Un-Stuck

It wasn’t a crime. No policemen were going to knock on the front door at 4 o’ clock in the morning and fasten cold metal handcuffs around her wrists and haul her into the back of the cruiser. But that didn’t stop her from sending jerky glaces over her shoulder when she was walking alone at night. Everytime a siren blared was enough to make her drop her coffee and hide in the nearest alleyway she could find. She wasn’t some convict on the run. There was no need to be edgy or paranoid, but there some something unsettling her stomach every morning she woke up, something that made her skip breakfast and lunch and eat a bowl of cereal for dinner. It’s not like she killed him. She wasn’t a murderer by any means but there was this voice sometimes that made it feel like she could have done something to change the outcome and washing her hands of his life was the one thing she could do to seal a fate in hell. One night, before she turned in, her phone rang from the kitchen. She navigated her wa...

She ran past countless pine trees that snapped back in her face and poke holes all over her body. There was sweat dripping down from her forehead, leaking into her eyes and blurring her vision. All she had to do was keep running. She should hear heavy footsteps behind her, weaving in and out of the uneven rows of trees, jumping occasionally over lightening struck branches. He was gaining on her. The soft wood from her basket was shredding into her arm, wedging shards beneath her skin. Deciding to ditch it, hoping that she could catch him by surprise, she threw it behind her only to hear it shatter into pieces as it collided with a tree. So much for lunch. Faint growls emerged from the right of her and she could almost feel his breath on her cheek. She pushed further. Her lungs began to burn just as she saw her safe point, Grandma's house. Come on, almost there. Eyes burning, she ran faster than ever, past the white wooden fence her grandfather made before he died, up th...

I'm sorry that I have been gone for some time, but I promise I have not given up. I am back with some new ideas and inspiration festering in my brain. I will not disappoint again! Here's your next throw back. Enjoy!

The sun beats down blindingly and my eyes squint behind my glasses. Your hand is sweating, I can feel it from your palm. We met behind the plaza in between our houses. No one ever finds us here. I have about twenty minutes before someone figures out that I am missing, that the screen from my window is not in properly. You run your fingers through my hair, making it all fuzzy, like we have been doing something naughty. We haven't. I swat your hand away and brush away cookie crumbs from your lip. We always do this. Go into the 7/11 and buy a snack for each other rather than buying our own. We don't make enough for presents yet so Oreo cookies are my way of saying that I can't stop thinking about you. You pull a Twizzler out of the package in my hand and put one in my mouth. They always taste sweeter when you're feeding them to me. I pull up my sunglasses and stare into your eyes. They are grey today, that means you're excited, maybe to see me. You break open half of y...

She looked at him as if she saw a monster. His face morphed into something ghastly with tendrils of mucus flying off of his sharp teeth and black haunting eyes threatening to suck out her soul through her irises. Her body failed any method of protective precautions and completely shut down instead of fleeing like her brain shouted to do. A growl emitted from the back of his throat, sending a wave of nausea from the pit of her stomach up her esophagus. She was backed into a corner, the moist stone wall pressed right up against her back. She willed her body to melt into the stone, pushing herself so close to it the sharp ridges broke the thin skin of her shoulders. He forced his body almost against hers, threatening to engulf her, eliminating any sight lines around his burly frame. Where was there to go? A frenzied smile played with the edge of his mouth, a laugh so baritone pulsed through her rib cage, shaking each strand of veins attached to her heart. “Don’t fuss, my sweet.” He hissed...

The ways in which her fingers came through the cracks were as if to pull him back or maybe to push him further down, away from her reach. He tried to bite at them, tear the nail from its bed. He couldn't risk her motives, however innocent they may be, however she chose to plead. He wished an electric shock would pulse through, singeing her skin, stopping her heart for a moment,  maybe, for a couple seconds so he could get away from her maniac intentions, her maniac words that aim to pull him in or push him down beyond every single crack that separates their fingers.

It was a cold shock. The water pressure pushing against my body, threatening to wrap around my lungs and crush them. Each wave dragging me further out until I was caught. The under current keeping me trapped below the surface as if it were claiming me. I am not my own. I am a part of the sea, an ocean jailing me as prisoner against its rising tides. My mouth fills with water, traveling down my throat and into my chest. It weaves its way through my veins, turning blood into ocean and air into salt. I will succumb to it, let it carry me out, carry me across to different worlds. There is nothing else for me here. I am a part of the sea.

“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...