When I was little, I always loved watching my sister paint. She would create the most realistic snow capped mountains and the rustiest torn down barns. I would sit next to her and watch her create whole worlds with just a few flicks of her palm. She would give me a blank canvas, and tell me to draw anything I wanted. I hated seeing that blank canvas, it was just a square of nothing, so I would paint streaks of color everywhere. Turquoise, maroon, magenta. Off they went, covering every corner of that ugly blankness.
Tag: Tragedy
Recurrent by Gretchen Gales
No one actually knew if a girl drowned in the pond or not. That’s what local legend suggested, and plenty of people swore they remembered hearing about a tragic afternoon where something like that happened. That, and the family that moved away from the home on the small hill above it. Was the girl their daughter? A stranger? It depended on who you asked.
Hitting Trains by Yash Seyedbagheri
I laugh at railroad crossing PSAs when bad actors gasp at oncoming trains, are too immersed in headphones, or think climbing on boxcars is dope. I guffaw at YIELD TO ALL TRAINS signs.
And I roar at the footage itself, the footage some railfan with cat-eye glasses caught by sheer, dark chance. No 90s quality footage and actors who could have been kidnapped from a family sitcom. Just a car, my sister’s Toyota Corolla, actually striking a train. Not being struck by a train. Striking a train. Ramming a boxcar, as though her Corolla were a Panzer rolling down the streets of some occupied European power, and not being dragged and spun around.
Marrowbone Creek by D.W. Davis
We set up camp by the creek. As I was stoking a fire, the sheriff told us the name. “Not sure why it’s called that,” he said. “The name just stuck once, the way they do sometimes.”
There were five of us, an uncomfortably large number. Normally it was just Wilcox and myself, which could be uncomfortable all its own, depending on his mood. He normally kept to himself, hidden behind his beard and grizzly frame, a hulking man who kept his Winchester carbine closer than most mothers did their children. The others in our party were Sheriff John Walken, a man of indeterminate age but whose way of carrying himself suggested he’d seen plenty of action, perhaps on both sides of the law; Nadine Effins, a thin waif of a young woman whom Wilcox and I had been hired by the sheriff to rescue; and Miles Myerscough, the man who’d kidnapped her. That Myerscough still breathed surprised me; Wilcox had a tendency to kill men like that without hesitation, either through some flawed moral principle or, just as likely, enjoyment.
Echoed Back by Keely O’Shaughnessy
“They met on the toilet bowl when he was locked up.”
My sister’s high and giggling as she tells me this.
“Heads down their echoey, metal toilets they yelled to each other.”
“How’d you know?”
“Hammer told me. It’s a thing they do in prison.”
An Exoskeleton of Fear by Catherine O’Brien
That night I shed an exoskeleton of fear. It happened as a sweet pulsation overlooking the river. My body crackled with suspense as, like an exhausted sprinter, I was overlapped by a clear and gracious winner. There was no creaking or moaning as it wrenched itself free. It left quietly and with all its dignity.
I’d been gifted an excuse, a chance to reclaim my wilderness and that’s the end of my story.
(if we’re very lucky) Death by DS Maolalai
it’s wonderful, frankly,
being comfortable.
and I spent so long
in search of suffering
to breed a poet’s
soul. I had – and we all have –
my romantic aspirations,
but there’s nothing else
like this, or shouldn’t be;
like falling over
Lemonade for Sale by Wendy Garrett
My stomach hurt for a week after my cat Boots died. She arrived as a gift on my first birthday, and ten years later, she was gone. A year after that, we had more death to cope with. But unlike with Boots’s death, we rarely talked about what happened next door at the Moores’. Whenever we spoke of that summer of 1979, what we discussed was the lemonade stand, not the murder-suicide that triggered the estate sale where my sister and I made a fortune.
Julie (my sister) and I sat at the kitchen table eating cereal while my mother whistled Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” as she unpacked her brown leather tote bag from the weekend retreat, from where she and my father had returned the night before. She has always been one of the best whistlers I know. She can draw her fingers to her lips and let out a whistle that can be heard blocks away. On this day, she was casually whistling with just her lips, not typical, but it sounded nice. She pulled a candle from her bag and placed it on the dining table next to a silver bowl I’d never seen her use. The candle was in a tall glass votive decorated with two overlapping yellow circles above which, inside a red heart, were the words “Marriage Encounter.” She lit the candle and walked back to her bag to finish emptying it. Julie and I slowly ate our cereal, weary from the long weekend with our “fun” babysitter. I couldn’t remember going anywhere, which meant we had been home the entire weekend.
Found Footage by Lee Ashworth
Glyn Evans: A Life on the Edge
Stooky16
23k views – 3 days ago
“You’re always an outsider on an island like this.” We see a close up of a metal halide bulb reflect in the mirrors of a powerful lantern. As the camera zooms out, the tower of a lighthouse is revealed, the white surf lashing against sharp black rocks. A ferocious wind rips through the air. We hear the voice again, shouting to be heard over the elements: “There is no interior!” The profile of a man’s face in shadow comes into view, the lighthouse receding into the background. “Only what’s in here!” he blasts, staring out across the channel between the headland and the lighthouse, tapping his temple. The lantern is glowing against the darkening sky. The light is fading. The picture is grainy. Another voice speaks, clearer, closer to the microphone. A voice of sudden concern: “I said, you want to step back from the edge?” The camera refocuses, blurring in and out, grappling with the last of the light as the man turns slightly toward the lens, buffeted by the gale, transfixed by the view out to sea. The man behind the camera raises his voice: “You don’t need to be quite so close to the edge…” He does not reply. There is only the sound of the wind. We fade to black and a caption fills the screen: Glyn Evans: A Life on the Edge.
Idle Ink 