Emily Gaines
Bio
Stories (4/0)
Dusting the Attic
I need to rebuild the lactic acid in my pens and legal pads. That’s what they all say, isn’t it? Writing is a muscle, exercise it. Exercises of plot and character and theme and structure and point of view, all neat little blocks that fit together to make a castle, but I’m not sure I like the neat lines. When I exercised in real life I didn’t like the discipline, didn’t like the every day of it, didn’t care for the stamina and the sculpt, I wanted short bursts of energy giving me wings, absolute freedom, and days afterward of paralyzing recline. I don’t think writing should have neat lines, except the little blue ones on notebook pages, because things with neat lines are usually artificial, man-made, and I want to be a force of nature. I want to be messy, because people are messy, no matter how well they like to pretend to be put together, their brains are messy places, and I want to be human.
By Emily Gaines3 years ago in Journal
The Spectre
I always wondered what it would be like to die. I pictured it a thousand ways. I imagined what would come after. Would I go to heaven? I don’t think I was a good enough person for that. What about hell? No, I wasn’t really a bad person. Would everything become void? Like I never existed in the first place?
By Emily Gaines3 years ago in Fiction
Finger Paints, Finger Prints
You find Ma in the kitchen using one of the donttouch knives to slice a bunch of carrots into little strips. “Ma, why does it smell so bad?” you ask, wrinkling your nose the way you do when Ma drives past the dump and the smell crawls through the glass of the windows into the car.
By Emily Gaines3 years ago in Fiction