Mariah Proctor
Stories (5)
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The Ballad of Scruffy the Hero Dog
I glanced out through the lovingly homemade curtains. There sat Ryder, 8 years old, shoulders hunched against the wild Alaskan forest backdrop. He looked down at Scruffy with the same sad uncertainty we all had. He’d been run over by a car. He lay in the soft grass of the yard pleasant, but panting. We didn’t know enough to be able to tell if he’d be ok.
By Mariah Proctor4 years ago in Petlife
The Collector
[Inspired by a true story.] Stephen couldn’t decide which pain was worse; the pounding in his head from the blood that was rushing there, or the knowledge that all this could’ve so easily been avoided if he hadn’t decided to take off his coat, or if he'd remembered to tighten his harness again afterwards, or if he hadn’t tried to turn halfway around to tuck his cold gear into his climbing bag.
By Mariah Proctor4 years ago in Earth
Turning a Wall into a Window
A wail of distress broke the nighttime silence of our little home and I forced one heavy eye open to check the time on my phone. 2am. It was the middle of the night going into my 31st birthday, but as I glanced across the bed to my husband who had to get up for work at 5, I knew I would have to be the one to answer the call of our insistent, nocturnal two-year-old. It turned out that his middle-of-the-night emergency was that a favorite toy had dropped off the side of his crib, out of reach, and he was inconsolable. I held his sobbing little body close and rocked him back and forth in the golden glow of his nightlight, thinking how desperately I wanted to be sleeping and how this wasn’t my idea of a great start to a birthday. But I looked at the blank wall above his crib and started to think again on the scene I planned to paint there and I began to calm, even as he did.
By Mariah Proctor4 years ago in Families
The Struggle Itself
The bell continued its shrill call for a full 180 seconds and just like that, the office that only moments before had been alive with the rhythm of determined fingers pressing identical buttons, lay abandoned and silent. During work hours there was a predictable shuffle of diligent workers, in corresponding grays, each bearing the embroidered symbol of the Bureau. Yet for all their careful synchronicity, they rarely spoke with one another. The purity of true silence was a welcome rest for this literary factory that otherwise bore the noise of carefully enforced speechlessness.
By Mariah Proctor5 years ago in Fiction
