karlolegend
Bio
I must write until I die, I thought as I foolishly believed, since the world I live in makes no sense, only to discover the world written about is a world even more questionable.
Stories (3)
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FRIENDLY STAKES. Content Warning.
CHAPTER ONE: THE STRADDLE a voluntary blind bet made before the cards are dealt The shift key is broken. Jamie noticed this three days ago, an hour or two before dawn, while designing a logo for a startup selling meal kits to people who pretend they don’t have time to cook. It took him forty-five minutes to realize it wasn’t the software. Just the shift key. Dead. Unresponsive. He ordered a replacement from a site that sells Chinese knockoffs at American prices. It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow. Or next Tuesday. Could be a month from now—those delivery dates are meaningless. They say it’s guaranteed, but then the package sits in a warehouse on the other side of the world for six days.
By karlolegend26 days ago in Chapters
THE PETRIFACT
The medication was still dissolving under Vera's tongue when she realized the lake was breathing, was expanding and contracting in rhythms that had nothing to do with wind or tide or any natural hydrodynamics she'd studied during her three semesters of marine biology before dropping out to care for her mother who was currently dying in the facility on Korčula's northern coast in a room that smelled like industrial bleach trying to hide the particular odor of bodies giving up, and Vera was supposed to be there, was supposed to be holding her mother's hand and saying comforting things about heaven and reunion with Vera's father who'd died in the war, the real war not the economic one, who'd been shot in Vukovar when Vera was six months old so she had no memories of him except photographs and her mother's stories which had changed over thirty years, had been refined and edited until they bore no relationship to actual events but were instead mythology, were founding narrative of their family of two, and now that family was ending, was reducing from two to one, and Vera was at the lake instead of the facility because being at the facility meant watching her mother dissolve and Vera had already watched enough dissolution, had spent six months documenting her mother's cognitive decline, her personality fragmentation, her transformation from woman who'd raised Vera alone into something that wore her mother's face but wasn't her mother, was just biological process, was just neurons misfiring, was just body forgetting how to maintain itself.
By karlolegend2 months ago in Fiction
THE WEED MADE ME PARANOID BUT I WAS RIGHT
The clock strikes midnight with the sound of a ledger snapping shut, and Peter clocks in for another shift at the Hopetown Gas & Go, where the fluorescent lights hum a frequency that vibrates at the exact pitch of his guilt and the parking lot stretches into darkness, a ninth circle of suburban hell waiting beyond the glass, and he's been doing this for eight months now, ever since his mother got sick and he made the decision that would define everything that came after, the decision he tells himself was about medical bills but knows, in the place where truth lies beneath the narratives we construct, was about something else entirely.
By karlolegend2 months ago in Fiction
