The Porcelain Mother

 https://www.darkharbormagazine.com/the-porcelain-mother/

A short story of mine was recently published in Dark Harbor Magazine.

I hope you enjoy :) 

Choices

The greater the choice, the more invisible the chains.

On Hope

Hope is not the belief that things will improve, but the refusal to believe that despair has the final word.

Despair and Freedom

Despair is freedom's twin: both appear when all illusions are gone.

Living Well

To live well is to make peace with the fact that you will never understand your end.

Threshold Altitudes

I wrote a small piece for Airplane Reading called "Threshold Altitudes."

Enjoy :)

https://airplanereading.org/story/5451/threshold-altitudes

Solitude as Chamber, Predation as Rite

There exists, in certain regions of the world — and more precisely, in certain regions of the mind — a sensation so subtle and so specific that language, that crippled engine of comprehension, struggles to name it. But let us make an attempt.

Imagine solitude not as a lack of company, but as a presence — a presence so patient, so preternaturally attuned to your inwardness, that it begins to mimic the cadence of your thoughts, the pitch of your memories, the rhythm of your sighs. At first, you mistake it for introspection. But then it lingers. It does not leave. And it begins to suggest things.

This form of solitude is not psychological. It is predatory.

And the architecture of the universe has always accommodated such predators. Their true forms are not monstrous but intentional. They feed not on flesh but on that delicate illusion we call the self, slowly unweaving its fibers until we are left as empty as a Roman centurion whose body is found intact, but whose personhood has been evacuated by something that wore a woman’s shape.

These predators do not devour out of hunger, nor malice. They enact a rite as old as the first shiver to pass down the spine of an ape staring too long into the dark between the trees.

To be alone is to be recognized.

To be recognized is to be selected.

And to be selected is to participate in a pageant not of passion, but of disintegration — a ceremonial dissolution in which the ego, that brittle artifact of evolutionary misfortune, is unmade by what it can never comprehend. In such rituals, desire is merely the velvet glove, the lure. What lies beneath is function: the inexorable correction of a species that dared imagine permanence.

In this light, the empusa is not a monster.

She is a mercy.

Or worse: an inevitability.

And the outpost? The fortress in the mountains, unmarked and unmourned?

A place outside time where the universe momentarily peels back its mask and whispers, This is the arrangement. You are not meant to endure.