Horror and Wholesome
People like happy. They respond to happy. Sad is a different story. One that’s far shorter, with fewer characters and less descriptors. Sad is the thin leaflet you hide between the brighter covers. No one really wants to know it’s there. Not even you. Sad is uncomfortable. And so, I was “happy”. I had my... Continue Reading →
You can only see her when you can’t see her. There are a lot of theories surrounding her: she was a great beauty who died of a wasting disease that left her hideous in death, she was attacked by a spurned suitor and committed suicide after he disfigured her face, she was murdered and mutilated... Continue Reading →
I know what happens to you when you die: You become a file. If you led a good life, that is to say, one filled with first class travel, designer labels, and a “small” villa in the French countryside, you’re a fat file. If you were the Average Joe, you end up an average file.... Continue Reading →
It snows at sea. Sometimes I forget that. Or, I try to, anyway. Frozen white on an endless field of black. It feels alien out there when it’s snowing. Maybe I’d feel differently if it hadn’t been snowing that night. But it was, and I don’t, and I’ll never know otherwise. Dad was a crabber.... Continue Reading →
In movies, right before a traumatic accident happens, the screen cuts to black. When it reopens again, it’s in The After. There’s no hospital with all the tubes and machinery, no physical therapy, no one holding up the attractively scuffed main character while he tries to remember how to pee straight. They’re just home. Sometimes... Continue Reading →
The first hour after the school day ended was my favorite. Both of my parents worked so I’d have the whole house to myself to watch cartoons, sneak snacks, and put off homework. I raced home on my bike along the same route every day. Schoolyard, up Greeden, over to Maplewood, down Magnolia, and then... Continue Reading →
Before she was the drainage ditch Dahlia, she was someone’s daughter, a friend, maybe a sister or a wife. A person somebody had to have known. She’d been found in a ditch off a rural road a few days before by a trucker who’d pulled over to relieve himself. Naked, severed in two at the... Continue Reading →
When my daughter was young, she liked to make up silly rules for our household. On Wednesday evenings, we all wore a sock on our right foot, but nothing on our left; if someone sneezed, the only polite response was “Godzilla nights”; if you dropped something you were carrying, you had to leave it on... Continue Reading →
Nursing is hard work for too little pay. You never feel it more keenly than when you’re getting off a double shift in the middle of the night. All the smells cling to the inside of your nose, you’re convinced you didn’t scrub your hands well enough to really wash off that last hour, and... Continue Reading →
It was a vacation of firsts. My first time on a plane, my first time out of the US (yes, Canada still counts!), my first time taking a ferry. My husband kept insisting it wasn’t a big deal, that we were just visiting his parents, but I might as well have found the wardrobe to... Continue Reading →
Stories By S.H. Cooper 