No doubt my mind
Of course, no doubt could exist
In a parallel appearance of this nature,
Manifested in gold bullion,
Stocked far from harm’s way.
Although it’s a point to make a difference
Start with new words
Brown ink,
Build on a blank space.
Jot geometric inconsistencies.
Memories flood back and conclusions draw themselves
As do similarities and analogies
And poplar trees and angled bees
One set of circumstances lead to another
Cause and effect may or not be clear
I hold on to large numbers of things
Starting with these words
Time is long enough to heal wounds
They are too dull to sharpen
The edges of what was once clear
Avoiding the mistake of the past
Relies on remembering the nature of it
No doubt remains in my mind
No thought is left behind
I stay where I am
Not to find out where there is
But to avoid going back
So afraid am I of the mistake of the past
I venture far forward seldom.
— from Inside Insight (2014)
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A little excerpt from a late-night study session between Anton and Velle: she's teaching him her language, and Anton finds himself.... a lot more relaxed than he expected. A bit too relaxed, in fact...
Suddenly, Pelty jumps up on the table, letting off a faint meow. Velle snorts out a small chuckle and reaches out to gently stroke her short, gray fur, eliciting pleased purrs from the cat.
I watch them, transfixed for some reason. Velle’s hands running over Pelty’s back, coming back in and scratching behind her ears… Pelty lowers herself down to a bunlike shape and stares lovingly at Velle as she continues her petting. The motions of her hand are slow, deliberate, relaxing… and sleepy.
I don’t even realize I’ve closed my eyes and briefly dozed when I feel a light tap on my hand and open eyes I hadn’t realized were closed. I blink around dazedly, refocusing my mind as Velle and Pelty come back into focus. The cat is staring at me now; I wonder what goes on in that little fellow’s head when she sees me? Velle has a strange look on her face, her brown eyes so warm, almost like russet, and so very filled with concern.
The language-teaching scene is such a good way to make two people vulnerable to each other, and the cat grounding the whole moment keeps it from floating off into pure mood. Anton dozing off mid-lesson and waking to that concerned, russet-brown stare says more about the trust between them than any confession could. Is learning each other's languages going to become a running thread between them?
That conditional opening does so much work, 'if this were a field.' It turns scarcity into a landscape you can walk through instead of a feeling you're stuck inside. And 'ghosts appear with every breath' lands hard. There's a whole winter in here. What's the season you're writing against?
(I wrote this as a kind of side story/companion piece to Blood On A Yellow Rose. I wanted to try writing something from Shelby's perspective to better flesh out her character when I was writing the first draft, and I came up with this. I ended up liking this little experiment of mine more than I expected to, so now you get to read it! This contains minor spoilers for Blood On A Yellow Rose, so if you're ok with that, then read on, but if not, I'd recommend turning away until you've read Blood On A Yellow Rose. Without any further ado, here's Scylla Dyed In Red)!
It’s a hot night in New York City, and all eyes are on Pammie as she belts out Blood Red Rose’s latest hit, Scylla, a song about being in love with a beautiful girl who doesn’t love you back. Rick dutifully bangs away on the drums behind her, but as always, no one’s paying attention to him, even though he wrote the lyrics to Scylla. Scylla was a nymph that they learned about on their tour of Greece. They went to a museum together and learned the tragic tale of Glaucus and Scylla. Glaucus, a minor sea god, loved Scylla, a beautiful nymph, but she didn’t feel the same way. Even so, he couldn’t bring himself to stop pining for her, and he asked the witch, Circe, for a potion to make her fall in love with him. Much to his surprise, Circe fell in love with him, but when she confessed her love to Glaucus, he rejected her, saying that leaves would grow on the sea floor, and seaweed would grow on the mountaintops before he ever stopped loving Scylla.
I’m a lot like Circe, in a way. What Rick and I have isn’t love. We met at a party and got talking while Pammie was signing autographs for some groupies who had somehow managed to sneak their way in. I’m Shelby Lee, one-hit wonder singer of Dice Baby. He’s Rick Grimshaw, the drummer of Blood Red Rose that nobody cares about. We bonded over being nobodies in the music industry who stand in the dark while people like Pammie hog all of the spotlight. Somehow, after a few more chance meetings, I convinced him to be my boyfriend, but I learned quickly that Rick only agreed to be with me because he can’t have Pammie, and he thinks that I’m the next best thing. He loves her, and if she ever said that she loved him too, he’d dump me for her in a heartbeat.
