OC Blabber
Slice of Life intermission. Theo let himself in at twenty past eight with the code he'd used for four years. He was carrying a paper bag that had gone see-through at the bottom. The blinds on the east side were already up. She had never touched them before the hospital....
Theo sat down. He did it slowly, the way he had sat down in hospital waiting rooms four times in four years, and he brought the laptop with him without thinking about it and set it on his knees, open, the blue light from the screen on his hands. Forty-one...
The ring light has three settings and Theo has tried all of them twice. He stands behind it in the penthouse living room with the remote in one hand and his phone in the other, and the phone is on speaker, and the voice coming out of it belongs to...
The bathroom light in Calvin's flat had a buzz in it that came and went, and it was going now, a thin electric whine above the mirror like a mosquito that would not land. He had showered. He had shaved, carefully, twice along the jaw where he always missed a...
She discharged herself at dawn on the fifth day, against advice, with three cracked ribs strapped under a black hoodie and a pair of sunglasses that hid most of her face. The doctor had told her to rest for six weeks. The label had told her to have a statement...
The first thing she learned was that a body hurts all the time. Not in the way the deep had hurt. The deep had been one pain, whole and everywhere, so complete that it had stopped being pain and become the shape of existence. This was different. This body hurt...
There was no up in the place she came from. There was no down, no near or far, only the pressure, and the pressure was everything. It pressed from all sides at once and had been pressing for so long that the word long had worn away to nothing. It...
The Lessons Alderley Edge, Cheshire. 1919 to 1938. Cradle song Holly Bank. March 1919. The first thing she knows is a voice. She does not know it is a voice. She knows nothing yet. She is eleven days old, in a cot in the night nursery at the top of...
The First Kill March 2021 I lost count of the seconds that night. I want that written down first, because it is the only time it has happened, and because I have never forgiven it. --- His name was Colin Maraj. I knew it for nine days before I met...
Tuesday, 20:47 The bike had been easy. That was the part Danny kept coming back to. A gas station camera on NW 7th, two blocks from where Kevin Duarte's car had been found with the keys still in it. Timestamp 03:10. Grainy, the way all gas station footage is grainy,...
