Isabelle stood beneath the archway woven with eucalyptus and jasmine. The late afternoon sun filtered through the leaves, casting shifting patterns of gold across the garden lawn. Her hands trembled slightly around the wildflower bouquet she had picked herself that very morning. The scent of jasmine mingled with the warmth in the air, yet inside her, a cold knot twisted tight in her chest.

Across...

In a town where the houses gleamed white and the lawns never dared to grow wild, a man lived at the end of Ashberry Lane in a shack of salvaged wood and spider-cracked glass. A blemish, they thought, on their perfect little picture.

The children whispered about him as if he might bite.

“Don’t go past the thornbush,” they warned.

“He has teeth for fingers,” one insisted.

“My cousin saw him bathin...

Okay. Okay. I’m calm. I’m chill. I’m so chill I’m practically frozen.

Just a regular, well-adjusted adult sitting alone, totally not consumed by the vague, suffocating sense that something better is happening somewhere else and I am not a part of it.

Love that. Love this for me.

“You can come if you want.”

Oh.

If I want?

Not “you should come” or “we’d love to have you” or “you have to be there, ...

Dahlia Voss laughed, but it wasn’t polite. It wasn’t sweet, like the practiced laugh she’d trained herself to give, the kind that landed softly, like tulle brushing the floor. This laugh was jagged and guttural, tearing from her lungs like a secret finally screamed aloud.

Around her, ruin stretched in every direction. The gallery was drenched in red. Canvases gutted, glass glittering beneath her ...

(For those who touch what burns them anyway)

I saw the matchstick trembling

between your teeth

before you ever spoke.

That embered grin,

half threat, half prayer,

like smoke curling from a chapel door

still whispering with flame.

You were ruin wrapped in velvet,

a lit fuse in a silk dress.

And I:

I was dry wood in winter,

all longing, no caution.

I didn’t fall for you.

I offered myself willingl...

At first, it was a bad dream.

A forest, too quiet. The kind of silence that presses against your ribs. No wind, no birds. Just the creak of a giant tree standing alone in the middle of nothing. Its bark blackened, its roots writhing like snakes in the dry earth. When she got too close, the roots moved. Reached. Grabbed. Tried to drag her under.

She woke up with dirt under her nails, panting, alway...

“Favourite colour? No idea. But his darkest secrets? Those I knew well.”

It’s the line I’ve used for years, whenever someone brings him up. A shrug. A half-smile. A joke just sharp enough to pass as wit, just true enough to leave a mark.

Because what else do you say about a father who was never quite there, but never quite gone?

He wasn’t awful. He didn’t scream or vanish into some cliché. He ju...

I met you in the hush between

two pages creased with longing.

You stepped from ink, a burning thing,

more real than those who haunt my morning.

You spoke in lines not meant for me,

yet I read them like a prayer,

each glance you gave some other name

was mine to wrongly bear.

You live where lanterns never dim,

where storms are poems, blood is grace.

I chase you through a thousand words

and never...

It started with a single word.

In white spray paint, stark against the cracked red brick of the alley wall behind the old community center:

“REMEMBER.”

No one saw who did it. No cameras, no witnesses. Just the word, all in capitals, sitting there like a ghost someone forgot to exorcise.

At first, people ignored it. Just another tag in a city full of them. But then someone added to it, not over ...

Rhea Calder lived life on the second buzz of a crosswalk light. Not the first, no. That was reserved for tourists and trust-fund dreamers. But the second? That was for people like her. People who could jaywalk like choreography. Who knew which corner store sold aspirin without judging your 2 a.m. mascara tears. Who could hear the difference between an angry honk and a warning one.

She was alread...