Few things burn quite so hot as young love. Few things claw at you quite as painfully as young heartbreak.
Karessa spent her days and nights in her room. Crying, mostly. Sobbing. Howling. Thrashing. Bleeding out as tendrils of despair tore at her heart. Screaming his name into a pillow like a cry for help into a void in which she dwelled alone. She hated him. She missed him. She wanted him back. She wanted him dead. She wanted to die.
Time passed. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Five”
“Out,” Karessa said. “I’m allowed to be out.”
“You’re sixteen,” said the woman who gave birth to Karessa, who was seventeen. Her mom was sitting on their couch, reading a book with a half-dressed giant on the cover, and glowering. “And you live in my home.”
“I pay for the place,” Karessa did not say. “I was just with a friend,” Karessa said. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Three”
Insultingly close to the Mish Mash lie the evergreen plains in which the wealthiest families of Skymoore had built their estates. There you could find the Windblown Manor, home of the Windomere family, Progress Point, home of the Stonesoul family, and the creatively-named Dufton Estate, home of the Dufton family, to which Lawrence Dufton belonged. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part Two”
A long time ago, sometime after Seamoore became Skymoore and sometime before the present, a number of disabled, sick, pretentious, and otherwise undesirable people were deemed unfit for proper society, and they were quarantined in a crowded district to live in misery together. (Today it is generally agreed that this was an awful thing to do, though that doesn’t do much for the people who languished there.) The resulting region was forced to expand upward, rather than outward, and to become its own self-sustaining ecosystem, containing a little bit of everything if you knew where to look. This jungle of wood and rust, known today as the Mish Mash, was almost a city unto itself, with its own politics, its own culture, and its own leaders. Continue reading “Bad Faith, Part One”
“Was the Suntouched ever in love?” Karessa asked one day as Donovan limped onto the store floor from his living quarters. Everyone had noticed the limp, but Donovan didn’t acknowledge it, so neither did they. It was looking better, anyhow. “Any special women in his life?”
“No,” Donovan replied, perhaps too quickly.
“Men?”
“Wha? No! Er, not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“Of course there isn’t.”
“Right.”
“Shouldn’t even need to say it.”
“I don’t.”
“But you did.”
“Well, anyways, the Suntouched had neither.”
“Really? He galivanted all over the world for what – thirty years? Fifty? – and he never had a girlfriend? A lover? A fling?” Continue reading “A Brief Note on the Love Life of the Suntouched, wherein we Briefly Check in on the Lives of Donovan Allman and Karessa Plunderton, and Which Contains a Very Long Title as to Obfuscate the Miniscule Length of the Piece Itself”
“Do you know where your father is?” Mrs. Plunderton asked.
“Out shopping,” Karessa replied automatically as she tied the laces of her boots. In truth, Karessa had not seen her father in four years. Nobody had. “You know how the Mish Mash is. You get all the best deals this time of day.”
“Doing anything after school?”
“Theater. I’ll be home late.”
“Oh, for the love of – are you still wasting your time there? Do you know where we’d be if your father and I wasted our childhoods playing pretend instead of working?”
Maybe not in the Mish Mash, Karessa almost said. Instead, she chose to endure her mother’s rant and try not to take it personality. It wasn’t easy. Never was. Continue reading “Assembly”
Odd & Ends 