Amber beams of late afternoon sun split the venetian blinds. The professor sat in silhouette on the other side of a massive desk.

I envy you your easy solutions, the professor began. Just like we all envy addicts who have a single solution to every problem. But for once I’d like to see you write something without… all the blood. This violence is a crutch for you.

The student stared back at him.

For example, try this: A story where two characters have a conversation and no one dies, no one gets impaled, no limbs are severed. The professor lifted an old-fashioned letter opener from his desk and put it away in a drawer, turning a key to lock it. He went on: Try a story with no one getting disemboweled. Just people talking. The student’s eyes became vacuous. The professor couldn’t determine what exactly he was looking at, if anything. Hey. What’s going on in there? he asked, tapping his temple. Continue reading →

Dorothy lay alone in bed, thinking only of him. She thought of him in the shower as she washed, she thought of him when she ate cakes. When she looked at postcards in the art book store she thought of which one she might send him. She knew she’d made a big mistake when she’d let him go.

That was how Den imagined it, a month after her final text to him.

But instead Dorothy lay on a slab of soapstone, naked. An evening mist rose from the dewy grasses below, back-lit by the red of the setting sun. The fingers of her right hand rested lightly on a sharpened dagger. At midnight she rose, eyes unseeing, tip-toeing forward like a weightless marionette. Following the gleaming point of her silver dagger down a gravel path to the tennis court behind Den’s house. Soon she was up on his balcony, white like chalk outside his floor-to-ceiling window. Then she was in his bed, hardly a ruffle in the covers, waiting for him to come back from washing the stage makeup off his face, waiting for him until he finally slid in beside her and turned off the light, unknowing. Unknowing until cardiac arrest and a gallon of blood geysered up from an open chest wound that had a silver knife handle sticking out of it. Continue reading →