breaking-cycles

  • No Dominion

    Eventually, you stop dancing with the devil beneath the pale moonlight and let the devil do what the devil is going to do. There is little reason to interrupt a good storyteller when every lie, given enough time, develops a strange habit of revealing the truth. Sometimes the truth arrives quietly. Sometimes it walks through…

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  • Consequences of Division

    The demons had been unusually restless since the veil began to thin. They had always lived among us, although in earlier centuries they possessed the dignity to remain mostly invisible. They preferred cathedrals after midnight, the bedsides of dying kings, the corners of rooms where grief had been left unattended for too many years. They…

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  • The Devil Read the Fine Print

    There was an agreement once. Older than the people who signed it. Older than the beds they shared, the children they raised, the names carved into courthouse paper. No one remembers writing it. That was the clever part. It passed from hand to hand without ink, disguised as love. The masculine would provide. The feminine…

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  • The woman in Jackson Square told me I had brought someone with me. I smiled. Of course I had. He had been with me for years. New Orleans was sweating through midnight, all perfume and rot beneath the balconies. Rain still glistened between the bricks. Somewhere down Chartres Street, a trumpet was playing something slow…

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  • The most dangerous woman at the burning was not the one tied to the stake. It was the woman standing in the crowd. She had arrived early. Before the square filled with bodies. Before the priest climbed the wooden platform. Before the men dragged the accused through the street and explained to everyone why another…

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  • Satan Stepped Aside

    People no longer cease to amaze me in the worst way possible. Maybe that sounds cynical. It probably is. But cynicism is merely optimism after it has been mugged in a dark alley enough times to recognize the footsteps behind it. There are very few people left who aren’t looking out for themselves first. I…

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  • Throw Me

    There is stone that reads throw me sitting on a random shelf. Nobody remembers who put it there. That is the strange part. It isn’t decorative. It isn’t polished enough to belong beside the books, candles, and little porcelain angels collecting dust beneath the stained-glass window. It is an ordinary gray stone. Heavy. Cold. Imperfect.…

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  • Why?

    If time were currency you would spend less on the bullshit. You would. You would stop handing entire afternoons to people you don’t even like. You would quit spending Tuesday arguing with strangers who will be forgotten by Thursday. You wouldn’t donate perfectly good years to jobs that make you miserable, relationships that already died,…

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  • Crossroads Again

    The mind will tell you things that are not true then make you responsible for the outcome. It is a terribly convincing liar. It knows your voice. That is its greatest advantage. It does not arrive like some villain dressed in black, dragging chains through the corridors of your thoughts. It does not announce itself…

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  • The Mourning Room

    At some point you have all the answers and then those answers disappear quickly leaving an empty space where comfort once lived. Nobody knew exactly why the room was called the Mourning Room. Perhaps because of the black velvet curtains hanging over windows tall enough to belong in a cathedral. Perhaps because of the ancient…

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