Mack Devlin
Bio
Writer, educator, and follower of Christ. Passionate about social justice. Living with a disability has taught me that knowledge is strength.
We are curators of emotions, explorers of the human psyche, and custodians of the narrative.
Stories (97/0)
Servant of Chaos
BIRDS™ sang in the TREES™ decorating Lovelink Plaza. LB78-MFL sat alone on a bench, clutching something in his hand. The plaza was elevated, giving him a good view of the sprawling city. Staring out at the silver-blue buildings of Sunland Metro, he watched the auto-trains coursing through the transport tubes, snaking around, over, and through the skyscrapers.
By Mack Devlin3 years ago in Fiction
Bastion 4
Aguilar stands in the rain while his abuelita fumbles with her keys. She is trying to open the security gate that protects her store from nighttime bandits. Aguilar is nine, nearly ten, and short for his age. His flip-flops grow slimy under the torrent and the wetter his underwear becomes, the more it starts to itch. Then the sun emerges from behind the heavy clouds and the rain suddenly stops.
By Mack Devlin3 years ago in Fiction
In Black
In April, the cherry blossoms used to fall, covering the courtyard outside our apartment in a pink blanket. Dad used to tell me that the building was designed to look like a Spanish hacienda. I think hacienda means big house, but I never did ask him about it. I’ll never be able to ask him about it. The cherry blossoms won’t fall this year because the trees are dead. Almost everything is dead now, including my dad.
By Mack Devlin3 years ago in Fiction
Object Lesson
Om was drenched in sweat, and even though the night was hot, they felt a chill run down their spine as the summer wind brushed their skin. The barracks were on the other side of the campus, so they had a long walk ahead of them, time enough to reflect on the events of the day. Off to the west, a plume of black smoke rose from the re-education facility. Eventually, the wind would carry the smoke over the campus, dumping ash onto the fields and buildings. Om shuddered at the thought of what the ash contained. Om’s father had been a traditionalist, bucking the laws of the land and affixing his son with the forbidden pronoun "he." Om’s father was not one of the secret dissidents that had to be ferreted out by Oversight. His counter-culture rhetoric had been front and center, so it was no surprise when Oversight arrested him.
By Mack Devlin3 years ago in Fiction
Tin
In '99, we were just kids, fourteen and thereabouts. Like most teenagers where we come from, we was always raising hell, getting into all kinds of shit. Most afternoons we'd spend taking baby sips of whiskey and spinning on the swings until we almost puked. Liquor was never hard to come by. Once the jobs peter out, folks start to drink. Not a dime for rent, but they could scrounge enough for a bottle, and they would get so damn blitzed, it was easy enough to fill a couple coke cans with booze. At least enough to get our scrawny butts toasted. We were stupid little dick-wipes and like stupid little dick-wipes, we didn't know where the train was headed. It had just turned summer, school was done, and we didn't know how we were going to spend all that free time. We certainly didn't expect the summer would end the way it did, with that girl dying.
By Mack Devlin3 years ago in Fiction
The Battle for Sleep
The most strained relationship in my life is my relationship with sleep. I was the youngest of five kids growing up in a two-bedroom condo. In order to make the most of limited space, my brothers and I slept in bunk beds. Most nights, I spent endless hours staring at the slats of the bunk above me, letting morbid thoughts creep into my mind. What if the bunk bed broke and I ended up impaled on one of those slats? When that got to be too much, I would turn to the wall. The wallpaper was ships at sea and even though the image was always the same, the scenarios I created in my mind were ever-changing. Sometimes I would run my hand over the wallpaper, feeling the bump where my mother plastered over the hole.
By Mack Devlin3 years ago in Psyche
The Sand Dark Sea
In that moment, with the sun against her cheek and the wind furious in her hair, she became more than just that morning. She became my every morning. Dasha was not one of those women who could stop you in your tracks, but if you did stop for a second glance, you would see beyond the wilt of the sun and the red bite of the wind. Like the dark blue in the deeper parts of the southern seas, her eyes would catch you and hold you. Her face was round and kind, the succulent beauty typified by Florentine visual expression, not the bone juts and hard lines of a runway culture. She was hearty and strong like the country of her birth. For me, others before, and others to come, Norway had always been a place of far northern mystique.
By Mack Devlin3 years ago in Humans
Worship
“Mama, my shoes is killing me,” Marcus moaned. His big toe, protected only by a threadbare sock, rubbed viciously against an exposed seam at the tip of his shoe, and there was a pinching sensation at his instep. His mother, a large and stoic woman, did not stop. She didn’t even slow down. Having already raised three boys and one girl, she had little patience for complaints.
By Mack Devlin3 years ago in Families