The Tree of Breaking is said to have hands and, if you sit under it’s branches, you may feel it lightly touching you.
Sometimes the most horrible things that happen to us don’t show up in theatres or along the spines of novels. They have no title, and the blurb is too deep and felt too inarticulately to imagine. But horror can rescue us, too. We can’t describe the nameless thing that is trivialized by the mere attempt …
A Story for the Fallen: One man stays away from windows and puts his back to the jambs of doorways, using the framing as a shield. No moving if the refrigerator compressor kicks on – you need your ears – every sound. Stay clear of the lamp – make no shadow. Don’t anticipate the recoil …
Rewrite of a story from Oct 29, 2006 We had a large family together, ten children in all, some more successful than others. We were happy, oldest to youngest. But life throws curves to life, and ours was that our house caught fire with the children trapped inside. The flames were impossibly hot, but I …
Don’t swing so high, my parents said. You’ll learn to fly, or you’ll wind up dead. You kick off with your knees. Your feet leave the ground and you immediately tilt back and encourage them skyward.
Everything was fine. We were fine. We were a family. Until the tree came up through the floor. It didn’t happen in a day, or a month, not even in a year, though by a year’s time we could feel the strangeness of it. It wound through our lives like blood courses through veins, spreading …
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