The Porcelain Mother

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

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

I hope you enjoy :) 

 

Edit:

The Magazine has since rebranded to Macabre Magazine.

Homegrown Maxims

The greater the choice, the more invisible the chains.

Every ideology dreams of monoculture. 

Consciousness resembles mycelium more than monarchy. Its brightest fruiting bodies advertise themselves above the soil while the true republic conducts silent negotiations beneath our boots.

The owl never mistakes insomnia for enlightenment. Humanity repeatedly publishes the confusion in hardcover.

Extinction remains the oldest literary critic. It has reviewed trilobites, emperors, mammoths, cryptocurrencies, and every fashionable certainty with identical brevity.

Individuality resembles an old-growth cedar. Institutions forever offer pruning. Markets prefer topiary. Forests quietly continue inventing impossible silhouettes.

Every prison first colonizes grammar. Soon enough the verbs march in formation, adjectives salute, pronouns require documentation, and silence receives promotion.

Desire seldom travels alone. It arrives carrying memory in one hand, anticipation in the other, then quietly empties both pockets into the bloodstream before introducing itself.

A wolf tracks scent through snowfall. An algorithm tracks appetite through metadata. Each follows invisible trails, yet only one truly knows the fragrance.

Humanity congratulates itself upon inventing mathematics while the nautilus continues drafting logarithms in calcium and the sunflower keeps correcting our proofs with impeccable spiral etiquette.

Decay possesses remarkable editorial standards.

Freedom grows poorly inside certainty. It flourishes among contingency, where every path wanders sufficiently far to encounter another species of self.

The most accomplished censors rarely burn books. They cultivate identical imaginations until unwritten pages become unnecessary.

Memory edits with greater audacity than fiction. 

We call ourselves Homo sapiens, though the epithet remains aspirational. Ravens negotiate, octopuses improvise, slime molds optimize, forests cooperate. Wisdom appears delightfully promiscuous.

The philosopher who never kneels before tide pools, compost heaps, carrion beetles, and weather has mistaken bibliography for metaphysics.

Every addiction promises eternity in convenient installments. Every recovery discovers time again through the astonishing weight of an ordinary afternoon.

Somewhere beneath every city sleeps an older geography whose rivers continue flowing through culverts, whose roots continue interrogating foundations, whose spores regard concrete as merely another temporary climate.

Mortality never diminishes the world. It multiplies significance with extravagant generosity. Every perishing leaf tutors the forest in renewal. Every vanished species enlarges responsibility. Every finite consciousness briefly lends the universe another pair of astonished eyes through which to admire its own impossible abundance.

 

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