Lost in my messy mind @mrxvonpallero - Tumblr Blog

soft permisson

The first night they made love she stayed awake long afterward so she could watch him sleeping, to witness a part of him that he himself had never seen.

– Alison Moore, from “Communiqué,” Small Spaces Between Emergencies: Stories (Mercury House, 1992)

a-quiet-green-agreement

So down underneath the bridge we went. Down there the ice was crystal clear, very thick, and it all like a room we had all to ourselves shut off by the snowdrifts on either side. We sang and laughed, ate our oranges. Quite my nicest memory.

– James Reaney, from “Master William Butterfield,” The Box Social and Other Stories (The Porcupine’s Quill, 1996)

a-quiet-green-agreement

Time passes like a thick, slow-moving river. You go back to work at the office and the diner and the movie theater where you show people their seats in the dark with your little flashlight, because there is no employment for historians in love with swamp monsters and their family secrets. You never dream of that vast, black ocean anymore. You never dream of anything at all, and, for that, you're grateful.

– Natalia Theodoridou, from “Nocturnal,” The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 1 (Undertow, 2025)

a-quiet-green-agreement

The night is clear, each star bright and perfect as a new idea. There is no traffic, no one else about. He is alone in the world.

– James Sallis, from”Attitude of the Earth Toward Other Bodies,” Time’s Hammers: The Collected Short Fiction (Toxic, 2000)

a-quiet-green-agreement

"Where should we go?" whispers one to the other.

"Away," she replies, and holding on to each other, they stumble into the spring, the wide world rising to meet them with the dawn.

– Amal El-Mohtar, from “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories (Tor, 2026)

weird-ecologies

Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day. It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers. It means learning how to eat, how to speak among people and walk and love and more than any of that, learning how to just sit still. You're moving into a house the last tenants trashed. You spend all your time ripping up the piss-carpet, filling in the holes in the wall, and you also somehow have to remember to feed yourself and make rent and not kick every person who talks to you in the face.

— Kaveh Akbar & Paige Lewis, from the introduction to Another Last Call: Poems On Addiction & Deliverance