Short Story

It felt a little like I was back outside again, my lava tears streaking down my cheeks, making my tear ducts sting. The room closed in on me and my eyes scanned the space from left to right, spinning and dancing across my mother’s concerned look. I can’t say I was angry, that I felt some predictable rage or crippling sadness. I just felt numb, untouched and untouchable. It was as if I was floating in the air, accompanied by the words my father just spoke, chasing each other around in some chaotic tornado, and yet everything around me was still. There was no feeling really, just reaching and grasping for something to be different, failing to comprehend.

You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is

The night air was heavy with silence. Clouds drifted across a calm sky, and a full moon shone in the distance. In a small hut on the outskirts of the valley, an old man lay in bed, awake in the peaceful slumber of the village. His breaths came in rattling gasps, his forehead burned, and his joints felt stiff with pain. He shifted on the blankets, his withered hands clenched in fists as he tried to suppress the wave of bitter memories coming to him. His life had been nothing more than work, loss, tragedy. He remembered all of his hope, his ambition, in his youth, and he smiled bitterly. No one would remember him as the man that he had once hoped he would become. Now, as his breathing became heavier and he felt himself fading on the brink of

First came the pride, an overwhelming sense of achievement, an accomplishment due to great ambition, but slowly and enduringly surged a world of guilt and confusion, the conscience which I once thought diminished, began to grow, soon defeating the title and its rewards. Slowly the unforgotten memories from that merciless night overcame me and I succumbed to the incessant and horrific images, the bloody dagger, a lifeless corpse. I wash, I scrub, I tear at the flesh on my hands, trying desperately to cleanse myself of the blood. But the filthy witness remains, stained, never to be removed.

For days he stayed there, curled up by the wall. The sun would rise, somewhere, illumine the mouth of his pitiful den, grace the cold rock in front of him with a soft blue sheen, and set again, immersing his life in empty darkness. One day, two, three, he stopped counting, buried his mind in the chambers of his soul where a soft dim warmth still glowed. Waves of grief passed through, turned him over in riptides of hungriest despair, roaring death pounded nightly at his door, and then, hearing no answer, tore away again, letting warm comfort envelop him and soothe his damaged

despair and remorse pressed on my heart, which nothing could removed… I wandered like an evil spirit,

First came the pride, an overwhelming sense of achievement, an accomplishment due to great ambition, but slowly and enduringly surged a world of guilt and confusion, the conscience which I once thought diminished, began to grow, soon defeating the title and its rewards. Slowly the unforgotten memories from that merciless night overcame me and I succumbed to the incessant and horrific images, the bloody dagger, a lifeless corpse. I wash, I scrub, I tear at the flesh on my hands, trying desperately to cleanse myself of the blood. But the filthy witness remains, stained, never to be removed.

Scuttling innocently through the twisting corridors I bore the same expression; head down, shoulders hunched, avoiding any eye contact - my desperate attempts to deter the despot for one day at least. Despite my efforts, there was no escape, as seemingly within the second of having that naively optimistic thought, a cruel, callous voice demanded I surrender my broach. Fear spiked, as it always did, but with it came something else, an alien emotion ... Looking back now, I see that it must have been the cumulative effect of months of torment that brought me to the realisation that at this point I had reached the nadir of my life. Deriding cackles pierced my ears and this time I recognised the emotion, fury. It burned through my veins, along with the memories of the past to form a feeling of overwhelming power. I met the daggers that would usually invoke terror, and calmly, I said “No.”

For when I was shattered, I knelt down to the darkness that will, one day, consume me. And within my consumed heart. Something great may come, something no one could expect.

Almost everyone has a moment in their life when the world ceases to turn, when the clouds still and the very breath of the soul stands frozen. Revelation, realization and inspiration all collide in an epiphany of tumultuous truth. A split second when one’s life is displayed, not as the guise so artfully rendered day in and day out, but in brutal, Technicolor honesty. The lies that bind so tightly unravel and leave you bare, at least to yourself. Some call it insight, I just call it ugly. Because that is all I saw when the mirror shattered my soul, leaving me metaphorically bleeding and bereft. There was no warm person asleep inside of me waiting to wake up, no golden intent I could draw on for comfort, or even a spirit guide caught beneath

After ten years, and I had not returned to normal. Nobody, including myself, really knew about it. There was just a general unsettledness in my life. I couldn’t refer to the matter clearly in the past tense. It was unlike typical grieving or trauma. It wasn’t simply the death of a close friend. Nor was it the trauma of the violence. Set between me and the universe there was still a lack of order, a loss of meaning which I couldn’t frame. Something between the Christian call of mission and the real world was incongruent. Reflecting backwards didn’t solve the

The magic of doing things right? Is temptation within redemption immoral? Do we have the right of renewal? I reached the point of no return swimming thru desire. Can you preserve my innocence? Can I escape suffocation? Insanity is a measure of the daily routine. Between the philosophical discourse and the novel, the truth is bloody. My expandable memory falters and I am a capsule of time. Things overflow my being. There is clutter and there is nothing, nothing at all. Silence, noise, peace and noise again. There is no future and no past. Terror, flight, core drilling thru cemented souls, terror again, swimming in your own fluids towards another body. There is a muscular approach. There is leadership without questions. There is no challenge. There is controversy. Nobody falls behind. I am coughing my soul on paper. We have a legacy to preserve; we have truth to be altered. The voice of madness tells me that I have nothing to fear. I lost everything and I am safe now. I can’t explain myself. I am not afraid of my own lyrics anymore. I have no limits and no clues. Who am I? Past flashes, future imperfections, the math of unnecessary words tear at my seams. Wasting words on canvas, dreaming counterpoints to a decaffeinated life, burning for a new

There was a time when I was depressed, sin and guilt weighed me down, and it had me bent over. I was jumping from man to man, in school, a business owner, and mother to 3 small kids. On the outside I was well dressed and appeared to have it all together. However I was mentally and physically tired. I was hiding my loneliness and brokenness with busyness. I was tired of brokenness, which had spilled over into all areas of my life,

Countless times I’ve sat, mindless gaze fixed on the wall, eyes brimming with silent, slow tears. The void opens in my chest, I reach for my phone, then stop, with the helpless hesitation of one who truly believes that none of her friends will care. You are useless, my mind whispers. You are worthless. I stare listlessly at stucco ceilings, white and blank and empty; I hide within the folds of duvet covers; I wither within a trench of self-pity. The insidious beast settles in, to either destroy my relationships or render me useless in any endeavour. But, once the storm passes, I am myself again – ostensibly flatline but not necessarily depressed.

The smattering of rain on the roof overhead calms me, beating out an irregular rhythm like an anxious child unconsciously tapping his foot. The dim glow of my phone screen washes over me as I wait for the light to return, cut off by the flash flood inducing rain. I look around, and sigh; yet again, the lights on the ceiling are blank, leaving me with nothing to shield myself from the impending darkness.