J.L. Townsend
Bio
J.L. lives and breathes stories of muted existential hysteria and unkillable joy, and draws inspiration from writers such as John Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor, Francis Hodgson Burnett, J.R.R. Tolkien, Walker Percy, and Ella Risbridger.
Stories (6/0)
Make It Stop
I can't make it stop. It's the first unclouded thought I can form. It takes my brain minutes. Before that, when I wake, I only grasp that I'm awake because I'm twisting onto my side and my stomach is emptying itself of what little I have inside me. When my eyelids pry themselves open after that, I roll my gaze over my surroundings, slowly, not quite seeing. Hazily, my brain tastes the details around me, sifts through what they might mean: grimy floor, level with my eyes. Gum on the bottom of plastic seats above me. Blackness beyond the windows, narrower, more constricting than the darkness of night.
By J.L. Townsend2 years ago in Fiction
The Valley
There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Sometimes Hazel saw centaurs instead, racing their young and laughing as they pretended to lose, clomping the low clover fields into leafy dust without the dragons sprawling everywhere and taking up miles of space as they napped in the shade. Sometimes, instead of the smoky odor of lingering dragon breath, the scent of fairy maidens—a scent like that of jasmine and honeysuckle blossoms drying in summer heat—glimmered in the air, drifted like refractions in the sunlight where the fairies themselves had been. (Hazel knew the fairy maidens were the most elusive inhabitants of the Valley—even more so than the dragons—but she was no less disappointed when she never quite caught sight of them.) And sometimes mermaids popped their inquisitive faces up from the depths of the mossy-green lagoon at the far end of the Valley. They never did this when the dragons were around, naturally. Mermaids had nothing to do with dragons as a rule.
By J.L. Townsend2 years ago in Fiction
Ghost Stories
Joan stood there with the air of a doe straining her ears for bullets. The old Marley Schoolhouse loomed over us, its cutesy, antiquated postcard visage not only forlorn in the dark, but bitter, sinister. It decomposed year after year behind the courthouse on Main Street, abandoned for thirty years but still not condemned—not in the legal sense of the word anyhow.
By J.L. Townsend3 years ago in Fiction
Crumbs of a Life
Everything had changed, yet nothing had. Whether it was comforting or cruel, none of us knew and none tried to decide. The same neon-rainbow, fat Christmas lights webbed the ceiling; the same wobbling dartboard rattled against the wood-paneled wall when a dart hit; the same old stains and scuffs left the checkered tile floor looking as though it crawled with hepatitis—and still 7th Street Dive felt haunted, or even a ghost itself, crumbs of a life that had passed away for all of us.
By J.L. Townsend3 years ago in Fiction
