dreamszilla

When teenager Joshua's behaviour gets totally out of control, his largely absent father doles out an unusually severe punishment. Image generated with OpenAI "He just won't listen, James!" "Did you go through the steps like we talked about?" "You don't know what it's like when you're gone for weeks at a time." "You knew what I did for a living when you met me." "I thought you might consider your son's welfare a little more at some point..." "Nope. You don't want to go there, Lis. My job supports this family." "I'm just so... I'm frustrated, James!" "Oh, for Christsake. Let me unpack my gear, then I'll talk to him." When he finished putting away his last pair of socks, James gave a listen at his son Joshua's door. The mixture of sounds - digital computer noises and heavy metal grinding and grunting - caused him to wince before knocking. ...

Esmerelda's life keeps getting reset, as if manipulated by an unseen hand, but each reboot dirties her destiny. The doorbell rang out through my pristine apartment, pulling me away from the novel I was reading. My heavy front door groaned as it dug more grooves into the wooden floor. A wide-set man stood in front of me with a large box. Sweat was beading around his hairline. "Are you Miss Esmerelda O'Dell?" he asked, breathless. I nodded and plastered on a smile as his body odor reached my nostrils. "Yes, I am." 1 "Sign here please." He handed me a small clipboard and I scribbled my name as quickly as possible before taking the package and shutting the door in his face. I sliced into the box and inside was another, this one wrapped in navy blue paper and tied up in a fluffy white tulle bow. The signature wrapping from Luxe, Adam's favorite high-end department store downtown. It was the kind of place I never would have dreamed of shoppi...

Stevie's great-grandmother looks great for her age, despite bequeathing deadly cancers to all of her descendants. Image generated with OpenAI I hate my Grossma. It wasn't always this way. My earliest memories of Grossma are the times we spent together playing dominoes. As a young child, I didn't understand there was an actual game involved, one requiring more skill than simply knocking them down in a long, curling row. We would spend what felt like hours setting them up like spotted tombstones, perfectly spaced despite her shaking fingers. Overflowing with anticipation, I would gently topple the first one. I remember the clack-clack-clack like it happened yesterday. I would tell Grossma it sounded like a machine gun, and her toothless smile would lose itself in the deep folds of her wrinkles. She would make her hot chocolate slightly bitter, and I would greedily slurp it up, even if it scalded my throat. I don't remember Grossma ever saying more than ...

After years of mixed feelings about her family's history, recent divorcee Leonie reads the diary of her Belgian coal-mining grandmother. Image generated with OpenAI I knew I could have gone into the coal mine, like other women before me, but it was a dirty place. Outside of the mine, coal dust escaped from a steady flow of transportation trucks, and it was stirred up when ground was dynamited to get at the coal seams. The dust drifted over the town, dirtying everything in sight, then sifted into the houses. Curtains and wallpaper were cobwebbed with the potentially explosive powder that could also contain silicates and sulfur oxides. Coal being friable, the dark powder was unavoidable inside the mine, and to prevent disastrous fires, rock dust, such as gypsum and limestone, which didn't cake when wet, was applied to surfaces, diluting the possibility that powdered coal suspended in air might ignite. If mining took place on the surface of a mountaintop, the distu...