Humanity: Raw & Unfiltered
Austrian winters cut deep, brandishing exposed skin with bitingly cold plumes, descending from mountain tops. The only feasible way to survive a rural Austrian winter in 1820, especially the duration of its bleakest months, December to March, is to obtain a box-bed. A simple box-bed. Raised from the floor, enclosed Read more
The trouble started the day she was born. Before that, really—as soon as the sonogram showed up. She was a she, and he couldn’t register that. He was proof that even some of the smartest gator-poaching hicks remained fluent only in the language of macho: talk of bullets, ballistics, and Read more
Hiding. Always hiding. He keeps to dark corners of woodland, ghosting trees, with sharpened blades for claws. Often fractious, taking to gouging lines of discontent within woody bark, leaving imprints of dissatisfaction in his wake: macabre tattoos that speak of moroseness and an unspoken curfew. His having, and then, not Read more
Classes wouldn’t be back in session until early January, so Alice had a little time to go up north for a visit. She hadn’t seen them since summertime. That’d been a nice, long weekend lounging with her feet up and nothing of much importance in her head. It was a Read more
Today is a good day to die. The neighbor’s mother is dying next door, fifty feet from us. She has been dying for some days. The son arrived yesterday, though, from Ohio, all red-eyed, sleep deprived, and unshaven, and I happened to be collecting the mail. “Hi, how are you?” I Read more
For one hundred and twenty-five years, I’ve been nothing more than a watery whisper, dissipating in shifting waves, crumbling to shadowy fragments, perpetually washed upon the sandy shore. My fingers are ghosts stretching longingly and painfully back to Norway, where love was once known. Cruelly, my spirit is trapped here: entrapped Read more
