Erin Benson
Bio
Teacher. Student. Advocate. Writer of personal essays about grief, loss, mindfulness, mental health, and the complexities of being human. Have an idea for a dystopian trilogy.
Achievements (1)
Stories (3/0)
- Runner-Up in Return of the Night Owl Challenge
Some DreamsRunner-Up in Return of the Night Owl Challenge
For a while, after her son died, she could still distinguish between dreams and reality. Dreams varied. Some included a central task, like the dream where she misplaced him at a party. She searched room after room, some familiar and some not, parting the cigarette smoke with her hands and asking revelers if they’d seen him. He’s got big auburn curls and a limp. He’s only two, she said. Some dreams sucked her back in time, like the one where she and a long-lost friend from middle school resolved an elusive conflict. She didn’t know why they had drifted apart. She didn’t know why this one friendship kept haunting her, why the electrical signals created more than twenty years ago fired again and again while she slept. Some dreams revealed an unmet need, an aching desire to find a place to pleasure herself or a person to find pleasure with. The point is, dreams varied. But since he died, her reality was always the same. Reality always included a deep well of pain, a tether to the physical, a reminder of his absence.
By Erin Benson2 years ago in Fiction
Designer Instincts
I met my childhood best friend, Mike, shortly after my parents purchased their first home in a nondescript suburb of Minneapolis in 1984. I was two years old and can’t remember our first interaction, but the story of our meeting is one of those tales that takes on mythic proportions for small, interested audiences. The story goes like this. Mike's mother, Pam, wandered across the street to welcome my mom and me to the neighborhood, hopeful that I might become a playmate for her youngest son. I was riding a tricycle and immediately offered Mike my Big Wheel with the words, "Here. You can have this one." And then, we were inseparable.
By Erin Benson3 years ago in Confessions
The Unnamed Child
The planet was dying, and Ward Ad1 welcomed it. She longed for it, especially in the evening when consciousness returned to end her drug-induced slumber. She fumbled for the eyedropper next to her bedroll, opened the face shield on her helmet, and winced as the moisture coated the lens of her eyes. Pink tears slid down her cheeks as she sat up and took her first painful breath of the day. The oxygen from her tank pierced her lungs. She sipped stale air, eventually gathering enough strength to sit up, the sharpness of her breathing slowly subsiding. She nudged the lump in the bedroll next to hers and elicited a soft but unmistakably angry grunt. Ward Ma3 cracked her dry, dust-encrusted eyelids open just enough to glare at her bunkmate.
By Erin Benson3 years ago in Fiction