Category: Scratchpad
Short stories, weird dreams, and anything else.
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Cracked Drywall
The realtor said the house had good bones. She said this while standing in the kitchen, one hand on the laminate counter, the other gesturing at crown molding that had been painted over so many times it had lost its edges. She said it with the particular brightness of someone who’d been showing the same
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Guardian Angels
The field had been a hayfield once. You could tell from the stubble poking through the mud where the tires hadn’t ground it flat. Thirty, maybe forty cars and trucks nosed into rough rows between the tree line and a barn that leaned about ten degrees past optimistic. Most of the vehicles were domestics —
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The Awakening
The morning Lira Voss turned ten, the world changed color. Not all at once. Not the way her mother described the harvest sunsets over the Greenvale, where the whole sky supposedly caught fire and the wheat fields burned gold from horizon to horizon. This was subtler. A shimmer at the edge of things, like heat
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Indoor Space Challenge
I’ve been in lots of places like this one, some better, most worse. The place was cleaner than most and still lightly smelled of old ale and wood smoke. A rough planked floor, worn smooth by countless boots was dappled by the morning light coming in the open shutters. I was glad for that because