sid + nancy 1
Category: creative writing
introject 1
landmark 3
Mystic and Mystic alone understood the soul of the theater. It is commonly believed that people have souls, maybe animals as well, especially dogs, but places have souls as well, souls that are often richer and more varied than the soul of any single living being. Because these souls have histories that long outlive the beings that inhabit or pass through them. Only Mystic could begin to understand how, when the rest of the world had imploded so suddenly, the Landmark independent theater continued to survive.
landmark 2
Switch and Fix watched the toxic smoke curl towards them as they sat on the steps of the Landmark. Silently, Fix reached for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Switch played with her knife, idly flicking it out and snapping it back in again.
“you know,” Switch said, looking into the smoke, not at Fix, “you’ll run out of those eventually.”
Fix shurgged
“and when I do, I’ll quit.”
“Touche,” Switch laughed.
porter 1
she ended up marrying a firefighter. Eventually, she threw everything he owned out on the lawn and burned the things he cared about the most. She burned each item methodically, carefully containing the flames from the flourishing rose bushes and tomato plants. She burned his shirts first. The trading cards he kept between plastic in pristine conditon. The couch he used to eat his dinner on in lieu of a dining table.
marriage doesn’t change people, despite popular belief. it entrenches them, validates them, enables them. and there are many ways to hurt someone in a marriage.
nancy 1
Though the 4th floor of the psychiatric hospital was permeated with glass door and floor-to-ceiling windows, this particular room was primarily lit with a series of flourescent tubes, so when those harsh humming lights were turned off, the room was actually very poorly lit.
It was supposed to be lit at 3:16pm on Friday, April 28th, there was supposed to be an individual psychotherpay session. It had been requested for, perscribed, scheduled, all the boxes had been ticked. But at 3:16 on Friday, April 28th, room 421b was dark and empty except for the patient.
It’s apalling how badly most people handle encountering someone in distress. This same patient had curled in a fetal position on the floor of her room, had cried until she passed out from dehydration. All she had to show for it was timid platitudes, a 60 piece puzzle, and couple “Chicken Soup of the Soul” books. It is especially shocking to find this kind of timidy in a place meant for helping people in distress.
landmark 1
The Landmark Indepenent Theatre was falling apart long before the world was. As we were all adjusting to new computer screens in shiny new cars that felt more like spaceships, cupholders were falling off seat arms, the popcorn kettle squeaked ominously, an HVAC drip plagued theatere 3, the shelf in the freezer where the pretzles were kept tilted precariously, joints permenantly unmoored, and the concessions counter was barely temperature controlled at the best of times.
At that point, the lake was already rapidly drying, the arsenic slowly seaping into our air supply. But we were still humming along, streaming our TV shows that refused to pay writers and absorbed in our smartphones full of blood-soaked rare-earth minerals, either ignorant of the end of the world or hoping, naively that it would not catch up to us for a few more years.
An apocalypse is not so much and “end of the world.” instead its more of an ending of a certain civilization, structures and systems we rely on heavily collapse and alternatives must be found.
anatoly 1
She sits across from me, studying her straw as if realizing for the first time that someone has chewed on it. She looks back up at me.
“She wants to tell you something, but she can’t”
“Why not?” I ask, gritting my teeth against another cryptic answer.
“Because she doesn’t know how”
I looked down at the greasy linoleum table and shook my head. She shook her head too letting out a soft laugh.
“Why do you care so much about all this anyway?”
“Why do I care? I care because people of your same description have been popping up all over, first just the city, then the state, now the whole fucking country.”
She scoffs.
“Come on, why do you really care?”
chester 1
9-7-22
They stared that the sea, watching the waves recede into inky blackness. or rather, she did, and he joined her briefly.
“I was really mean to you yesterday, wasn’t I?” he said, speaking first in a break with tradition. The silence spread between them. It was hard to tell, but she could hear how his throat restricted with self-sustaining guilt, a circular kind that is so often inescapable.
“I mean, yeah,” she replied. “It sucked, what else do you want me to say? But I’ll be fine.” She refused to absolve him. His resulting silence spoke volumes. He hoped she appreciated that he bit his tongue, restraining himself from snapping at her again. Just as she had always hoped he appreciated the benefit of the the doubt she often tried to extend to him, when he was sullen, uncommunicative, and difficult to understand. But both of these burdens were unspoken and were unlikely to be recognized, but both hoped a silent symetrical understanding would ensue.
She, resurrecting tradition, broke the silence this time.
“Look, it’ll all wash away eventually. In the waves of all the good stuff, or even just the waves of time. There’s been way worse and there’ll be way worse.”
His eyes glistened in the solitary glow of the moon. Clearly, she saw the fear reflected in them. Those eyes recalled the ghost of many a guilty expression that passed over the face of a man. It seemed that man’s greatest fear was nothing outside himself but simply the fear of being “bad.” Perhaps a legitamate fear in the face of the asymmetrical power he waged on the world.
foamy
Nihilistic Porcupine 