ToxicWaltz

* The thing. It is invisible: sinuous and coiled like an asp’s lethal promise; it glares at her with imagined eyes as hungry as an angel’s.  Fallen.  It speaks, and the words—as they unravel in her mind—bear the acute, red flare of fresh, stinging blisters.  Sweetness lingers: the fading, chilly redolence of hops and tobacco-smoke, of damp, moldy stone and an echo of juniper.  It touches her, sometimes, with snow-cream skin and the memory of something dark and shiny in the moonlight: a clumsy thing.  It is not human. It is invisible, now. But she can see it… When she closes her eyes. * Fat memories throb

I was a better person when I wrote. I was a better person when I wrote about boys who'd never return my feelings on silver platters, and ships long lost, or drowned, at sea. It sounds like a disaster, but I only write well with the ashes of a crumpled, discarded spirit mixed with the still-warm tears of a troubled soul. Words kept me human, for they are what makes us human, and they distanced me from the animal I could become. All I do now is stalk around the concrete city, pace about my enclosure, and think about how my bitterness and I can never be released in the wilderness again. Before the city stole my words away, I was living in the

Gus Number Five Jenna and Cindy filled their mouths with watermelon seeds, spitting them fast and hard until the air swarmed with seeds like shiny black dive-bombing gnats. “My seeds are winning,” twelve year old Cin yelled, her thin body tense and urgent with victory. Jenna just kept spitting seeds. Eight years old, she already knew the seeds that flew the farthest would be Cin's no matter what. Jenna puckered her mouth preparing for another losing bombardment. Suddenly she paused, lips plump and pouting as the mouth of a painted candy box cupid. Spitting the seeds into her palm, she stared at them for a moment, chewing the