Cynthia's Story

"Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the OTHER poor dumb bastard die for HIS country!" I screamed into the mirror. Feeling those words roll off of my tongue filled me with passion. I took a step away from the mirror and took a moment to analyze my facial expression. "Today is the day Walty, today is it," I said to myself while smacking myself across the face. Still staring at the mirror, I put my finger directly on the glass. "Today is the day you blow their fucking minds. You can do this, you've lived through it, and you can be it!" I smacked myself across the face again and chugged down the glass of water next to me. "Okay..." I breathed. "It's showtime." I turned toward the camera I had set up on a tripod and pressed the record button. I walked backward until I felt the coolness of the wall tickle the nape of my neck. "Hello, my name ...

Word Count: 863 “Would you still love yourself?” I asked myself while looking in the mirror. I’ve been married to my husband for years, and I cannot cope with the thought of telling him the truth about who I am. I cannot think about the repercussions of telling him all that I have done. I walked out of the bathroom and back to the kitchen where I had started preparing tonight’s dinner to see the ham that I had left in the sink overnight was completely dethawed. “Leah?” I heard him call me from the hallway, and I stopped what I was doing. “Goodbye my love, I’ll see you later tonight,” he said while grabbing onto my waist and kissing me goodbye. “Bye… Aiden.” My anxiety over these secrets has grown worse, and I can no longer keep them to myself, I thought. I can’t just let him walk through the door and away from me without telling him the truth. “Aiden wait!” He dropped his car keys on the floor from how startled he was, and just stared at me for a ...

Word Count: 1,740 Beach Towel. Kerry James Marshall. 2014. "Do you think I'm beautiful?" she asked while I took pictures of her half-naked body. She immediately shifted her position so that her legs were overlapping one another, and turned her black-pearl emulating face towards the sun so that it's light made the glitter on her cheeks shimmer. I took a step back and took another picture of her with my camera, and responded, "Of course." Later on, while I was buying the acrylic paint and PVC panel that the artist would use to re-adapt the photograph into a painting, I thought about her question... I did not understand why she would ask me if I thought she was beautiful when she was inexplicably gorgeous. Everything about her was beautiful, and her personality matched everything that her exterior portrayed to people. At first, I thought I was just overthinking the question, and that she was just flirting with me, but something about the way she as...