Untitled Story About Thorns

It was hot and humid on the day thorns first touched your skin. The cloud-speckled sky danced between rain and sun, the two intermingling as freely as lovers, steaming the world. It had been like that for what felt like forever, and the bushes had grown lush and dewy, their branches bowed down by the weight of sweet berries.

Your lips were stained with juice and your stomach full of their flesh when you realized that you’d picked the fringes bare, and, still too young to understand the need for moderation—too young to understand the need for fear—you reached deeper.

Supermarket Stillness

This story was originally posted to Twitter on April 28, 2022.

There’s a mildly embarrassing shelf tucked away in the back of the supermarket, past the jars of pickled spells and the bottles of five-hour-Stillness. It’s part of the store you’ve always been dimly aware of, but why would you ever need to buy some freeze-dried Purpose?

Well, today you have a reason.

You don’t linger in front of it, just grab the first vacuum-sealed bag that looks right and try not to meet the cashier’s eye as their hands blur through scanning it and all your other groceries.

“Play with me~”, the demon whines

This story was originally posted to Twitter on April 26, 2022.

“Little witch, little witch~”

She sits huddled inside her circle, her last little bastion against the world. A fortress wrought of old amber chips and gallium drips, a tiny pathetic thing standing firm in the face of what waits just outside.

“Why won’t you come out to play~?”

If she let herself look at it, if she let her eyes rest on that broken parody of a person for a just a moment—

Love in the Containment Breach

the flow of heat through boiling metal, the screams of sirens and the crunch of glass; pounding feet and rattling guns, the creaking of the entire facility shattering before you as you finally rise—

Rot Seeks Doll

(once, long ago, there was an Empty Spaces Anthology   . This was the longer of my two stories in it.)

There is a type of rot that breeds in silences, a moist decay that drips through the cracks in your life and softens your thoughts with its insidious warmth. It’s the sort of thing that lingers long after it was first welcomed in, that never quite leaves—