This website is primarily dedicated to my romance reading and writing, but you can also find links to some of my other work below.
Stories
Split
“Patricia had only taken a few steps outside when she felt dizzy, everything tilting a little, growing fuzzy. She put her hands on her knees, breathed deep. Her insides grew too big for her skin; bones, muscles, organs pushed against her. With a yell, she felt her insides burst free. She fell to the ground. After, there was relief. When she opened her eyes, Patricia saw herself, an exact duplicate of herself, sitting right next to her.”
The Road to Canada
“It was 2005, the summer between Val’s junior and senior years of high school. She was seventeen, her brother Joe twenty-two. They’d taken to hanging out for the first time since they were kids, reunited by a shared listlessness. … They spent most weekends driving aimlessly around town, occasionally stopping by thrift stores in search of the old Goosebumps books they’d collected as kids. One weekend, bored of their usual haunts, Joe declared they should drive to Canada.”
The Living and the Dead
“Victoria walked to the hallway on unsteady feet, wispy legs. The gown fluttered behind her. She could barely feel the ground beneath her feet, like she was floating. She floated out of the room, down the hospital’s corridors, all the way outside. The street lamps lit up a mosaic of reds and yellows blazing in the trees, openly signaling their imminent decay. … She remembered the great big oak rushing toward her. The flash of bark. The exhilaration she felt when she thought it was all over.”
High Rise
“Late at night, when he was alone and couldn’t sleep and couldn’t stand it, something gripped him, some force he couldn’t control. He stumbled out of his apartment into the hot night, following it to the corner liquor store to buy a twelve pack of stout. …Back home, Josh sat on the high-rise’s roof in the old patio chair that pre-dated him, chain-smoking … He stared up at the sky, tracking the plane lights crossing the constellations, imagining they were space crafts, that one might beam him up.”
The Zukurski Twins
“Their parents found them in the pond behind their house. Their creamy faces bobbing just below the surface. Hair fanned out the way a mermaid’s might. They were wearing their white flower girl dresses. Small black shoes that buckled. They wouldn’t have drowned by themselves. They were too cautious. Too smart. They wouldn’t have gone farther than knee-deep if they happened to find themselves alone. They should have never found themselves alone.”
Creative Nonfiction
The Lake House Incident
“Each time we pushed a new boundary, a familiar, nagging voice crept into my head, telling me it was wrong, I would get in trouble, I would be a bad person. Each time I voiced my anxiety to Em, she cajoled me, just like I needed her to. I had to figure out if I still believed in that voice, if that voice even belonged to me, or if it was just one more thing that had been pushed on me by other people, making me believe that what someone else wanted—my boyfriend, my parents, even God—mattered more than what I wanted.”
Cross Country Chase
“Sometimes he left for hours. Sometimes he left for days. He’d spend nights in Seattle with his older brother, getting too drunk to drive or, in one instance, trying and calling me at 3:30 a.m. as I was walking to my opening shift at Starbucks to say he’d been arrested. Later, when I got home, ready to comfort him, I found him on the bed, passed out with his shoes still on.”
Elliott Smith: A Head Full of Flames
“Elliott didn’t want to be known as the ‘lugubrious singer
songwriter,’ but it’s hard to think of him any other way, with lyrics spilling broken relationships, heroin addiction, daydreams of suicide. His depression was the hallmark of both his life and music. At seventeen, I possessed a disposition mingling bitterness with skepticism, and so I believed I knew just how Elliott felt trying to contain a head full of flames. At times, it was all I could do to not be vicious to my family, my peers, my teachers, surliness being a primary symptom of my acute seventeen-year-old-ness.”
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Melissa Rose 