101 Words

I never forced Dave to lick the metal bar inside our family freezer, but I offered him a dollar if he did. The fool! The icy hinge stuck to his tongue like super glue; when he pulled back his head and ripped himself free, tiny taste buds remained intact on the door, visibly wiggling from side to side. After that, Dave applied Orajel to his wounded mouth four times daily, hiding the numbing ointment out of reach from others in his bedroom. I gave his selfish behavior very little thought until I fell while skateboarding and knocked out my two teeth.

He awoke, as he often did, in the middle of the night. His duvet was tangled from the man’s lack of sleep, and his right hand hung off the side of the bed. Groaning, he rubbed his eyes with his other hand and tried to locate the piercing red figures on his LED alarm clock. 03:03.

Exactly three hours and twenty-seven minutes until he needed to be up. Another groan. His dog’s damp tongue rubbed across his right hand, as if for comfort. Not a moment later, he heard his only dog bark, loudly and from the bottom of the stairs.

Morgan, a concerned father of three, stared nervously at the uploaded file he’d spent days working on, entitled ‘No Free Speech Equals Fascism.’

Heart pounding in his ears, he moved the cursor to hover dangerously over the SEND button.

Images began flickering in his mind like playback of stop-motion animation.

Bloodthirsty Twitter posts, hateful headlines,

death threats to his children, rape threats to his wife,

vulturous journos picking away at his past,

termination of employment,

knocks at his door.

Awareness returning, his eyes landed on the framed picture at his desk: beaming children, darling wife.

He sighed and pressed ‘cancel’ instead.

Hannah’s heart raced as she walked into the cafeteria to have lunch with her co-workers. After hiding her intermittent depression for years, she finally gathered the courage to talk about it and felt ready to reveal her authentic self. She couldn’t help worrying though because she knew the stigma against mental illness still existed, and she might be judged harshly.

Hannah’s face lit up when she saw how receptive her friends were and was more than happy to answer all of their questions. A co-worker wiped the smile off her face when he asked, “Why can’t you just snap out of it?”

Back then I went swimming every day; it was what kept me going. In the locker room, I avoided eye contact with the other boys. Felt the pleasant smell of chlorine as I approached the pool.

A rush of cold. Butterfly, then front crawl. Alternating strokes, legs kicking, fast-moving blue tiles. Gliding. The air erupting from my lungs in muffled rage, like secret oblivion. “Look,” kids often whispered in school as I walked past. “The faggot.”

Afterward I floated on my back; gazed up at the bright lights. The water eased my mind, you see. It listened. The water was my friend.

Its tiny fingers poked out of the towel it was wrapped in, inside a cardboard box. Its face was covered in dots of dry blood. He was a new resident of the world. And the eyes were yet to be opened. Someone left this young creature outside the main entrance of an eighteen-floor block of flats. With no note. Who was he meant for? I picked the box up and lo and behold on the inner side, written with black eyeliner: ‘Dear Good Samaritan, please make sure that my baby is safe.’ It was signed: ‘The lady hanging above you.’