This story is one of the July Writing Challenge entries chosen to be a featured story. . i glance outside. leaves are falling in ever-radiant shades of crimson. how ironic, that it be autumn. how ironic, that summer is over, that my summer is gone. turning my attention to the sea of faces in front […]
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I saw death for the first time when I was 8. She was beautiful and isolated, floating upside down in a fish tank at a Chinese restaurant. I remember her red eyes, so hollow and glassy staring at me as I pressed my nose against the glass. A blue light illuminated her in the tank, […]
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I understood immediately why he had picked her as his model for the week. Despite my best efforts to avoid the thought, I could imagine him leaning lovingly over her, his shaggy, greasy hair concealing his eyes as he perfected every detail. He would paint her lips that alluring velvet red and dust her face […]
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My science textbook tells me that stars are flaming balls of gas, all but the sun light years away from us, probably dead by the time their light reaches us on Earth. I disagree. They’re not dead. They come alive every night, as I stare out my window and watch them twinkle in the ink-smeared […]
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Strawberry blond hair curtaining a beautiful face. Pale soft skin, a porcelain doll laying on a hard surface scattered with shards of glass. Green shining eyes are revealed, moving around as if they mastered the art of forgetting. Rosy cheeks and red lips complete the doll. She got up, bare feet moving against the floor, […]
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1. The edges of petals curl like toes, like fists, like needles drawing inward, coming back. 2. Heat creeps in through gilded fringe, gradually wandering to the core. 3. Petals, sun-soaked, know there is a heaviness to dwindling. 4. Fall like men on their knees, kissing sacred ground. This is a reconciliation of origins. 5. […]
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It was I who survived and you who died. You sat across from me, Daddy, with your shades low for protection. The bus clumped on the desert, as the wheels were milk crates, past cactuses and sand castles that flumped back into piles. The smell of human carcasses blew out the AC vents and splattered […]
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november has gone: thirty days passed by and i’m still striving. my hands no longer shake from the tragedy inside my lungs but it is not any easier to breathe without aching all over. the pain does not only reside in my chest. but yesterday, the stars lit up the sky, and my mother smiled […]
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Haunted. A word I have never been able to understand. As a child, I made up stories of ghosts and ghouls, just for the sheer joy it brought. But those were stories — made up fragments of my mind. Completely and utterly fictional. Now, I can’t decipher the word. I physically can’t figure out the […]
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