everyone be quiet I can hear cheese

For as long as I can remember, it had been empty. There was an odd silence about the place, and were I ever to wander away from the treeline towards it, my father would bring me to heel with a click of his tongue. He’d save the stern look for once I was back at his side, never taking his eyes off the cabin until it was out of sight. I never needed a second warning.  After he was gone, I didn’t walk those trails much. I had a life, a family. A little boy. I tried to be softer with him, and I never took him to the places my father used to take me.  And then one night as I was smoothing back the hair on my son’s forehead to kiss him goodnight, I saw a flicker of light outside. A stark contrast to the ocean blue of his nightlight, an orange flame just beyond the pane of glass. A candle burning in the window of the house across the street, hot, thick wax trickling down as the flame fluttered, wavering in the wind.  Except there is no house across the street. And when I got closer to the window, the light was gone. With it, I could feel a chill growing inside, because the house hadn’t been just any house. It was that same damned cabin from the woods.   I left that night. Pulled on a jacket and slipped on some shoes and started driving, not bothering to leave a note for my wife or to take another look at my son’s sleeping face. I drove until the roads were rough, until the trees were gnarled and wild, reaching out for me and threatening to come crashing down. I drove until I hit the end of the road, and then I got out and began to walk. Even in my worn-out sneakers, even with a few inches of freshly fallen snow on the ground, it didn’t take as much time as I’d thought to reach the cabin. I could’ve followed it blind, and with no moon, I very nearly did. The only light cutting through the trees was, at the end, the candle.  I’m in that cabin now. Everything’s covered in a dusting of snow from where the roof caved in, and the floorboards have been given over to the termites, in the places where they haven’t rotted through. There’s a candle burning in the window, covered in melted wax but somehow as tall as the first time it was lit. It doesn’t give off much heat, or smoke, but I can hear it burning away. I can hear something else, too, just below the flicker and hiss. My father mumbling in his low, drunken drawl, some song, some half-remembered lullaby. 

Sony and Chev had been alone for as long as they could remember. Sony had watched time etch its lines into Chev’s face, and trace similar paths into her own. The only reason they had lived long enough to grow old was because there was no one else left- neither had the skills to grow or build life’s necessities from scratch, so they had survived by scavenging. The rest of their lives wouldn’t even begin to make a dent in the vast hoard the rest of the world had left behind, and there would be no one after them, and so they were not afraid. Neither had been afraid in a long time. But then they had found the baby, and both knew fear again. 

"Now Boarding" is a single-set, one-act play written in February 2024 as an exploration of how a play could be constructed in a way that allows each group staging it to decide which textual perspective to legitimize through casting and set design. It's also interested in the interactions between space and guilt. Warnings for paranoia and claustrophobic conditions.

She hits the ground. Hard. Curls up into herself on instinct, some ancient dull-eyed ancestor whispering that if she gets small enough the pain will go away. But all it does is surge through her, a signal carried by bundles of traitorous nerves that don’t seem to understand that she was better off before this particular message got delivered.  “I did warn you, Lindsey.” Darren crouches down next to her, hands in the pockets of his garish sweat-stained varsity jacket, stolen from his older sister when she got a full ride to Georgetown and a top spot on their soccer team. His hair, obnoxiously over-styled and underwashed, blots out the glare from the light behind him, and she manages to open her eyes.  “You think you’re untouchable because of some grade-school bullshit? Think you can say whatever you want to say and there won’t be any consequences? Think again, you stupid bi-” The only warning before the metal cuts through his neck–cuts maybe isn’t the right word, since it implies a kind of cleanliness and a neat edge, and this is more like jamming a pencil into an eraser while Ms. Jacobs scrawls out the quadratic formula–is a faint hiss. And then Darren’s coughing up blood, blood with little chunks of flesh in it, his eyes wide and bulging out of his split skull. His body doesn’t slump to the ground, no, it’s held up by the other end of the metal driving itself deep into the alley asphalt behind him. Jutting out from his neck hangs that red hexagon like a smarmy little umbrella. STOP.  Lindsey spits, grunts, and pushes herself up off the ground, leaning on the stop sign for support. Staggers out of the alleyway, out towards a road where drivers react with squealing tires to a sudden change in the traffic pattern. Mutters to the puddle of blood she’s leaving behind: “I fucking warned you too, Darren.”

It was exquisite. The most extraordinary thing he’d ever laid eyes on. Every inch of the wooden cradle was covered in details carved with the utmost care: vines winding their way up the legs, trees bearing heaps of fruit bursting from the strats, a starry sky with its constellations come to life right over where the baby’s head would rest. When laid down in this, he thought, his child wouldn’t so much as whimper, let alone shriek, or wail, or cry. Her dreams would be filled with the pleasant warmth that comes to one surrounded by beauty.  *** She tossed another of the wooden stakes onto the fire. It stirred up the ashes as it struck, and in the glint of the light the reason for its strange texture became clear: bits had been chipped away to make some kind of shape, though the details had been worn away by time. Tendrils of flame began to lick at the edges of the stake, curiously at first and then more hungrily. She wondered why anyone would spend their time trying to make some spindly stick beautiful.

“Nice bug.”