Ryan Shulman
Stories (4/0)
La Guillotine
There was a single window to the cell through which I watched the sun and the moon rise in rotation five times, guided between the iron bars. I spent most of my time watching those yellow and white balls being slung skyward in their cosmic juggle. The sky turns lilac and amber with burning yellow, and it wanes lavender and amethyst with gleaming white. It’s not that I’d never paid any attention before. Dead men, it seems, pay special attention to the heavens.
By Ryan Shulman3 years ago in Horror
- Top Story - February 2020
Your 2020 Guide to All Things AnnoyingTop Story - February 2020
Look, let’s get straight to it. We don’t have enough time anymore. Between keeping up with the voting habits of celebrities and participating in the latest viral internet trends, there’s not a lot of room left for us to get to the bottom of a lot of really serious issues. Unless it’s compacted and served via drive-thru, there really isn’t any way to stay up to date on the inexcusable things people are getting up to in the world. Hence, I humbly present The Official 2020 Guide to All Things Annoying.
By Ryan Shulman4 years ago in Humans
Grady
Grady was, when I first saw him, less than a year old. He was tall and slender, waving his half-length stump of a tail behind him, and he stared at me through the pane of glass that separated us, keeping me from laying my hands on his black-and-tan bespeckled coat and him from engorging his nose with the pungent scents I had no doubt tracked into the shelter. His concrete kennel was barren except for a tarnished blanket crumpled in the corner. It was the fifth blanket they’d tossed to him since he arrived less than a week prior. Had we not left with him — my mother and I — there would have been a sixth, and a seventh, and an eighth, until someone else snatched him up. But no one else was going to snatch him up. Despite his unremitting wag and his half-erect ears, Grady had an intensity to him that would have made White Fang think twice before squaring off. It was his eyes.
By Ryan Shulman4 years ago in Petlife
Ten Years Out Of High School
One of my most cherished pastimes involves flicking my stumpy thumb over Facebook’s carousel of friend suggestions. There’s no nostalgia in this. There’s no longing for the past or remembering better days — quite the opposite. There’s nothing wholesome at all about what I do. The point is to be not wholesome, to wallow in my own hauteur, to dole out my disdain across the beaming faces of the ghosts of my adolescence. That’s what draws me in while I’m sitting on the toilet or finding reasons not to be productive. Facebook calls this that section “People You May Know.” I call it “Reasons I’m Glad To Not Be In High School Anymore.” It’s with great joy that I welcome that gag-inducing row of profiles onto my feed. If I don’t have time to cycle through the menagerie, I make sure to remember a handful of posts surrounding it so I can return at a later time. That’s dedication.
By Ryan Shulman4 years ago in Humans
