Inspired by the poem „Antigonish“ by Hughes Mearnes

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Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. At first while passing him I almost didn’t see him, but something made me turn around and there he wasn’t.

You might call me crazy hearing this. How can I have met someone that wasn’t there. And I might agree with you if I hadn’t clearly noticed him not being there.

I should ex...

In the semi-darkness, the pebbles looked like coffee beans. Shaun could almost smell the aroma of freshly roasted beans, despite it having been years since he last smelled it. Still it felt to him like yesterday.

He took the calm moment to remember the coziness of his favourite café, the way the coffee beans turned slowly darker with each turn of the rotor that was steering them. The air getting ...

Gently stroking hair

Lovingly touching my cheeks

Pain from being hit...

The day after Leila finally managed to defeat Alistor and free her kingdom from decades of tyranny, she went for a walk in a nearby forest. The celebrations have been going on and she needed some quiet and distance from all the people thanking her. Not that she wasn‘t happy, it just was a lot. 

Her arm still hurt where Alistor managed to slice through her armor, probably overpowering all the other...

"Who are you?" - those were the hardest three words to hear in my life. And yet, it was just a random encounter that confronted me with this question. I went to an exhibition, modern art, a mix of philosophical questions and educational content. 

One of the pieces was a small room. Black and empty. On one wall was a body-sized mirror and through a speaker, in a loop, came a voice asking existentia...

You are at a dinner party, sitting down to eat, when you glimpse someone sneaking a suspicious substance into your food. 

This wasn’t too much of a surprise for you. After all, you had just done the same to another guest sitting nearby. It would surprise you if any of the plates on the table did not contain some kind of suspicious substance. The trick would be to pretend this wasn’t the case and s...

Have you ever known a person that you hated with all your heart? The pure sight of them causing you to have violent fantasies, their voice leaving you annoyed, even their smell being nauseating to you? 

To Elle, almost everyone is like this. She can tolerate only a few chosen people. She had to drop out of school, her parents needing to move to the countryside so she wouldn’t have to encounter peo...

The key they had given me still fit the lock, but the house no longer felt like home…

The walls and roof were still the same. The baby blue outer wall had faded a bit and looked more like the sky covered by those misty clouds up high and the red rooftiles were partly covered by moss and not as shiny as they used to, but it was easy to imagine what the house look like all those years ago. 

The door...

Jane knew what she was getting into. It was a deliberate decision. One last heist. The riskiest one yet, and the one with the most profit. After this she would be set for life. Nevertheless did it turn out harder than she anticipated.

She and Felix have done heists together since they were old enough to walk. First, they were small childish things. Stealing something from their parents or sibling...

(This story is about a character I play in a Spire Campaign. If you want to know more about the setting, please google the TTRPG Spire. When creating him, I also took more freedoms than were intended by the rules, with the approval of my fellow players and GM of cause.)

The bar was fuller than usual. People bustling around, drinking, playing games, having fun. Unusual for a bar in Red Row, but no...