Hard to sleep and impossible to dream
I. Hard to sleep I meet to talk with the cynic for the second time in as many years. In my first entry, she had no name, but today, let’s call her Magdalene. Previously, she was all about godly...
View ArticleSay goodbye
After thirty years of following the rules, I rebel. It’s not spirited disagreement that I feel with the status quo, but fatigue. It dogs me like a lump of flesh, like a shadow. I go to the supermarket...
View ArticleGet thee to a nunnery!
Get thee to a nunnery! is a medieval fantasy roleplaying game set in the 11th century. You play as Aois, a directionless young woman cloistered away in a convent. You shape her life at the abbey...
View ArticleThe thing itself
In difficult situations, I try to be in control. I try to be outside myself, to look down at the patchwork of sensation and sensitivity from a position of careful remove. Comfortably seated on the blue...
View ArticleWelcome to Nurdle Nation, LLC
She doesn’t list her job on her profile, but nine out of ten prospective partners look her up before the first date, and then the cat is out of the bag. “What’s an ESG manager?” her date asks, sliding...
View ArticleSide project
What’s my side project? It’s the avoidance of meaningless pain. It’s the cultivation of meaningful pain. It’s the pursuit of overthinking. It’s like film photography, but I am the photographer, the...
View ArticleFlawed pendulum
I read back my writing and find it uneven, like a mislaid path. Cobblestones, ruddy with rusty moss. But the unevenness doesn’t bother me. In the gaps between sentences, where the rhythm breaks and...
View ArticleHypnerotomachia Polia
Inspired by Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and written from Polia’s perspective. A reader suggested to me that this could be interpreted as a story of sexual violence (and I don’t contest the validity of...
View ArticlePlague in the city upon a hill
America’s greatest living writer is a forty-nine year-old management consultant with a shattered moral compass and a cardboard box of unfinished manuscripts in the trunk of his silver Miata. He spends...
View ArticleEcstasies of Persephone
Finally, fall. I roll the bike out of storage. Like the grass underfoot, the air is cool to the touch. I ride down a maple-lined street to the corner store, where I buy freshly roasted coffee beans and...
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