Here’s a collection of some VSS (very short stories) that I’ve posted on my Bluesky:
Regret weighs heavily on my heart from past mistakes. From memories which I've turned into miserable scenes. What is there to do but purge the grief through pores meant instead for sweat as I take up the pen in my hand and write. Write a new reality where it all may end up happily, just for once.
I sat on a bench overlooking the beach. On the sand further out were a dozen dressed up people. They soon parted and so appeared the radiant bride; beautiful in her flowing white dress. Her smile was as wide as the waterfront. She moved graciously as I watched with envy, wanting it all for myself.
After taking the pills, I sat at my desk and looked down at my pen; that syringe-like instrument which would draw my inner-plasma and inject it back onto the paper canvas. I just needed something to spill my ideas on, to catch my fleeting epiphanies and seal them up forever with a drug-laced kiss.
She is my perpetual winter night; like the glimmering snow, a beauty frozen in time. Amidst tree branches and twigs wrapped in ice, her silhouette glides across the wet ground. She guides me through the still landscape of a twilight world. In an ever-embrace, we keep each other warm and alive.
A Chicago winter is rough. Ice and sleet cover the streets and everything is grey. Not a pure white with freshly fallen snow, no. It’s marred from the tar off the wheels that run themselves over the slush and dirt of an urban landscape. But even then, something beautiful can be found within it.
I take the first L-Train seat I see. The Chicago rooftops drift by in the late afternoon sun. The ones right past the fiberglass, quickly. The ones way behind in the background, slowly. Either way, they all drift by into the recesses of our memories and only reappear once we pass through again.
We shut the door and refused to leave the safety of her bedsheets. It was the warmth of the other’s presence, the refuge of the other’s arms, the calm before the storm. Her room became something close to heavenly, something close to hellish. It was in that room where our game of darkness began.
We'd blacked out. Now, only the stains remained, measuring our madness like height-marks on a wall. We traded in long-term happiness for temporary relief through tiny, pointed teeth. Two lost ships with no lighthouse in sight. Dense fog. Broken compasses. We became unrecognizable; cutlery rivals.
I stared out the hotel window. The city seemed so romantic and bursting with possibility. Lofts, apartments, and suites were scattered across the sky. Below, the people all walked in gracious movements to and from places as taxicabs and cars intermixed like streaks of paint on the same canvas.
There you stand; barely showing a trace of how torn apart you truly are at this very second. You hold in your hand the key to everything and everyone. But you don’t even realize it. All you see is the glorious shine off the crystalline curvature and forbidden knowledge itself.
The city becomes my church with permanent smoke gliding across its surface. Her curls flow down in rivers of taxicabs and speeding hearses. Her lips part the water and coastline with urgency. My bride’s alive in the electric wires powering our cement sanctuary with trillion-watt bulbs.
The violent waters below the cliff sounded terrifying. He stepped up to the edge and drew in a long, deep inhale. “I’m sorry,” he whispered out. Just before allowing his body to make the plunge, he heard it: “Don’t!” An echo beyond time and space. He turned around and walked away.
I couldn’t stay after the fight we’d had. But I couldn’t leave either as sleeping beside her was my favorite thing to do for the fact that even to the slightest touch, she’d nearly purr herself awake. Tonight, there was no purr. Half of my heart stayed behind in that bed as I left.
She’d been with tons of men since marrying him. But he remained faithful. Forgiving, though never forgetting. In time, those slashed pieces of his heart grew into separate forms like planaria, until they finally took the shape of two palm prints wrapped around her cold neck as she slept.
The spiraling descent felt like more of a free-fall. When I finally hit the ground, I wondered if it was truly rock bottom or just another trap door. Once I began selling myself on downtown corners the country over for just one last line, I realized that “Yes. This is indeed, rock bottom.”
Her finely stitched bulletproof vest of silken-threaded wires reflects back a past through mastered alchemy of the very sun’s satin-flowing fire. Her wreath whispers beginnings of the long awaited fulfillment under regal soils of a promise stemmed from paralleled lineages. She is my Poetess-Bride.
Michael rushed her before they left for dinner. She didn’t have enough time to properly conceal the black eye. “Act right tonight,” he warned with his cold, stern voice. Putting on her overcoat, she felt the only warmth left in that entire house: the hood’s polyester fur lining.
We were made for danger and risk. Now all that’s behind us and as she and I stare at one another—knowing that midlife will be slow and arduous—we wonder: what now? “Should we take up pilates?,” she coyly asks. “No,” I say. “Let’s Ocean’s 11 the hell out of The Louvre instead.” Game on.
Over and over, he’d move a chess piece, go to bed, and wake to find an opposing piece in a new spot. By who, he couldn’t be sure. Finally, a whispered “checkmate” during sleep had bolted him awake and as he hurried toward the board, he clutched his chest in pain and fell to the floor, lifeless.
A city slicker driving an old pickup truck was totally his style. He loved being the contrarian. But the townsfolk never warmed up to him. They eventually ran him back off to the Big Apple with pitchforks by way of sneers and cold shoulders. He truly was a beautiful fish out of water.
They asked me to leave a light on so the overnight nurses could still take her vitals every hour. As I walked out of my mom’s personal room and toward the elevators, I felt a newfound respect for the hospital as a whole. Though bleak, it was still giving her another chance at life.
