gothic storytelling
-
He was the confessional without the collar. No stained glass. No wooden booth. No priest waiting patiently on the other side of a little brass screen. Just a telephone that was almost always on speaker and a man who could never keep his sins inside his own mouth. Behind closed doors, they poured out. The…
-
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…
-
The room had fourteen cracks in the ceiling. There had been thirteen yesterday. He was almost certain of that. He lay perfectly still beneath the gray wool blanket and studied the newest one, a thin black vein beginning above the window and traveling toward the light fixture before disappearing beneath a blister of old paint.…
-
Everybody is willing to hate you until they need you again by then the relationship has changed. Not ended. Changed. There is a difference. Endings have funerals. Flowers. Black dresses. Dirt thrown over something everyone has agreed is dead. Change is crueler. Change leaves the body sitting at the dinner table. It lets the conversation…
-
“I wish I could tell you she was a hippie.” The Mind sighed and stretched itself across the corners of consciousness where it spent most of its time organizing thoughts into neat little piles. “But she wasn’t.” The Ego laughed. “Thank God for that. She would have been unbearable.” The Spirit smiled quietly from somewhere…
-
They did not notice the moment she learned how to take. That is always how it begins. For years she was a vessel. A quiet thing. A body that absorbed moods the way stone absorbs heat. People leaned into her presence and left lighter, never asking where the weight went. They mistook her stillness for…