Everyone loves Pammie. She’s beautiful in a way that makes women want to be her, and men want to be with her. It’s not fair. I practically had to beg for a record deal, and I’ve only produced one hit song, meanwhile Pammie’s gone triple platinum with her music. People are enthralled by her singing, her lyrics, and her killer guitar solos. Tens of thousands of people scream her lyrics back at her at her concerts. It’s her world, and she just lets Rick live in it. Because he’s her ‘best friend’. Rick is nothing compared to her—Every tabloid newspaper and gossip magazine says that he sucks, and that Pammie deserves a drummer with actual talent. They say that he’s riding her coattails, and Pammie dismisses them, because he’s her ‘best friend’. They blame him for her cocaine addiction—He convinced her to try it with him at a party, and when they do cocaine together, she thinks that they’re just two best friends having fun. That beautiful bitch knows what she’s doing, holding onto Rick. He loves her, I know it, and so does everyone else, but she either doesn’t realise it, or pretends not to. I’ve seen them talking backstage after their concerts; once, he asked her if she thought that they could ever be more than friends, and she said that they were already best friends. She didn’t need anything more. He spent the rest of the night in tears, drinking himself stupid.
I hate Pammie. She has everything that I deserve. She’s a star, and everyone loves her, but she doesn’t let it go to her head. She’s genuinely nice to me, at first. She wants to be my friend, and I hate her even more for it. When I push her down a flight of stairs and she breaks her arm, her fans send her flowers and get well cards, and I rot in jail until Rick begs her not to press charges against me. When I steal her dead mother’s bracelet from her dressing room and flush it down the toilet, she sobs like the world is ending, and her fans tell me to kill myself on the internet. The internet doesn’t have proof that I stole the bracelet, but they think that I stole it, and that’s enough for them to want me dead. It was a gold bracelet with rubies, a family heirloom worth thousands, and Pammie didn’t deserve it. She stole the only man I’ve ever loved. Rick is supposed to be mine, but whether she wants him or not, his heart belongs to her.
Rick makes our wedding all about Pammie. I know that he only asked me to marry him because he’s accepted that he can’t have her, and he thinks that he’ll never do better than me. I’m not marrying him because he loves me, I’m marrying him because I want to feel like I’ve won against Pammie for once in my life. Rick will be mine, at least on paper. But he insists that we plan the ceremony around Pammie. I wanted a church wedding, but Rick said no, it would be disrespectful to Pammie because she’s Jewish. Pammie isn’t Jewish; her gold-digging grandmother who married rich after escaping from Nazi Germany is, and so was her whore mother. Pammie never asks for kosher food, and I’ve seen the cokehead bitch eat bacon before, on the few occasions when she can be bothered to eat. Rick also insisted that Pammie be his best woman. I didn’t want her at the wedding at all, but he said that if she wasn’t allowed to be his best woman, the wedding was off. So reluctantly, I stand there in front of the registrar, watching Pammie steal my thunder on my own goddamned wedding day. Everyone’s looking at how beautiful she is, and not at me. They scoff at how boring the white dress I chose is. They ooh and ah over the black satin dress that Rick insisted that Pammie wear. It’s from the 1950s, and she’s wearing it with a pearl necklace and lacy fingerless gloves. With her eyeliner, and her iconic red rose tattoos on her arms, she looks like a punk Marilyn Monroe.
I hope she fucking dies.
Rick refuses to dance with me at our reception, and instead, he drinks himself stupid and breaks down in tears.
A week after our wedding, Pammie’s cocaine addiction finally does her in. Apparently the cocaine she took was laced with fentanyl. I’m relieved when Rick tells me that she’s dead, but nobody else feels that way, of course. Chester Bennington, Ashlee Simpson, and Jaret Reddick come to her funeral. They talk about how brilliant, and beautiful, and talented she was. The music industry will never be the same without her. Rick makes a fool of himself, crying, screaming, begging them not to put her coffin in the ground and leave her in the dark. He pushes me away when I try to comfort him.
It’s not fair.
Pammie is dead, but she still owns Rick’s heart.
At my urging, Rick asks Triple Crown Records to replace Pammie with me. Now that that bitch is gone, I can finally be the star I deserve to be, or so I think, until I get booed off of the stage at Blood Red Rose’s next concert. My album doesn’t even sell enough copies to break even. It’s not fair. Even now that Pammie is dead, I can’t be a star. After six months of my music failing, Triple Crown Records drops Bloody Bouquet, so Rick and I do what all washed-up celebrities do; reality shows, and talent shows. Or at least, that’s what Rick does. I don’t get to, because nobody wants to see me on TV; all of my applications for reality shows get rejected. So I resign myself to being Rick’s Wife. I fritter my days away lounging by our pool in designer swimsuits while Rick does his big boy jobs. When he gets home, he doesn’t touch me unless he wants sex. The sex we have is terrible. No foreplay. No kissing. He doesn’t even look at me when we’re fucking, he closes his eyes and says Pammie’s name when he comes.
After six months of loveless marriage, Rick says that we should start a family. I don’t have anything better to do with my life, so I agree. He doesn’t love me, but I know that he’ll love our children. He’s always wanted a big family. Maybe I’ll get lucky, and give him the pretty blonde babies he wanted Pammie to have for him.
