the observationals

things observed from my brain and surroundings. these are glorified journal entries.

'Ghost Signs' - 2025

Somewhere: a ghost whose existence has been denied.
A girl, just twelve, when the weather’s cold, and much older when the snow melts. With nobody else to believe in, she prays to me,
splits her skin for the blood ritual,
begs me to love her as I should,
bleeds saltwater in my wounds when I don’t.

When the leaves start to turn, it runs to me as a wide-eyed and willowy thing of only fourteen,
scrutinizing every action,
bite, word, scar,
scuffs a sneaker in gym, twists the knife in limbo.
“No one will help,” it spits out with the bile. In the meantime, it intercepts dozens of signals, on the hour. They are all saying that no one will help.
I ask, “who are you?” and it begins to unravel without moving. I don’t know either, and then we both weep.

A spectre, a boy, a something that folds clothes,
empty-handed, kneels to pick them up off the floor.
That thrashes and gouges until it runs dry.
Sixteen and a half, ablaze and afraid,
convinced of his own inevitability.
This mass of misery:
dragged through a snowbank, laid out to dry in the summer sun, and left on the pavement to wither as the Bradford pears bloom.
This one persists when the earth erupts with green; when April rain pours out of my mouth, and the springtime sets into my bones.
As new sprouts litter the dirt,
his unsteady hands choke my ribs, and
we lay there, together.
If I try to pry us from the road, he sinks further into the asphalt.
He stands, aglow, incensed with all he’s known:
The rage, the sick, the vertigo,
the being left for dead.
Standing above me, he shreds my heart and sings to the parched pavement,

Unanswered pleas they failed to see
a gentle voice that cracks with grief:
“we need to go,” and make it brief.

'From One Afternoon In August' - 2026

It is the type of summer you read about in books when you were a kid.

Humidity that coats your skin with stick, and doesn’t fade with nightfall,

the chitter and thrum of cicadas carried on a sputtering gust of wind.

Sucking down the last of a raspberry popsicle while your bare feet simmer on hot concrete,

and you watch lightning splinter across the dense cloud cover. It threatens to split the balmy afternoon in half.

the stories

my short stories, if you'd like to call them that. mostly character interactions against a backdrop of whatever setting i was currently into.