Carla H. Krueger

Some ancient oversight had nearly taken his sight, but this sad fuck was already blind inside.

Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.

Youngsters deserve no opinions.

He remembers how someone _ he forgets who _ once said in a sarcastic tone, __sn__ she just Little Miss Sweetness and Light?_ _ and it was a statement that put him off proposing. It made him seriously reassess his options. He didn__ want to be with someone others saw as overly-moral because he has flaws, he has weaknesses. How would his mistakes compare to her virtuousness? She used to dislike the competitiveness at work, the way she claimed she could never really make friends with anyone because everything was always so fake and cut-throat and he used to berate her for it, used to tell her to accept it, to realise the truth about life and relationships _ but she wouldn__ take it. She was always thinking too hard about everything, always questioning her motives. Surely, if he__ married her, she__ have started questioning his.

Time is not an enemy as such, but a missing person, sending cryptic postcards from the past.

Nearly two years of dates. Still no question. Her mother and father want to set a proper date. Still no question. Her friends keep asking, when, Natasha? When? But she still hasn__ been asked The Question. It__ enjoyable to be the one with all the secrets, but in her honest mind _ the hidden part that__ always sleeping _ the secrets he keeps about when and if give her a feeling inside she__ never really understood completely _ a sensation she had as a child when she got to the end of a fairytale where never-ending love and happiness were all but expected and wondered whether there might be_. one last page.

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.

On some days she was able to see both sun and moon at the same time. Like feuding cousins, they hung in two corners of the vast world-ceiling refusing to look at one another. The moon was always harder to spot and more faded, but it was there if you looked, as many things were.

Beyond the boundaries of herself, her parents and the enclosing garden walls, were open fields and other waiting places she still knew nothing of _ lies of the land, perhaps. What Katie did know is that out there in the lonely nowhere was a special quietness, free of the sounds of daytime birds or foxes at night _ and that it was a quietness she might like to listen to one day.

He had become the sky around the sun _ alive, but not really there.

The breeze around them seemed to drop _ dead _ like a door to the best things had just closed.

Life isn't over until you're dead. Another ultra-positive, ultra-motivational tweet to improve your day. You're welcome.

Prayer is better than pills.

Books are readable drugs.

Bea stared at the pencils as if they were enemies.

Blank walls are a shared canvas and we're all artists.

Writing is a solitary existence, especially if you forget to chat to your friends _ sorry, I meant characters.

Dawn cackles as she guides me through the all-glass porch. Thinner, paler Reina shuffles about behind Dawn, watching as I slip my boots off. Although she tries to hide her hands, her fingers flicker nervously. I place my boots neatly on the floor of the porch beside the other pairs in the shadows under the coats. Music drifts through to us from a distant room _ it__ the Beach Boys_ California Dreamin_. Dawn looks at me and I smile _ they__e put the record on for me. Dawn nods along happily. __ear you__e a surfer boy!_ she says and she mimics riding a wave.