But luck isn’t on my side. It never is.
When we think that I’m finally pregnant, we see a doctor, but the thing they find in my uterus isn’t a fetus, it’s a tumour. They run some more tests, and on May 27th, 2006, one day after what would have been Pammie’s 26th birthday, we find out that I have uterine cancer. It’s already spread everywhere, and there’s nothing they can do.
I’m in too much shock to react. I want Rick to hold me. Cry for me. I want him to scream at the doctor and tell her that she’s wrong, I can’t have terminal cancer. I’m only 26, I’m too young for this. I don’t deserve this. I want him to beg her to try one round of chemo, or an operation, anything, as long as it might save me. Because he loves me. Because he doesn’t want to lose me.
But we both know that that’s not true.
Rick just nods at the doctor. “I see,” he says, as if he knew that this would happen. Or maybe it’s because he thinks that I deserve this. No, it’s because he thinks that he doesn’t deserve a wife, or a family, not after what he did to Pammie. It’s his fault that she got addicted to cocaine, and then died from a batch that was laced with fentanyl.
I think about what Pammie’s fans will say when I die. They’ll say that I deserve this for all of the nasty things I did to her. They’ll probably gate crash my funeral and sing, ‘Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead!’. When Pammie died, everyone mourned for her. Chester Bennington, Ashlee Simpson, and Jaret Reddick came to her funeral. They talked about how brilliant, and beautiful, and talented she was.
I seethe quietly in my seat as the doctor starts talking about end of life care options. She brings up a hospice near Yorkshire, by the seaside, like she’s sending us off for a summer holiday rather than sending me away to die.
This isn’t fair.
I don’t deserve this.
I’m going to die alone and hated, and it’s not fair. I don’t care what anyone else says, because I know that I don’t deserve this.
Rick chooses a hospice down south for me. I will die in Winchester, an hour away from the town where he and Pammie grew up. He didn’t let me have my dream church wedding, but he’s letting me die in a converted monastery, where there are paintings of saints hanging on the walls. My room has a painting of St Dismas on the wall facing my bed.
Rick spends more time praying in the hospice’s chapel than he does with me. My room is close to it, and when everything’s quiet, I can hear his prayers. His prayers are never for me. Only for Pammie. He never mentions God in his prayers. He prays that Pammie will hear him in Heaven and forgive him for getting her addicted to cocaine, and accidentally giving her the spiked batch that killed her. He says that he needs her to know that he loves her. He’ll never stop loving her. She’s the only woman he’s ever loved.
I am, and always will be Circe, the witch who couldn’t win his heart. I will never be his Scylla.
Leaves will grow on the sea floor before he stops loving Pammie.
Seaweed will grow on the mountaintops before he starts loving me.
Writing from a side character's POV to flesh them out is such an underrated move, and this works so well because the myth is doing double duty: Scylla as a song, as a story inside the story, and as the shape of what Pammie and Rick are both circling without saying. The Glaucus framing gives Rick a whole inner life that he'd never get to voice from outside his own head. Did writing Shelby's version change how you saw the main story? That's the part I'm always curious about with companion pieces.
Our destinies are entwined like Rapunzel’s golden locks tumbling down her back, reminding me that even the most stubborn knots don’t always ask for sharp teeth. Sometimes, all they need is the patience of a gentle hand.
'Our destinies are entwined like Rapunzel's golden locks' — love this fairy tale imagery repurposed. There's a fairy tale quality to the whole piece that makes the emotion hit differently.
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There's something meditative about this. Short lines that build a whole atmosphere. Love the way the leaves 'brush my eyes' — that sensory detail grounds the whole piece.
'Too hungry to sleep' — what a line. This whole piece has this raw, unsettled energy that really works. The dedication at the start makes it feel intimate too.
The imagery of wilted petals carrying messages hits hard. There's something about decay carrying meaning that poetry does so well. What inspired this piece?
Lots of things grew on the apple tree we planted, but none of them were apples. There were some glass swans, some hammers, some glow stick necklaces; there were quite a few telescopes, which followed us around on their spindly legs. You climbed hopefully up a tall orange ladder to pick the crate labeled “apples” that had grown on a high bough. You opened it and your dad was sleeping in there. The ladder slowly sank into the ground. The orchestra stood around with its hands in its pockets, mumbling awkwardly about the weather.
Next April, there was plenty of rain. Lots of things grew on the ladder tree we planted, and you were one of them. The first thing you asked for was a glass of milk. The second thing you asked for was as many telescopes as I could carry. You built a tiny observatory in the palm of your hand and I crawled in, but all of the astronomy had leaked out of the telescopes during winter, and all I could see was a sort of muted beige. When your dad woke up, he was stuck in the high boughs of a bald and withered apple tree, and it was snowing.
