When the enemy came, I heard a boy cry, “look, the knight has come to save us,” and I ran in the opposite direction.
Before she dissolved into butterflies, she handed me Mr. Teddy, looked back at me, poked my face, and whispered, “Goodbye, Daddy.”
Now I clutch his rattle, wondering why heaven needed him before I ever got to meet my son.
Eventually, I stopped asking why she thought I was.
And I hope you never get to see me when it finally wins.
I noticed how when we're in a dark room, you're holding on to something else that isn't my hand, and it scares me
When I recognized my wife's voice, I reached for her tray—and realized I heard my own voice coming from inside it.
Years later, I found his name written in the margins of every copy—and each time I read it aloud, he begged me to stop turning the page.
She kissed me without hesitation—then whispered, “You're getting better at this.”
When the soldier demanded proof that I was *human*, my mother rolled up my sleeve—and screamed when she saw the scars were gone.
I found him crying beneath my bed again, so I stabbed him until he stopped saying her name.
After the thing slaughtered my family, I spent twenty years earning its trust until it asked me to deliver its first child.
When it thanked me for saving its bloodline, I reached for the same knife I'd hidden since the night it destroyed mine.
(The hardest part is leaving the reader with a different stories in their heads because it's so ambiguous.)
He smiled and pointed outside, where the dead were already working beneath floodlights that hadn't been there before.
Now I hear a voice that isn't mine, and all it wants is for me to scream.
I thought my little boy was screaming in his sleep until he stopped breathing; then something woke up in my arms with a smile.
My laughter died when I stepped into the sun and saw my shadow was still pinned to the ground where the arrow had landed.
I found their bones beneath the roots, but only two boys were waiting for me when I climbed out—and neither remembered the third.
When they finally pulled it off, they handed me a machete and told me I could still go home—as long as someone else didn't.