While you sit there condemning others on the legs that hold your throne of lies, Hypocrisy surrounds you like servants at a feast. Your appetite for destruction fears them into quiet… The people live to serve you here, How auspicious is your rule? You yell and snap, Bend and break You inconsiderate jerk You, Inconsiderate…
Seeing Stars
Sometimes Lucile could ask for, or just, accept help. Most of the time Lucile wanted to scream and put her fist through a wall. But that would mean she was able to do something perfectly right, so naturally at best Lucile would end up with a broken hand and not a broken wall. Unfortunately for Lucile’s left hand she learned this in her early twenties. She felt if she didn’t take a step back she was going to have to relearn how less than perfect she was at the cost of her right hand.
Susanna
The flour had dried out her hands. It had worked its way deep into the shallow lines that ran across her palms, and up through her fingers. She loved the texture of the flour embedded into her skin. It was part of the reason she always made the dough the day before and left it to refrigerate when doing her sugar cookies. Today she was pulling out chunks, flouring the table, flouring the dough ball, rolling out the dough, flouring the cookie cutters, and then cutting out the festive shapes. Fifteen gingerbread men, fifteen snowmen, fifteen stockings, fifteen candy canes, and fifteen stars. All politely waiting on the floured parameter of the table for the batch ahead to be taken out from the oven. Then each group would be placed on the cookie sheet and put in the oven for nine minutes. And so the pattern continued: sticky dough, flour, flour, flour, sticky dough, flour, flour, flour, oven mit, repeat.
Bethy Breaths it Out
There were things that were hard for her like changing plans, changing her furniture, changing any type of pattern, regularity, or system she had. Change in general was an inconvenience, but she did it. Did Bethy sometimes come off as rigid and demanding, probably. Did she give a shit, no. Bethy always made sure to cross her t’s and dot her i’s when it came to scheduling. She had a calendar for herself, for her boyfriend, for work, and at least six notepads in rotation each with a general subject or specific area covered. There was her work notebooks (one for shortlist tasks, tracking her food/water intake, and noting her hours for her daily log; the other for meeting notes, long term projects, and tasks assigned to her from her boss), the was her purse notebook (for everything lists), the one by her bed (to capture her dreams), the one on the hallway table (to leave instructions for whomever was watching her home while she was away), and the one on the kitchen table (which was her financial book). Then there was the memo app in her phone where she kept anything that needed to be written down when she wasn’t near a notebook or was not specific enough to be put into a notebook. Bethy liked structure and organization almost as much as she loved notebooks.
A Not So Silent Night
His loud sounds needed to be silenced. There was only so much she could take. Aurora realized this was partially her fault. She was the one who had put him, and herself, in the situation. But she couldn’t take it anymore. Every time he howled, the sound pierced her body. It had become almost constant. Before she could sing or hum or talk just a little louder to drown him out. But now, it was just too damn much.
A Night in River Ridge
The green grass so perfectly in disarray it looked as though someone had positioned each blade by hand. Throughout the healthy grass were long pieces of pale yellow dead grass uprooted from the last mowing. Occasionally there was the head of a dandelion long since blown. Two feet, a pair of them, were laying in the grass. The soles of them facing upward and slightly out. Small patches of flesh were visible. The right index toe, not the tip, but the shaft, the part that never touched the floor; the inside of the left pinky toe; the inside sole of left foot, the arch of this foot was higher than that of the right; and the right ankle bone, barely visible in the picture due to the angle, but if you studied the photo you would see the pale white skin glowing like the silver lining of clouds in the sky. The rest of the feet were a dried, sticky red.
Questions for Breakfast
It was a strange feeling. Almost as if she had borrowed someone else’s notebook, and turned to a new page to write her own story. Still, she somehow knew that the notebook she was writing in was her own, she just couldn’t place it. She couldn’t place a lot of things – the bed she was in for starters. The sheets were a dark gray color. The comforter was black, gray, silver, and white. Something similar to what she would have picked out for herself, but a different pattern. The sheets didn’t quite match, but some effort, no matter how small, had been made. She wasn’t sure of much, but she had a feeling that if she had been picking out these things they would have been a full match. The pillow cases, similar to the bed sheets were close, but off. Two of the four pillows were the same color as the sheet. The other two were light gray, better matched to the comforter.
Matilda
Matilda sat at her blue wooden desk. The one she had refurbished from old pallets and old shelves she recycled herself. The blue was intentionally bright and bold, but worn to revel most of the stained, darker pallet wood. She looked out the window which her desk faced. The woods behind her house were illuminated by the sunlight reflecting from the snow they had gotten the night before. She lifted herself slightly off her seat, leaned forward and looked out the window down toward the ground. The outdoor furniture was lightly covered with snow in such a way it made Matilda think of sugar dusted cookies. For the most part the patio was snowless. Matilda thought of how cold the metal furniture and snow would feel pressing against her legs and back. At the very least it would feel good, even if it didn’t calm her down.
Anxiety Brain
I probably could have done a lot more, she thought to herself as she continued to do nothing.
Do more with your life or with your night, she questioned herself.
That is a great question, she replied as she scratched behind her right earlobe with the edge of her nail.
Leilah’s Low
It was six years ago. Leilah was 26. She had graduated from college three years ago and was working at a job she hated. It wasn’t that she hated to work. It was actually quite the opposite. She loved working, but all the same she hated this job. More specifically, she hated the past year of her life. Her anxiety had been spiraling. Her eating habits had taken a non-existent turn. She was smoking and drinking coffee as though they were the air of the fresh outdoors and nectar straight from the ancient gods. Her dating life was a slew of awful men, one worse than the one before. To line the men whom she encountered up would mimic a lineup of all the usual suspects in a jail house.