dreamszilla

Having navigated college through a haze of reefer smoke, David swears off the pot - until it becomes legal.  Image generated with OpenAI David lives in Massachusetts, born and raised. "Where It All Began," as the saying goes, a state whose origin story is about a mob of cheap shits who didn't want to spend more for their tea. This attitude has evolved over the generations into a bedrock orneriness, steeped in the conviction that everyone not from there? Is an idiot. This helps to create the impression that the state is rife with arrogant and unfriendly pricks. Massholes. The vibe given out is that if you aren't one of them, lucky enough to be living there, you may as well be camping out. Wiping your ass with leaves. David believes this, as most natives do. Proud that they are watchers, not huggers, and certainly not back-slappers. Prudent, puritanical and parsimonious. Travelling roads as twisted and as hard to navigate as their souls. Once, and to an ...

Twelve-year-old Elise longs to live as her eleven-year-old self, before most of her family died and left her in destitution with her disabled brother and his carer. Image generated with OpenAI Mirrors don't grant their onlookers the privilege of denying reality. Sleeplessness. Torment. Grief. Elise's mirror screams these at her. It's agonizing to look into the reflection, for the bloodshot eyes, the purple bags beneath them, and fissuring lips are not hers. They belong to another, someone whose family has been dead for the past year. In her heart, her mind, Elise is still the person from a year ago. But the mirror retorts: This is who you are now . But then the mirror shows her eye twitch, signaling something. Acknowledgement? Regret? Behind the twitch, the truth was that most of her family had perished and still her eyes could not produce tears. A knock at the washroom door shatters her gaze. "What, Hilda?" she calls. "Pat wants to se...

A lonely man tries to reconnect with a stranger he encountered four decades ago. Image generated with OpenAI It was over forty years ago. I was hitch-hiking and he gave me a lift from the ring-road south of Edinburgh to York. He - whoever he was - was driving to his home in Orpington, which was then in Kent. He was making the return journey, having followed a girlfriend to Edinburgh who had told him she didn't want anything more to do with him. He was there one day, back the next. I wouldn't have remembered the lift but for that detail. At that time, in my mid to late-teens, I was in the habit of hitch-hiking. It was not from necessity, far from it. My family were horrified that I did so when I had the means to travel first-class, but the fact was that I continued to do it for a good while even after I bought my first car. It was more for adventure than expediency; you never knew who might stop or what might transpire. I don't know how it is for straight peopl...

When farmer İbrahim's young wife struggles in childbirth, he appeals to the maligned and bitter local doctor for help, in this new translation of a classic Turkish short story. Image generated with OpenAI Asiye went into labor in the middle of the afternoon. She stopped threshing immediately, and went home. İbrahim returned home from harvesting after nightfall. As he was moving his two oxen to shelter near his house for the evening, he saw many children congregating in front of the house. Without even closing the gate to the shelter, he ran to the house, but the women did not let him in. His single-room home with a low ceiling was full of women from the village. Aunt Makbule blocked him at the door with her chest and said, "Go away! This is not a man's business." İbrahim turned around, and just as he was beginning to wonder what to do, Aunt Makbule addressed the women in the room: "Saving her will not be easy people, but we have sent word to the m...

A young woman recalls a life-changing romance conducted almost entirely through letters. Image generated with OpenAI The last letter he ever wrote to me just said, 'goodbye Lil.' Nothing else. He had always been dramatic like that. I took it outside and tried to burn it on the curb because I didn't have a fireplace or a garden. I tore it up into little pieces and tried to burn it with a plastic lighter that I'd bought from the drugstore. I had to stop though, because the pieces kept blowing away and I was worried that they would land on the fresh tarmac. They were only smoking but I stopped anyway. The tarmac looked so clean. That was in September 2022. When I went back inside I thought about all the letters I had already thrown away. I had never told him that I had been throwing them away because I knew he wouldn't like it. It just felt so childish to keep them all in a shoebox under the bed. If I had told him, he probably would have written again...