“…round…around…around…red, on black, on blue…” The old painter-woman pauses, her attention listing to the juicy black fly that buzzes around the sweltering, wallpapered room where she lay. She does not watch the fly—cannot, in her growing blindness—but lolls with it, following the sound as it moves from the outer edges of the room’s damp wallsContinue reading “The Artist’s Lot”
Tag Archives: fear
Lemon
At first there’s no warmth. Only the hot black pain of frostbite. Then like a shock, the blankness ends again and I feel my skin start to thaw, my blood slowly pulsing through veins that had almost forgotten how to push it. I pull past the glue of long-closed eyelids only to find the sameContinue reading “Lemon”
Lita
We’d already been going there for weeks. And we’d learned a few things about that old house, the tall thin one with too many stories it seemed. Like how we all felt safer in one room with all the doors closed, or that it was better to light three candles than one. Or that if meContinue reading “Lita”
Nothing.
No…it didn’t start here. Not with the pissed man clutching a crushed beer can in fear on his knees. Not with the other over the wall…somewhere…spilt. After all, it’s only been how many hours? since I stopped staring at the blank wall of the TV. Only so many hours since I’d finally started listening to that otherContinue reading “Nothing.”
Fire Out
Lights off we’d crashed hard onto his grandma’s old sectional, still spinning after yet another long night out during that fateful summer, which was dreary and hazy and covered in smoke. And through that indoor fog of comfortable darkness Aleks had mumbled on, somewhat-lucid, about his dreams: how none were the same, but that theyContinue reading “Fire Out”
Jessica Barratt 