“Stay quiet”

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The cheap gin and tonic was a prop, a piece of stagecraft for the one-woman show I was performing. The real alcohol was the look in his eyes. It was a slow, deliberate intoxication, the kind that seeps into your bloodstream and warms you from the inside out.  We talked for another hour, the meaningless…

The ten-year reunion was scheduled for a Saturday night at a place called “The Alibi,” a bar that tried way too hard to look like a dive. It had all the right props – scuffed wood, neon signs for beer I’d never drink, a sticky film on every surface – but it lacked the authentic…

I fell in love with him the way a stain spreads on a white tablecloth: slowly, silently, and in a way that you know will never, ever come out. It wasn’t a lightning strike or a cinematic moment. It was a slow, creeping awareness that settled in my bones during eleventh-grade literature.  He sat two…

The house is quiet now. Not the good kind of quiet, the kind I spent fifteen years cultivating in stolen hotel rooms and coffee shop corners. This is the hollow quiet of a life that has finally, completely emptied out.  His youngest left for college last month. I saw the pictures his wife posted on…