Sightless Scribbles

Podcast Tip Jar Fixed

2026-05-24T19:14:51Z

Short email today because I have some amazing news! My podcast tip jar is finally fixed!

My podcast tip jar is where people can listen to my audiobooks in the podcast app of their choice.

For a while, there were some account issues I did not know about but all of that should be fixed now.

Now, you can enjoy serialized audiobooks right in your favorite podcast app! After you donate, you will get a private RSS feed. Put this private RSS feed into your favorite podcast app.

Here is Pinecast help on how to add the private RSS feed to your podcast app of choice

My podcast tip jar is here

Until next time!

How to make portable Passkeys

2026-05-15T13:36:26Z

The first time I heard about Passkeys I was about to email one of my dashingly swoon worthy friends. In this case it was Sean Crisden. I was about to detail the intricate specific joy of crunching down on a slice of freshly baked Apple Pie when my phone dinged.

"Hey," my friend said, "since you're a tech person, explain Passkeys to me."

And so, here I am.

Think about passwords. I mean, really think about them. The password is something that works, but you can't deny that most of the time it is a rusty bolt in a door that never quite fits its frame. It is a string of characters we bury in our gray matter like copper coins in a garden, hoping the soil doesn't shift before we need to buy our way back into our own lives.

Enter the Tech Bro. He arrives with the smell of overpriced espresso and the unearned confidence of a man who thinks "interoperability" is a dirty word. He wants to sell you a "Passwordless Future," but he wants to keep the keys in his velvet-lined, proprietary pocket. He talks about "Asymmetric Cryptography" to make you feel small, like a child being lectured on the physics of a toy he isn't allowed to break.

What they don't tell you is that Passkeys are just a better way of digital handshakes. A Passkey isn't a string of data. It's a resonance.

Imagine a cat---one of those awesome, heavy-furred creatures that knows its own worth. A Passkey is the way that cat leans its weight into your palm when you reach out in the quiet of the evening. You know what your cat feels like. Your cat knows what your soul feels like. Your device and the website perform a secret, silent handshake that tastes like cookies and smells like a fresh-pressed book. They don't exchange the "secret"; they simply verify that the rhythm of the soul matches the make of the door.

The Tech Bros want you to keep this cat in their hostile, gilded cage---Apple's garden, Google's locked room, Microsoft's sterile hallway. They want you to believe that the key must live on their servers, tethered to their whims, and subject to their "Terms of Service" (which is just a fancy way of saying "I can evict your identity whenever the shareholders get bored").

There is a better way.

To maximize the use of Passkeys, you must go against every tech advice about Passkeys ever devised. You must put passkeys into a portable database---something like a .kdbx file and place that .kdbx file in multiple places, even across multiple machines.

I love the .kdbx file, a sovereign territory that doesn't care about "Platforms" or "Ecosystems." When a site asks for the handshake, my database provides the resonance through a bridge I maintain myself. My heart does a little percussive dance whenever I hear the screen reader announce a successful login without a single corporate server being invited to the party.

Tech, and by extension, Tech Bros, hate portable things such as my trusty .kdbx file. It is independent of their servers. It is not a service they can hold hostage from me. It is a salvation of portability I control, and this drives them bananas.

The best way to utilize Passkeys on a .kdbx file is to find password managers that work with .kdbx files and support Passkeys.

It's about the democratization of the "Yes."

You don't need a degree in computer engineering to own your digital breath. You just need to realize that the Tech Bro is just a landlord trying to charge you rent for the air between your fingers. A Passkey is your air. Don't let them bottle it. Carry your keys in your own pocket, learn the rhythm of the handshake, and leave the landlords knocking on a door they no longer control.

Find out what websites support Passkeys here.

If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy the fiction podcast Un(con)Trolled

We Need Diverse Disability Fiction

2026-05-05T12:49:59Z

This was previously published in the Artificial Divide anthology

I remember the first out-and-proud fiction book I read that included an openly gay character. Actually, this book had gone above and beyond. It was a gay utopia for me because some of the characters are also openly trans and proud of who they are. What made this book so special to me was the fact it was a safe space before I knew what a safe space was. The book is Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan.

Growing up in Florida, I don't remember anyone encouraging me to read books with openly gay or bi or trans people in it. People loved the fact I loved to read, but I was never actively shown any books with LGBT+ characters and themes. I had to find those books on my own. Even after I’d found them, I had to keep them in the closet with me because I knew society didn't see them as “normal.”

