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There’s an eye in the back of my husband’s head. It opens only after he’s fallen asleep, lid splitting silent as a dream in the night. My husband’s eyes are amber, no brighter than a penny in the sun. The eye on the back of his head is different. It looks out at me through his dark hair, pupil white and glowing.
Most of us speak and eat/swallow without thinking about how complicated these processes actually are, how a single malfunction in the system can completely alter how we live or interact with others. A few years back, I accompanied an elderly family member to their first swallow test.
The hearth is a trope of holiday songs and stories. It’s a warm place in a cold time, and families gather around it—for love, laughter, storytelling, a cup of cheer. This short story is an attempt at redefinition. I’m taking the familiar and approaching it from an unfamiliar, upsetting angle.
Every once in a while I am lucky enough to disgorge a story almost fully formed from the get go. This one was born from a stew of rising fury with ambient misogyny, irritation with discourse about the declining art of music playlist design.
What do the wicked stepmother and the innocent princess have in common? In this retelling, a lot more than you might think. I love a good fairy tale retelling, especially those that subvert the narrative in unexpected ways, and it’s high time for the jealous villainess archetype to be rewritten.
he found the first man on Tinder, or maybe on Hinge, and the restaurant where they met was glowing with antique lamps and green brocade wallpaper and velvet couches, everything soft and inviting, not a single hint of what was to unfold in an hour or two.
Little is more crushing than the idea that no matter what you do, you are only capable of destruction, and everyone knows it. I wanted to weave that fear into this story, and to push tenderness and violence up against each other. How can we understand one without understanding the other?
Inspiration: A relationship—everything but the drill.
The idea for this story began in my final week at the Clarion Writers Workshop. I wanted to write a haunted house horror story using stripped language, but unsurprisingly, it became strange and detailed and maximalist. It’s the perfect piece to summarize my time at Clarion, as it was collectively inspired by all the great stories I read over the summer of 2023.
This piece was one of my Clarion West Workshop stories, for one of the days we issued a challenge in the group to write something erotic for a particular week (shout out to Samit for being amazing during “Chaos week”) and this was the result of it.
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