muse
Stories
7
Chapters
9
Words
16.4 K
Comments
0
Reading
1 h, 21 m
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It was past four a.m. and he hadn’t slept. He needed to be up in a couple hours if he was going to make the meeting with his editor. He couldn’t postpone a fifth time. The storm had been raging since he’d gone to bed. The curtains were thick enough to block the lightning, but coastal storms always unsettled him. He could never sleep through the wind. He turned over, shoving a pillow over his head, but he could still hear it. His mother had called him a night owl since he was a child—better…-
4.2 K • Completed
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Rose’s seat was the third from the end on a continuous desk that could seat seven, but she was one of only two that morning over her first cup of coffee. The desk faced the back of someone’s monitor; to her right was the senior writer, Ania, who had given her a tour yesterday in a banana-yellow sweater. Today, they wore gray and black leggings and had not looked up when Rose said good morning. Most of the paper’s staff worked remotely. That meant an empty office but no one pressed up on…-
4.4 K • Oneshot
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He had read of love in novels, prying its meaning from aging paper—something from another time, like the green forests he could only imagine. He looked for it on faces he encountered, and while he felt for every one, it was not love. He didn't like the boy when they met, and after he'd sent him down the trail, never expected to think about him again. He would not kiss him until they were twenty-six. That kiss would overturn his world, but it would not stop the exquisite ache in his…
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296 • Ongoing
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First time I saw her, both of us twelve, I’d never seen such untamed eyes. Other kids said she wouldn’t survive the winter, but I approached anyway. “You can’t have my bunk,” she wheezed when I told her my name. She’d steal from me in our twenties — the ring my parents left me. I let her keep it. She’d sleep with me, feelings ending at skin. Every time should’ve been the last, yet I always crawled back. Now, decades later, her eyes are still cold, but she’s never turned them…
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296 • Ongoing
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The ghost was throwing leaves again. Every morning around ten o’clock, it grabbed handfuls of them off of the shrub that grew alongside the parking lot. The ghost had no strength (new ones never did), and so the leaves did little more than scatter across the gravel drive. On a windy day, they might blow into the street as she walked by. Noa didn’t know the woman. She passed by the restaurant at the same time each morning, in pencil skirts or trousers, a leather handbag thrown over one shoulder.…-
3.8 K • Oneshot
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They emerged together in a new life as twin saplings in the damp, black mulch. Their seeds had spun down the previous autumn and lodged in the soil. They hadn’t blown away like the others. She was alone with her consciousness, an innate sense of being; she had been once, twice, a hundred times before; so had he; and they had been—together. Without eyes or mouths, they could no longer see or speak to each other and they were too far apart to touch, but beneath the soil, their roots spread and twined…-
1.3 K • Oneshot
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Ray visited his brother more often after his death than he had for a decade. On Saturdays, he’d pick up a bouquet along with a week’s groceries and after lunch, carry it on the five-mile run that took him past the cemetery. He’d kneel before the grave, clear away last week’s flowers, pinch weeds slithering up the headstone. The fresh engraving was almost sharp to the touch. Simon Fisher, beloved husband. Ray hadn’t seen anyone else here since the funeral—not even her. The adjacent plot waited,…-
4.2 K • Completed
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On the weathered gray shingles of a neighboring shedthe sunlight reveals the image of a man crouched down, his head twisted to three-fourths profile, one eye open and vacant, shingles forming a jagged grin where a mouth should be. He’s creeping, paused, turned to look—sunlight striping his cheek, the side of his nose, shadow falling like hair across an invisible ear and aged shingles giving the appearance that the skin above his eye has rotted away. When the sun shifts he’ll be gone.…-
176 • Ongoing
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He came with the rain, decades ago when the forest here was still saplings, back when we were growing sod and Mama was crying every night that the drought would ruin us. I heard him before I saw him that first time, a cheerful whistle coming up the road. “Don’t talk to him,” the neighbors whispered. “That boy’s bad luck.” But he’d been friendly and young, as young as me, the only other person under thirty anyplace I could get to on foot. A year older, maybe two. I’d never asked.…-
2.2 K • Oneshot
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