I just can't shake those early years of thinking I wasn't wired the way the rest of society seemed to be, just because I am not at all sexually attracted to women. I didn't understand how a book such as The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot was only for girls, and why I shouldn’t be reading it.

I didn't understand publishing’s desire to keep telling stories about non-disabled, straight white men. I thought, If everybody has a story, then where are the stories about people who are Black or trans or gay or disabled?

If I take a minute to try to think of fictional characters with disabilities in books, my brain comes up with few options. I've read many great memoirs by Disabled people, ones where I felt seen and heard because they shared my struggles, but I can't say the same thing about fiction.

Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan was special to me because it was a story involving LGBT+ characters. Nobody was overcoming their gender identity the way Disabled memoirists seemed to “beat” their disabilities on every page. I was hungry for some fun stories that just happened to have Blind or visually impaired characters telling us their fictional tale of adventure or mystery.

Even in the non-fiction I've read by Blind people, they all seemed to be about overcoming the world, not just living in it while experiencing drama and or romance. The protagonist always had to overcome blindness or learn how to be blind. The characters always saw the Blind protagonist as either strange, scary, helpless, super gifted, flawless, ignorant, clumsy, or unable to function. The memoirist would have no choice but to prove them wrong about their blindness. It made me exhausted trying to find books by Disabled authors where the visually impaired protagonist just had to deal with the plot of the story, not their blindness and the plot at the same time.

As an openly gay man, I'm witnessing in real time the progress publishing is making towards telling LGBT+ stories. LGBT+ is moving away from a genre label and characters are just LGBT+, which is great. I feel honored watching that growth. As a Blind man though, I'm afraid I'm not seeing the same progress with Disabled stories.

More times than I’d like to admit, I've googled fiction books with Blind characters. The results are not promising, every time. I go to page four or five of the Google search results, hoping I’d find a golden egg somewhere, but the results are disappointing.

For one thing, a lot of books featuring visually impaired characters are written by sighted authors. While I don't necessarily have a problem with this, I keep running into stories that are inauthentically told because a sighted writer always shows a visually impaired character dictating to their phone without using a screen reader, for example.

One exception I can remember is a book called WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer. In that book, the protagonist uses a cane properly, uses a screen reader with the keyboard for a long time on the page, and is just a smart Blind girl who is dealing with the plot.

Even though I still go back and read WWW: Wake occasionally, I'm hungry for more modern fiction featuring visually impaired characters. I know there are others out there just like me who are eagerly seeking books that have people like them on the page. That's where this anthology comes into play.

This anthology features blind and visually impaired authors telling their own stories. Some authors are emerging authors. Some are more established, but they all have something to show you about being low vision.

There's a wide range of writing styles, genres, and even character archetypes in this anthology. Not every story will have a happy ending. Not every protagonist will be nice. That's the point, though. This anthology compiles snapshots of blindness to show that Blind people can be witty. Blind people can be crude. Blind people can be whimsical. Blind people can be clever or brash.

Visually impaired people have to educate the sighted daily on what it's like to be visually impaired. This even happens, sometimes, because sighted people expect us to be teachers. This book might not be an instruction manual on how Blind and visually impaired people use a computer, but it will open your eyes to characters who have flaws, outsmart bullies, learn to trust their skills, and are mischievous to get what they want.

The authors in this collection are just a snippet of the talent that's cast aside for established sighted people, who really should step aside and let Disabled voices take the publishing contracts.

I hope that you, dear reader or listener, go through this anthology with the understanding that Artificial Divide isn't meant to take away from sighted authors trying to be allies. We desperately need allies, but we also need people willing to listen when Blind people want to tell the stories they want to tell—with grit and grace.

It might be difficult to empathize with some of these characters. You may love every story in this collection. That's okay. It's your journey through this book. I’d like you to ponder how you feel after reading this collection. I think you'll find that even though you may be sighted or visually impaired, and even though this character would never be your friend in real life, you do have things in common, and that maybe we're not so divided after all.

Robert Kingett.

