Un-Stuck

“No! Don’t shoot!” Isaac screamed from behind me. My hand was shaking terribly. I imagine I would have missed anyway with how erratically my wrist was seizing. I screamed in frustration. “Gimme one reason!” My voice was jumping in a wild frenzy. How could he expect me to just drop the gun, get back into the car and ride off into the night? We searched and pled just to find him. And there he was, tied to the overpass on top of the vacant train tracks. We couldn’t have planned it any better. And now Isaac was saying don’t. Don’t kill him. Don’t put a bullet through his worthless head and end it right here right now. “Are you sure?” He asked like he was trying to coax me off the edge of a cliff. If the adrenaline coursing through my veins didn’t have my head all foggy and my muscles spasming, I would have rolled my eyes. All I could see was the man in front of me. His hands all over my body, the sick smell of cheap whiskey and cigarettes covering his tongue. His tongue as he tried to stu...

The strong scent of rotting filled her nose almost instantly. At first it was hard to decipher where exactly the offensive odour was coming from but a quick scan of her surroundings lead her to the fridge. Maybe she should have bought a mask, or gloves, or a hazmat suit because her simple jeans and a t-shirt would not be enough protection. She slowly pulled the door open and winced at the violent lurch in her stomach. It must not have been cleaned out in weeks. The old Chinese takeout boxes were barely held together with the grease stains saturating all the way through. She was also very certain that a poor soul had crawled into the back of the fridge to escape the surrounding chaos and died waiting for some semblance of normalcy to be restored. It was hard to believe that anything could go back to normal after this. She slammed the fridge door shut and moved on to the living room. Although the smell from the kitchen had not permeated through the drywall, the smell in the living room w...

"You’re doing it again,” she complained. Her lips were turned down into a frown. Over the past few months the lines around her mouth started to crease into the familiar expression. She would spend the rest of the night in front of the mirror pulling and prodding the tender area as if that could perform a miracle facelift. He stirred his cup, spoon clinking loudly against the ceramic mug, one more time for good measure. Maybe her eye would twitch again and he would relish in the personal victory. The café they decided to stop in was just off of the highway outside of Nashville. It was small with yellow linoleum floors, dark wooden tables, and smelled of coffee and butter. There was a consistent flow of people looking for a quick pick me up on their journey to wherever. It wasn’t her idea to pull off; she wanted to keep going. She thought it was because the rain was coming down in sheets, submerging the roads in two feet of water, but it was the silence in the car that was becoming ...

It's been all night, like someone turned the switch on when you walked through the door. I've seen you a million times before, but tonight there's something in the way your laugh floats across the room, something in the way your lips look on your glass. And when your eyes found me, I could tell there was a shift, slight and dangerous. Very dangerous. It began with a game. Keeping tabs on each other from across the room, not getting too close, not straying too far. I noted every movement you made and every glance you chanced my way. But you still managed to sneak up behind me. "Smoke?" you whispered in my ear. Your sweet breath danced across my cheek, filling my nose. Bourbon, neat. "Yes." It almost comes out as a sigh. You lead me out through the patio door, fingers pressed gently on the small of my back. They're soft, warm and inch lower the further we move outside. You pull two cigarettes out, pass one over and put yours between your li...

She was cold. She never got used to dressing for the weather because she never had to when he was around. There was always an extra sweater for her just in case. Eventually she didn't even need to ask. But everything was different now. She bit down on her lip and felt the November wind push through her skirt. She would have to get used to checking the weather before leaving the house. It would take time, but they said she'd learn. The sun was barely showing over the horizon and she wished that she wasn’t so late. She promised him she would be on time for once. The sun would still be out and they would watch it set together with a fleece blanket as a barrier from the frosted ground and a cup of cocoa split between them. But the blanket wasn’t where she swore she saw it and the cupboard was fresh out of cocoa. It was all wrong. The iron gate whined as she pushed through with little effort. The first time she visited, it took her 45 minutes to even touch it but in following months...

I started writing at the time most people probably say they do. Pre-teen angst: so many feelings but never wanting to talk, begging for someone to understand but convincing myself that no one could possibly understand at all. So, I wrote. Pretty melodramatic, cringe-worthy doom and gloom pieces but even in their darkest form, there was something so raw about them, something terribly naïve that has kept me stuck in the moment so many years later. Stuck. There’s a word that I’ve come to loathe. A word constantly used as an excuse, a crutch. Because if you’re stuck, people develop a form of understanding. Like some uncontrollable force is keeping you still, stalling your progress, and there’s not much you can do until you just become un-stuck. How? No one knows. One day the powers that be will release you from this cursed hold and you’ll be able to carry on, years, months, days later, until something else comes along that you can’t quite grab the reigns on and you become s...