#mirac.misc

From January's personal "drabble a day" challenge, originally written January 27, 2025. These dailies are unedited and do not represent polished work.

From January's personal "drabble a day" challenge, originally written January 6, 2025. These dailies are unedited and do not represent polished work.

It was a peculiar feeling, to be a visitor at the hospital knowing full well you put the patient there. He was too conscious of the nurses’ eyes. The doctors didn’t care, too busy, the psychopaths. What had Junta told them? Even if asked, Mirac couldn’t say why he did it. Just that he hadn’t thought it through. Just that he didn’t think the gun would go off. What was waiting for him on the other side of this door? Police? But when he opens the door, he just sees Junta turn away from him, and somehow that feels worse.

From January's personal "drabble a day" challenge, originally written January 2, 2025. These uploads are unedited and do not represent polished work.

Despite the cold buzz of fluorescents up above, in the exam room, the stress of a hundred-and-three students is almost tangible, coalescing into the damp reek of fear. Mirac despises it. He despises the proctor up front with the thinning hair and roving eyes, and he despises even more the anorexic girl to his left tap-tap-tapping the tip of her pencil on her desk. When she chips the tip once again and jams the pencil into her sharpener, Mirac imagines jamming it in her throat and watching the blood spill down her shirt. It was easier—and more cathartic—to do that, to blame the room, blame him, blame her, than confront the real source of his increasingly violent frustration right in front of him: A school district is forming a committee to discuss plans for the construction of a new high school. Of those invited to join the committee, 15% are parents of students, 45% are teachers from the current high school, 25% are school and district administrators, and the remaining 6 individuals are students. How many more teachers were invited to join the committee than school and district administrators? Just a year ago, he’d have said he wouldn't take the SATs. Despite his academic successes, hard-earned through glib charm and extortion, college was a card he’d tossed from his hand almost a decade ago. He was never supposed to be here, at this desk, in this room, in this school the next city over so that no one who knows him could see how he hunches or dents the metal ring of his No. 2 pencil with his teeth. He had managed fine in the calculator portion of the exam, but now without it, he finds himself unmoored. The numbers swim until he blinks and the paper turns as blank as his brain. Shit. Shit. The seconds tick by at a brutal pace, and Mirac squeezes his pencil until the bones bruise in his fingers. No, it would be alright. The joint studies may have been an excuse to hang out, but he must have gone over this with Junta at some point. This far along, it wouldn’t do to fail so early, and after this test, when his younger sister comes to pick him up, he has to greet her with a smile—and unlike others, she’s always had an uncanny sense for when he’s lying. ‘I have to go to college to take care of her,’ he reminds himself with a deep breath and begins to write again.

An excerpt from “Sibling Rivalry” (working title). These dailies are unedited and do not represent the final product.

What face is he making? Does it look natural? The world pops and crackles with static, everything a blur under the fuzz of noise.  “Well, it was good to see you, Junta,” Mirac says politely, and calmly continues on his way. He doesn’t change routes, because why should he? What power does Junta have over him that would prevent him from walking past? Nothing. He’s proving it right now.  Junta’s eyes burn like a spotlight on his skin as he walks. (He can’t stand for Junta of all people to see him like this.) “Dude, what’s wrong with you?”  There’s a note of something in the question that stops Mirac dead in his tracks. Like digging a needle into an exposed wire, something sparks harshly in his chest and he turns on his heel. He feels how bright his smile is from the pull of his own skin, the moon and stars compared to the dead depth of his eyes.  “What do you mean?” he asks, with a frenetic edge to the easy tone like a knife in a sleeve. He sees Junta’s face now, the slight frown, the furrowed brow—the caution. It’s laughable. It’s a fucking joke.  “You look like you haven’t slept in a week.” Try two, Mirac thinks, but even the giddiness of sleep deprivation drowns under the exhaustion, leaving only fits and starts of the most frenzied of his feelings to claw its way up for air. “I don’t see why that’s any of your concern.” That’s the kind of sentiment he reserved for his brother, after all.

An excerpt from “Sibling Rivalry” (working title). These dailies are unedited and do not represent the final product.

Mirac Verrine’s ‘older brother’ was two years younger than him—one ‘Demari Nocenti.’ A scrawny waif of a man, with jewel-tone eyes and a shock of white hair that didn’t so much demand as beg pathetically for attention, an endeavor that had only gotten all the worse once the ungrateful cur left home at 16 and broke their mother’s heart.  Demari didn’t resemble their mother at all. Mirac was another story. Carmen Verrine’s second son resembled her quite strongly, in fact—the same smile, the same eyes, the same ruthlessness belying their charming appearance. Mirac imagined that he must resemble her quite more strongly than he resembled the woman who conceived him, whose face he could no longer remember.  He had heard once that ‘Nocenti’ was an orphan’s name. And, well, if their mother hadn’t even bothered to bestow her name upon him, how much could she really care?

An excerpt from "Sibling Rivalry" (working title). These dailies are unedited and do not represent the final product.

He stands at the door of her office, both hands behind his back. He grasps one in the other to hide the trembling. His hair streaks with grease, unkempt for the first time in twenty years. His lips have cracked from insomnia.  The silence hangs over him like the shadow of a guillotine, the sword of Damocles. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth as he parts his lips.  “… Mother, are you still angry?” The silence strikes him for his insolence. How dare he speak. His heart pounds like a greyhound’s, the kind you take out back to shoot when it fucks up.  His tendons creak in his hands as he squeezes his fingers, knuckles pale.  “Mother, could you please speak to me?” He doesn’t even know if she hears him through the door, his voice too quiet, too wavering. He stands there for a quarter hour until he hears shuffling from indoors. Suddenly, the door opens, her shoes pristine against the floor. He takes a breath to beg forgiveness—and just as suddenly, she’s gone. As she passes, she’s careful not to let even the hem of her blazer brush his skin. The air chills in her absence. The next quarter hour passes like death until Mirac quietly shuts the door himself.