qrod's profile

It’s Tuesday and I wake up to my alarm with a headache. My mouth is dry and my back already feels sore. There’s a thin sheet of light peeking between the sliding doors separating the living room and the dining room, but it’s quiet in the house and I can tell that my mother has already left for work. I get up off the living-room floor. I have to wake my brother’s up for school so I check my brother’s rooms and see that both of them are sleeping. It’s kind of hilarious; John is a lanky fourtee...

What? Setting: A humble-sort, old-fashioned kitchen. Gas stove. Pictures of chickens on the walls. A table and two chairs. Cast: John- A gray haired old man, very serious towards his wife, average sized. Millie- A gray haired old woman. Overweight, but not obese. Succumbing to senility. Never without a faux-attentive look on her. Nicole- Daughter of Millie and John. Early thirties. Very pretty and casual. Joshie- Son of Nicole, five years old. Enjoying a day of school for a doctor’s appointme...

This is a First Draft. What I remember most is the suffocating closeness of people all around me. The feeling of knowing the person next to you intimately and at the same time not caring if they lived or died just so you could have another second in the sun and in the open space. And I remember the cold. The feeling that must be similar to your heart stopping, or gangrene spreading throughout your arms and legs and head. The inability to stop your body from shaking. And just waiting to become...

I like to wake up in the early mornings for a cigarette before I have to start working. I rub the crust from my eyes and groan at the sound of my alarm. Getting up, I pull on my pants and the shirt I wore the night before and grope my way to the bathroom while my eyes adjust. I stare at myself in the mirror for a few minutes wondering how my eyes got to be so dark, uninviting. The circles around them have gotten darker too. Like my mother would say, "Look at those raccoon eyes, you're not sle...

“It’ll happen this time, I know it will. It’ll happen. It’ll happen.” The rocks Randy and I had stacked on the train tracks stood at least two feet high, big ones and the bottom and smaller ones on top. The last few times we didn’t have a special way of stacking them, we just did it however we wanted, but it never worked, so we had to find a new way. We figured that if we put the big rocks at the bottom, then it’ll help push the train up off the tracks and then the smaller rocks on top would...