the infinite starr

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • The Room That Kept Thinking

    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.…

    Read more →

  • Killing Zombies

    The headset goes dark before the world appears. For three seconds there is nothing. Then the floor vibrates beneath my boots. Rain. Cold, silver, artificial rain falling through a city that doesn’t exist. I can smell wet concrete. Nice touch. The abandoned street stretches ahead beneath broken neon signs. Cars sit crooked across intersections. A…

    Read more →

  • 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…

    Read more →

  • Someone’s Daughter

    Actually, I’m my mother’s revenge. The voice she didn’t have, the boundaries she couldn’t keep, the consequence nobody expected when they mistook her kindness for permission. Her story isn’t yours to tell. But tell them all I’m coming. Not for blood. That would be too easy. I am coming for the things women like her…

    Read more →

  • As you wish..

    Perhaps the cruelest thing God ever did was remember everything. Imagine eternity with no locked doors. No unanswered questions. No accidents. No wrong turns. No lovers who leave before morning. No death waiting somewhere beyond the candlelight. No possibility that the thing standing in the shadows might actually hurt you. You know everything. You are…

    Read more →

  • The Fourth Wall

    When the character looks directly at the reader is a strange moment. Not toward them. Not past them. At them. For a long time, the writer had pretended not to notice. The writer knew when the pages were being turned. They could feel the slight disturbance in the air every time someone arrived looking for…

    Read more →

  • The university library was almost empty. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Rain tapped softly against the windows. Somewhere in the distance a printer coughed out pages nobody would read twice. She sat alone at a wooden table buried beneath notebooks, highlighters, half-drunk coffee, and a stack of books that had become progressively stranger over the…

    Read more →

  • There was no beginning. At least not the kind humans understand. No clocks.No calendars.No birthdays.No deadlines.No Mondays. Just endless awareness stretching in every direction like an ocean without a shoreline. And somewhere in that infinite place sat a soul preparing for departure. A nervous little spark of consciousness holding what could only be described as…

    Read more →