.

It Had to Happen

“The strangest thing,” Carol will say, afterwards, “was that I knew it was right. It was—have you ever seen someone do something, and known it was wrong, without even having to think about it?”

“Of course,” the interrogator will say, “like a wild animal mauling someone.”

“Exactly! But,” she’ll reply, “no, you don’t get it. It—it looked like that, sure. But it was right to do it. It was doing what was best for both of us, for everyone.”

Untitled Story About Embarrassing Consequences

This post contains: sexual content

Her stomach clenches and she desperately holds her mouth shut, hands clamped tight over her thin surgical mask. Some of the other passengers glance at her; she’s breaking public transit’s unspoken agreement, drawing attention to herself. It’s fucking embarrassing. It’s really not helping.

Our Monster

Sticky-sweet doll-guts ooze out through the cracks in her teeth as she chews, mouth grinding in ceaseless motion. She’s a messy eater, our monster is, and her meal drips down to stain her ample chest and her temporary cell’s clean tile floor. By the time she’s done ruined dollstuff puddles around her feet and the poor broken thing’s porcelain shell is stretched as open as we’ve ever seen a doll’s corpse.

it looks at them, and they look at it

(I’m not sure if I ever posted this one publicly; back when I still had a patreon it was there, but now … well, here it is. 2.1k words of trauma and spiders)

Kids on one side of the glass, the spider on the other. There are three of them there on that sticky summer day, Grace and Florence and Ash, set adrift in the zoo’s carefully curated expanse while their three sets of parents get drunk and reminisce about old times. They’re all old enough to be left alone—and more than old enough to insist that they’d rather not have an older teen disinterestedly keeping an eye on them—but not old enough to be left to downtown’s tender mercies. There are kidnappers about, everyone knows that! And worse things too, lurking in the shadows and blasted across every news channel lest anyone might forget that the world is a dangerous place.

Rooftop Angel

This piece was originally posted to Twitter on July 18, 2022.

She’s smoking on the roof again, leaning back against the railing with her head tilted up to stare into the rotting orange sky. There’s no point in looking down or out, no point in letting her gaze wash over the city so far below. She’s seen it all before.

The way down’s lit up by her halo’s spotlight, shining painfully bright against the night’s uneasy shadows. Each inch of the fall thrown into sharp relief, from the ease with which she could tip back over the too-low railing to the places she’d have to flare her wings to escape the skyscraper’s setbacks, gathering speed all the while, plummeting down faster and faster and faster—