Nick Rizzuti is an undergraduate at Hofstra University. He has appeared in Little River, No Assholes, and Fur-Lined Ghettos. Art by owlwise12.
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Am I a failure of duty or dogma?
The brain that will not answer to itself,
heart that flings itself into the ether,
the ever after,
full of a strange obligation to believe.
Frantic for faith.
I find that I have been walking the same narrow passageway for years;
thinking each time I am following a fresh hope.
The faces change but the destination always reveals itself.
Same, same, same.
Hands tapping now, a new muttering,
and the woman sits across from me and says,
“How can I help other people, if I don’t have myself together?
Know what I’m saying?”
I almost laugh. I almost cry.
But no one can help anyone else. All of us are searching, stumbling.
This enters the mumbling.
Who am I to believe in myself, if you won’t?
Who are you to demand belief?
I sit in the wooden chair, repeating the words of a familiar language.
Everything is simple in the beginning:
Words for food, for being, for wanting and liking and doing.
I am learning backwards because I hear this language express the unspeakable.
My ears are clouded with shadows.
Today we learned the word to suffer and I thought,
this word, I need.
You wash up the blood first
from your hands,
from the blankets,
from inside the car;
but when you leave her at last
and commit her living
to memory,
something is forever stained
and nothing is
as it was
— not the date,
not the spot on the road,
and not the chair in the living room
where she slept in the evening
with the three-year-old.
I'm currently working on an original Superhero story, titled "Nobody Can Help You"
I'm actually writing the last scene of the last chapter of the first "Book" (I'm posting it online in weekly updates) of what I'm planning to be a quadrology.
Outside of that I've got some ideas for music production projects and I want to write a few shorter stories as well.
That’s a hell of a place to be — writing the last scene of the last chapter of Book 1 while already planning a quadrilogy. There’s something electric about that moment where you can see the finish line of one thing and the shape of everything after it. Superhero stories are interesting because the genre carries so much built-in reader expectation. The origin, the costume, the secret identity, the moral weight of having power. But the ones that stick with me are the ones that find something new to say with those pieces rather than just rearranging them. What’s the central question your story is asking? That’s usually what makes a superhero narrative hit or miss. Also, music production and shorter stories alongside the big project — that’s a good instinct. Having something else to shift to when the main work gets heavy keeps the creative muscles from cramping. What kind of music are you making? Dropping the link to your story if you want to share it — always looking for new serials to follow.
This is such a great point. The superhero-as-cop analogy runs deep in the genre, and you're right to call out how My Hero Academia and the MCU both lean into that framework. What's interesting to me is how the genre keeps circling back to this question without ever fully answering it -- because I think the answer would require the story to admit the system is broken, and most superhero narratives are fundamentally about reinforcing systems, not dismantling them. Your story sounds fascinating -- I'll check it out. Thanks for sharing it.
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I'm currently working on an original Superhero story, titled "Nobody Can Help You"
I'm actually writing the last scene of the last chapter of the first "Book" (I'm posting it online in weekly updates) of what I'm planning to be a quadrology.
Outside of that I've got some ideas for music production projects and I want to write a few shorter stories as well.
That's a hell of a place to be — writing the last scene of the last chapter of Book 1 while already planning a quadrilogy. There's something electric about that moment where you can see the finish line of one thing and the shape of everything after it. Superhero stories are interesting because the genre carries so much built-in reader expectation. The origin, the costume, the secret identity, the moral weight of having power. But the ones that stick with me are the ones that find something new to say with those pieces rather than just rearranging them. What's the central question your story is asking? That's usually what makes a superhero narrative hit or miss. Also, music production and shorter stories alongside the big project — that's a good instinct. Having something else to shift to when the main work gets heavy keeps the creative muscles from cramping. What kind of music are you making? Dropping the link to your story if you want to share it — always looking for new serials to follow.
Buenos Aires crawled from the River Plate basin as if the sandy riverbed had grown thirsty for air. From between its giant concrete corridors, jacaranda and ombu trees sprang and curled like weeds growing between dirty paving slabs. The city was a worn, desolate and unused patio whose edges had cracked, resigned to the trees and grass which cast their green eyes over its broken surfaces.
Early on a Saturday morning, tranquillity reigned over the river basin. In a quiet spot, the sun pierced the watery horizon, embossing Mario Lati’s machiavellian silhouette onto the cream-yellow pillar against which he was leaning.
As ugly as the city, yet as intriguing, Mario Lati had his hands habitually behind his back. He pressed his shoulder blades against one of the columns supporting the entrance to Mint. His posture was solid; standing in a doorway was also one of his customs. There was only one man more like the city than Mario Lati and he was waiting for him.
— from Buenos Aliens (2013)
