Skip to main content

[FICTION] Tales from Port Astor | Whispers 1

 "Hello caller, you are on the air"


"I can't sleep. I see my days play out in my mind; the banality of my life projected like old film upon the canvas of my closed eyes. The fine details lost under patina so heavy as to be entirely lost. And what plays on that movie? Which is so gray and dull as to be worn river rock? The small moments of each passing day, but utterly unable to be separate from one-another. Already lifeless as it is reduced to the mere physicality of brain matter and electrical activity."

"But more than that, the failings of my life, none individually extraordinary, consume me in their totality. Lack of family, found or otherwise; the path of my life so lost in the weeds as to make me wonder if it was ever really there."

"I can't sleep. As I lay there, watching that film, I fear that it will still be playing when I open my eyes; looming over me as I lay in the dark, illuminated by what little inner-city light that creep-crawls in through the blinds like vine through stone. The light forming scan-lines across its visage as it bores into me."

"I can't sleep. I can't tell what my life is anymore, or if I am just running in place as it loops in on itself; living only in the film playing before my eyes; living only in that which haunts me when I lie fitfully at night. A simulacra of myself."

"I can't sleep anymore. I don't know if I have ever been awake."


"Thank you, caller."

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[Guest Writer] Gemini by Brian Rydquist

Editor's Note: This is a content warning for those sensitive to certain topics; self-harm, child loss, graphic descriptions of violence.            Sylvia bent over the lifeless bodies of the newborn infants she had just spent six hellish hours delivering. Screams of anguish poured from her diaphragm, blood soaked her nightgown from the waist down. Her husband William knelt beside her, stroking her shoulder in a futile attempt at comfort. The midwife, an elderly Inuit woman, knelt on her otherside. “Please miss,  you must lay down. Your body has suffered incredible stress, the birth was not a good one.” “My babies, my babies, this can’t be!” Sylvia shrieked, deaf to the woman’s words. “Shh, shh,” William was muttering as he rubbed her shoulders. “Maybe it won’t be, I have already sent for the spirit leader of my tribe. He should arrive any moment.” “Don’t be a fool! How dare you give my wife this false hope! You can clearly see the babie...
4 comments
Read more

[FICTION] Pallid

     Eabha trudged barefoot through the sodden moonlit forest of early Winter, with soot and ash in her dark hair, and a spike of iron hanging on from her waist. Inquisitor Molan of The Black Saint had come to her home after the ill-fated duel with the closet thing she ever had to a brother, Cillian. And Molan had come with torches, and force. The last memory Eabha would ever have of her home was its conflagration.      It had all started when famine came at the hands of rot that took the grain. The village blamed Draoi Righnach, Eabha’s mentor, and whose line had been there in the Ban Forest for longer than it knew that name. So the Tiarna, the lord, called for an Inquisitor of Saint Macsen. Righnach had then soon disappeared searching for the culprit she knew caused the rot and harvest failure.      The issue was, however, that Righnach had vanished the same day Inquisitor Molan had come to The Ban. When Cillian had realized this, he ...
2 comments
Read more

[Guest Writer] Rain, Again by Charlena Kea

  Uncle, it is happening again. The rain has come. I have spent thousands of nights praying that the world would realize something when they pulled your small body from the river. How delicate life is. How precious. How it floats and swells and then vanishes in even the gentlest currents. I prayed you would be more than a forgotten proverb. In a story about big men in faraway places. Their empty fists and uncalloused fingertips meeting tabletops unscathed. And the rain falling faithfully in turn. They say they are here to protect us. That we are safe behind a blinding cloud of rubble and the dust of month-old bones. But I always wonder why they did not protect you; my most precious kin. I wonder what it is that must be offered to deserve their protection. Because your fluttering pulse and brand new eyes for an old and broken world were not enough. A child’s body and a child’s heart is not enough. They didn’t protect you when the squall of fire and metal touched down on the land...
2 comments
Read more