LittleLamb314

    1: MAISIE    Maisie leaned against the cool stone wall, trying desperately not to breathe too loudly. The air rattled in her chest. She wanted to scream or sob or perhaps even laugh. She wanted to rush back upstairs and see that she'd imagined all of it. Maisie just wanted it not to be real. Oh, she really, really wanted it not to be real.    Scraping sounds from above made her jump nearly out of her skin. She knew what it was immediately– Idaeus' desk, the massive thing, being pushed across the stone floors. He would've had a fit if it were her touching his precious woodworking. If he could still have fits. The horror of those t

Trace Chapter One      I was never sure how long ago I died. I mean, I'd always assumed it was sometime in January, because I've always hated winter. Christmas was bad, New Year's was bad, but January was its own special kind of hell. It was cold and damp (not that I ever felt anything else) and lonely on the streets. All in all, January sucked. I just wasn't sure exactly how many Januaries ago it had been. A half dozen? Ten? Twenty? The thought of counting back made my head spin.      When you're dead, time sort of melts together. It's hard to tell what happened when.      That January was no exception, of course. On what very well may

In The End Anxiety is something like the apocalypse; some days, you wake up and the earth is crashing into the sun and everyone you know and love will be dead within the hour. Other days it is the slow burn of carbon monoxide in your lungs, coal dust lounging like stratus clouds above your head, trees crashing out of forests and splintering into paperbacks and picnic tables. I may be the white rhinoceros but that makes you the ivory-billed woodpecker; maybe you will wake up and notice that you have been dead for fifty years and there is nothing left to do but if nuclear bombs are dropped tomorrow then you are my bunker, because we can rid

The Definition of Ignite Ignite, verb: inspire, render luminous by heat, breathe wildfires of fog onto windowpanes and write ballads on the glass. Ignited, adjective: burned, set aflame, brought into the light, the scorched earth ignited by her lover striking her with lightning bolts each night, ignited by the sun, brushing gently against her shoulders and drawing evergreen from her lips in the morning. Ignition, noun: paramour, passion, rapture, the spark of midnight candles and the ignition of the artist who works under their glow. Ignition, noun, may also refer to combustion, may also refer to nuclear fusion, may also refer to the mome

Heavenly Bodies We are at war with the sky. Stars shatter into spears, eclipsing into shades of night and darkness, striking the ground like bolts of lightning to walk the earth as fiery ghosts. The sun is alive, and it scorches our skin, gives us life yet steals the shadows from our wars so that we may be haunted by ghosts that lurk in the glow of each eclipse, tugging grief and joy into the light and chasing each year into the dark. The moon has forsaken the darkness. We are alive but she is basking in the light, weaving oceans with her silver fingers, warring with the heavenly bodies as she begs them to collide, to eclipse our cheeks wi

Happy Birthday I am a different person than the person I was born, on a Thursday, I come screaming into the big empty because I have no words to fill the gap between my gums, waving baby fists like hammers towards the gods who strike me down with lullabies and Sunday prayer until I grow into the girl in the watermelon dress. I am a patchwork quilt of someone else's baby blankets and I am still ignorant because I am small and my knees too skinny until they are not, until I am busting at the seams of what a twelve year old is expected to be by society I am ham hocks and birthday cakes but I am also Greek mythology and library books yet I w

Bubble Bath I think I was dead before I hit the water. Bubbles cling to my skin, so pale even in the yellow glow of the bulbs in the dimming-dark light of not quite nighttime, so foreign I am afraid to look. But I look anyway. I see knobby knees poking out of the water a chest rising to the surface with each breath a stomach distended and distorted by oil slicks of soap skin that puckers into bolts of lightning on each hip a girl that wonders if she is shaped like sexy or beautiful so I pour in more bubbles, stale peppermint from a sample size bottle. They cling to my hair like sea foam on wet sand. I blow them into the air and I do not f

Breathe To write is to breathe. I hold between my fingertips words no less fragile than paper flowers, collecting their ashes into paragraphs and happy endings. To finish a story is to end a life, to take the breath out of yellowed pages, collect the souls of the dead and hold them out for the reader to mourn. But paper was meant to be bruised with ink the way words were meant to be spoken, words were born to end up spilling on to every sheet of paper and breathe life back into hemlock and spruce, a life I can hold and chase into collections that collect in every crevice of my home. Words have built more stories than any man could hold in

Achilles The difference between gods and men is that they do not understand why we have learned to die. The prince, son of a goddess, was born into his destiny, taught that heroes do not have happy ends and warriors do not have room for love. As The Fates would have it, he fell fast and hard for a quiet soul, too soft for the bite of bronze and the hunger of the war to which he was bound, so the prince took up a spear and followed the promise of glory and death across the sea. The war was long but they spent their nights forgetting bloodshed in favor of pale sands under moonlight. The rough palms of a fighter clasped a healer's hands and