Mallory Rose
Bio
Writing to create, to grow, to confront, to become, to heal.
Stories (6)
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The Buzzer
The apartment where she was starting her life over had one of those outdated intercom systems with a loud, jarring buzzer that always made her heart jump and her skin itch. Her cats hated it too, always scattering when the noise rang through her apartment, sprinting for that dark, enclosed space under her bed that made them both impossible to find. She wondered, as that buzzer echoed through her apartment and her breath caught in her chest and her cats' claws slid over the hardwood floor as they ran for cover, if it would still make her feel that way if she wasn't now built out of anxiety and PTSD. But there was no point in what ifs and maybes in this brave new world.
By Mallory Rose3 months ago in Fiction
a love story, post-mortem. Runner-Up in Instructions for Disappearing Challenge.
hold him as tightly as he holds you as if letting go would extinguish stars and rewrite constellations and make the world go dark wrap around him like vine and ivy, even as he rips out your petals—he loves me, he loves me not—and digs up your roots he'll become a stranger overnight, one that exists only to lie and cheat, to maim you and brutalize you and destroy you but keep holding on, a cruel game of tug of war, muscles screaming and rope ripping skin off calloused palms send texts, paragraph after paragraph, begging for explanation, for closure, for respect or kindness or humanity get cold, heartless, one-word replies from an interloper wearing the skin of the man who once told you that you were the sun unwrap the lies of unconditional forever that he spent endless nights braiding into your hair and painting on your skin stop eating when food tastes like the cremated remains of the person you were before when you were one heart in two bodies his family—your family for eight years—they'll leave too without a goodbye, proving you're just crumpled garbage, a soggy cigarette butt in a gutter pluck clumps of tangled hair out of shower drains as your chapped lips bleed and your brittle bones crumble to dust realize too late that you're becoming shadow and smoke and try to grasp those missing tendrils of your soul as fiercely as you once held him you almost make it, broken glass gathered in bloody palms, when you see that picture of him with the girl, the one who faked friendship to cover jealousy get swept away, spin-cycling in a violent wave of pain and betrayal, smashed against jagged cliffs, eroding and melting and drowning in polluted, oil slick waters let the seaweed tangle around your legs and pull you deep, like the vine you used to be when you grew only around him like a twisted baptism, the water will cleanse you, stitching split skin with barbed wire, erasing memories and identity and the stamp of him embossed on your soul, and finally—finally—you let go who are you? where are you? what are you? nothing.
By Mallory Rose5 months ago in Poets
