FICTION
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
Allanson looked out of the viewport, at the ragtag flotilla of ships trailing behind, some of them slow to catch up. It was to be expected with the little time that they’d had to cobble the fleet together.
And then he feels that familiar sensation of drifting—when his body untethers from the material world and he soon dissolves into a fine, floating mist that evaporates into the atmosphere.
Darkness always follows.
A man with a fistful of showbags said, “That cow sounds like a person trying to sound like a cow.”
To be encased, Clint had always thought, was foolishness. Why allow yourself to be open to such sorrow?
I reached for my invoice, which Dr. George, holding it between thumb and forefinger as if it were a soiled diaper, dropped into my hand.
You’ve been dreading this day since the moment you found out you were pregnant—perhaps even before.
I pushed my nose to within an inch from the rug. I sniffed, and sniffed, and I smelled something…not quite right, but I couldn’t place it.
I loved Rena as much as a patient could love their gynecologist. We had tea together in her office. I cried when she asked how I was doing, and she showed me pictures of her terriers.
I’d never heard of anyone having a second baby right after the first one, but everything was so strange in those early days of motherhood that I just acted on instinct.
“The woman was a catastrophe,” Carlos told me at the time. “But she was as honest as my face is ugly.”
Before the headaches began, I thought myself sturdy: firm in my foundations, set square like a saltbox house.
Mama sped along the highway, unbothered by bits of gravel that flew up from the front tires and struck the windshield of the sedan.
Directly after the arrival of the Armada, this model made sense, as the gap between Unthulanian and Human cultures prevented a commensurable exchange of practices…
None speak of how the streets collide in coarse seams like scars, the fresh cobbles unable to level with the ones shaken from their mortar by uncountable seasons.
He used to hold my hand on Commonwealth. I wonder sometimes if he ever still thinks about my mouth.
When I was on earth I was a pretty good kid. I only got drunk when I needed to get drunk.
The day does not conclude with the gentle exhale of the earth, but with Mother Superior flipping the hourglass over, again.
Share some abandon.
[Sassy_Social_Share]