willwriteforhearts

She woke up late at night—or early in the morning, as she later assumed—and stepped first off their bed, then through the kitchen, then out the door, off the first porch step, and rather than stepping down onto the second as she had so many times before, she simply floated. It came on impulse. Natural. Like a breath. She breathed a calm in and out before taking the next step into the air, ascending like particles of dust in sunlight. Five steps, and she was above the rooftop of the house. Five steps more and she was forgetting what it felt like to be on the ground. She’d fantasized about flying thousands of times before and

The first time she suspected something wasn’t when Daddy told her not to care about mothers, or her arm snapped and her brain turned off like a light switch, or the time she found the “Family AI Inc.” card under his bed when she was cleaning his room. No. There was always an explanation waiting for her around the corner. She did not suspect. She did not care to. She did not want to. She did not need to. The day she found the business card, she tossed it into the trash incinerator, got a lollipop from the hospital-esque jar on the kitchen counter, and went off to meet her new tutor in Daddy’s private zoo. She was seven

The only window in the city—a small skylight on the roof of Globe Four—has been uncovered today, but all I see through it is the toxic fog. It blocks the whole thing, but that’s what I imagine it's like every day outside anyways: thick, blue, moving but static. They say it’s from the acid rain at night, but I never hear rain like they say it sounds in the movies, or thunder for that matter, or anything at all. The walls of Globe Four are thick, I guess. I don’t look for very long. I wave at my mother as I re-enter the house, seeing her currently poised in front of the handheld mirror she’s set on the kitc

Street lamps blaze with their electric harshness, igniting each of their heads with a singular beam of light as the three walk underneath them and up the hill to the nearest bus stop. The rest of the street is darkness. Anticipation locks their tongues—Jub reaches for Elodie’s hand and squeezes it. She squeezes back, faintly, hesitantly. She slips her hand out of his after a second, giving him a curt smile before looking away and composing herself once again. Matt keeps stride on Jub’s other side, twiddling, twiddling, twiddling his toothpick. His heart is a freight train. Looking at his friend, he wishes that they’d

It thunders, the first time in his life. Lightning on repeat. The people in the dustbowl town exit their households, eyes fixated starward, dry lips cracking and bloodying with their change in expression. The ground thirsts; it anticipates rainfall with the loving desire of a virgin. The sky. Thick with clouds, black, a huge mass glowing with static and rolling, thunderous murmurs. He has not seen the like in his fifty years of religious servitude to the people; he remembers arriving at the town, twenty and verbose and Catholic, and the deterioration since then.  What air conditioning his shack of a house had once had is gone and he lives w

It feels like I have been living in a dream for long time. Life for me, this state of being, it’s like the longest dream; I have no wrinkles to count the years that have gone by, or companions, or even an aging world. Of course, the forest changes, but it’s so hard to tell. Plants grow and trees grow but it always looks young. I have been alone since the time my memory began. The mother bear moans again; sickness having blinded her, she searches with her nose until she can feel the soft bodies of her children crowding around her side on the ground. Her limbs are heavy. Her spirit dips in and out of her mortal form. She glances

Sugar’s cheeks have the flush of a snowman’s, marble and pallid. It’s the middle of winter, her favorite, and it’s snowing feet bedecking feet in her front yard. It’d come in the night. It is soft and heavy, and slow, but it covered the ground when she woke up and blocked the door and garage so her father has to stay home from work for once. He is in the kitchen with her mother, and they’re making a hot drink together and laughing in undertones. Sugar is sitting by the window, a ways off from them. She is sitting on a dictionary on a chair because she’s not tall enough to see over the window otherwis

The first thing she notices are the crowfeet that frame his eyes. They’re not small creases anymore. Her heart flutters when he glances at her, flutters up her windpipe and seems to beat at the back of her throat. She swallows hard. It settles. “Oh, he’s the nicest,” says the servant, holding her hand and taking her away. “He’ll love you better than any other.” “Do you care for him?” The servant lets her go as they reach a bedroom with red curtains sewn from silk; it filters the sunlight darkly into the room. “He’s a good king,” says the servant, “you’re ve