My day’s goal was 10 miles. I’d already walked 12 and was about to set up camp when, on a hillside, I noticed a small yurt. With my curiosity piqued, I hiked over and found it was open, and empty. In the corner was a stack of abandoned books and knew my stay would be a few days, at least.
The bits of moss between the stones were lush and vivid. “This is otherworldly…,” she whispered, walking toward the modest castle down the hillside. It gave off a dark aura and lured her with familial secrets and lost histories. She reached the entrance and opened the doors as her eyes widened.
The slew of wedding dresses were scattered about the abandoned bridal shop with fury. Only the crystal chandeliers hanging from above were spared from the chaos. The silks and satins that had lost their luster decades ago now looked like elegant ghosts. All, long-forgotten, like unspoken vows.
Though the house looked like it’d been empty for a century, he couldn’t resist taking a few pictures. Even the sound of crunching leaves beneath his shoes echoed throughout the wooden hallways. He’d seen enough. Walking away, he never noticed the figure staring at him through the attic window.
She walked an hour to reach the spot. By then, the pebbles and rocks had scraped her bare feet and she ached to soothe them in the water. The sunburst out beyond the horizon set the clouds in the afternoon sky aflame and she felt tears welling up in her eyes. “I miss you,” she softly whispered.
Smoky pink clouds coated sections of the morning sky as dawn properly set in. He’d driven all night to reach her house and now that he was here, he couldn’t move. He looked at the ring once more and placed it back in its box and in his pocket. Finally knocking on her door, he readied himself.
Her breathing quickened as she unwrapped the rectangular box with pure glee. “Oh my God!” she shouted out seeing the bouquet of long stem red roses. But there was only 11. One shy. Just then: a knock at the door. She sprang up and opened to see him standing there with a single red rose in hand.
The first time I laid eyes on him, I knew. A close friendship that concealed my latent passion eventually led to a kiss as my heart began to melt. Now, so many years later, we’re both in wheelchairs and he still blows me kisses with fragile hands as my heart remains to resemble molten lava.
The midnight blue textured suit was a nice balance to the brighter shade of her manicured nails. “Just be yourself, okay?” said the photographer as he snapped away. Only after checking the monitors for possible keepers did anyone notice the horns. “Careful what you ask of me,” she said smiling.
The dirt road curved along until reaching a small wood covered in darkness. Surely, it would hold some type of danger. But wonder, too. And though the sky was covered with dotted sparkles, what would truly illuminate the path was the warm, glowing light of the perfectly centered full moon.
Her white mane flapped in the dusk’s cool breeze. The galloping echoed throughout the valley like a constant thunderclap in the distance, or at least, that’s what freedom sounded like to her. Equine liberation in its rawest form. Among the hills and open prairies, she finally felt at home.
A glowing metropolis that reaches out with neon arms and coyly asks: “do you still dream in technicolor?” Beyond them, its concrete body is an amalgam of individual moments that turn into memories which drift into the recess of our minds and only resurface once we pass through Pittsburgh again.
With beak and feet a matching calm lavender, he climbed the twig and peered out at the world around him. So tiny and delicate, the little exotic bird was a beautiful swirl of teals, greens, and blues. Shades of all types colored his unruffled feathers as he began singing his own beautiful song.
He could hear her off-key singing of show tunes through the wall—all night, every night. He’d never seen his neighbor but the studios in the city were so small, that he couldn’t escape it. After months of annoyance, her voice began lulling him off to sleep. Without warning, he’d become infatuated.
She was asleep, in a dream, unaware that today would be the day. The invisible representatives—an angel and a demon—sat on each side of the bed and debated about who would take her soul once the moment came. The demon slowly peered at her. “Humans,” he sadly said. “What a waste.”
He uprooted his idea of romance with fury like a farmer who uses a shovel in sweltering summer heat. “I will never love her again!,” he promised himself while storming out of the house. He jumped into his car and quickly disappeared out of sight. Hours later he returned, drunk and in love.
He still had all of her pictures up in the house. All of her clothes in the closet. The wedding band never left his finger. When others would ask how he was holding up, he’d say “fine, really.” But the reality was much different. He'd sleep all day hoping he could dream of her.
He always volunteered at a soup kitchen on his birthday to atone for the rest of the year. Though empty within, he portrayed someone very outwardly charming and confident. I suppose it came as no surprise when I finally heard he’d sold all of his possessions and went away to become a Buddhist monk.
“My mother was right about you,” she said under her breath. Like a taipan’s bite, the anger flowed throughout my bloodstream. She knew what she was doing. Like always. Instead of letting it escalate, I gently pulled her to me by the waist and softly kissed her on the lips. “Good,” I said.
He’d hiked for hundreds of miles before getting to the coast. Now here, all he could do is stare out at the sky’s pastel colors. He held in his hand a note she’d written him long ago and read it one last time before slowly walking towards the water. Even after he was submerged, he didn’t stop.
It lasted a month. Just a month. But in that time, we smoked, spoke, and drank bottomless cups of 24-hour diner-coffee. It was a beautiful flurry of near-kisses, laughter, and late nights spent deep in our shared sorrow. So apart from the rest of the world, and very much comforted by it.