The Hostage Negotiation of the Front-Facing Camera

2026-04-10T20:15:08Z

There is a comforting, tactile safety in the old fashioned way of using a phone. You press the phone to your ear, the device emitting a heat signature that's instantly grounding. This heated device creates a seal of warmth and assurance. It is an act of self preservation. No one is staring at you. No one is gauging how your looks contrast with their put together appearance. The voice on the other end vibrates against your skull. It is intimate. It is not awkward. It is, though, apparently extinct.

I was settled in my bed yesterday, the pillows arranged in the perfect architectural way to decompress my spine. I was ready, and eager, to talk to an older Black man we will call Shane. Shane is an older talkative man, a man in his early sixties. He is highly intelligent. One of his unsung skills is schooling anybody in a mathematical confrontation. Shane, though, like so many sighted people, possess the baffling inability to understand that I still exist if they are not actively perceiving me with their eyes.

It happened thirty seconds into the conversation.

The interruption was a sharp chirp from VoiceOver that sounded like an intrusion. "Video call engaged."

I didn’t accept a video invitation. I never do, but he switched it on from his end, and suddenly, my audio sanctity was breached.

"I can't see you," Shane complained immediately. His southern Mississippi accent, which was rich, heavenly, and blessedly close to my ear, was now a tinny distant approximation of a voice that didn’t even have enough weight to make my apartment echo.

"I know you can't," I say, refusing to participate in the madness. "My lights are off."

"Well," he says, like I'm depriving him of a vital organ, "Turn the lights on. Its pitch black!"

"Shane," I said, summoning a patience I did not feel, "I am blind. Why would I have the lights on?"

This is the first hurtle in the obstacle course that is the video call. Sighted people think that lights, and by extension, visual perception, is a moral imperative. They always forget that, for me, lights and light switches are a vestigial organ. They do not have functions in my apartment. They are only there for the sighted people that come into my apartment. I do not need them. I never needed them.

But lets say, for the sake of argument, I surrender, just for a minute. Lets say I get up and turn the lights on for a visual interpreter service to identify a specific can of soup, or maybe I wanted to triple check to see if I wasn’t about to brush my teeth with hydrocortisone cream.

The lights are on. We have cleared the lighting hurtle.

Now we enter the seventh circle of hell—the make the sighted man comfortable phase.

"I still can't see you!" he says, panic in his voice like I'm about to walk off a cliff. "I still can't see you right. Move the camera up. No, to the leff. You're cuttin' off your face. Its only your forehead. I can only see your forehead."

Now, I have to remove my phone from its comfortable spot—a space where I could actually hear his rich tone—and I must participate in unnatural arm movements so that I position the front facing camera just so, like I'm offering a sacrifice to a deity I do not believe in.

This is pure fucking hell. To satisfy the video requirement, I must hold the phone out in front of me at an awkward, uncomfortable, and an impossibly rigid angle out in front of me, where the party also now has to raise their voice in order to be heard because of the distance, turning this phone call—once a beacon of calming intellectual conversation into a painful posture. My deltoid starts to burn. I am no longer a participant in the conversation. I am an unwilling cameraman, shooting an obscure documentary about my own face.

"That's perfect," he says, "Hold it right there!"

Except it isn't perfect. This is terrible. The sound is atrocious because I have to hold the phone two inches away from my face. I am unable to make this sound better because I do not have earbuds for phone calls. The earbud microphone is never sustainable enough for a lasting phone conversation. I cannot wear my Bluetooth headset that would solve my audio problem because it does not have a microphone. My Bluetooth headset is only for listening to books and silencing the outside world.

I do not have a standing microphone because I still believe in the sanctity of an audio call. I am physically capable of holding the phone up to my ear. I do not need an external microphone.

I have to work twenty times as hard to parse his words through the airy distortion of the speakerphone.

And God forbid I move.

If I shift my weight to get even a little bit comfortable and relieve the cramp in my shoulder, the video on his end instantly gets distorted because I am not a robot. If I reach for my water bottle, my face tilts out of frame and the panic instantly settles in.

"Oh, You're gone! I can't see you no more! Where did you go?"

"Shane, I didn’t go anywhere. I am right here. I did not teleport. I am still in the same spot I was just a few seconds ago."

But for sighted people, object permanence seems to rely entirely on a video feed. Sighted people cannot have a conversation with me unless they are watching my pixelated mouth moving. If sighted people cannot track my pixelated mouth moving, then I have vanished into the ether. I no longer exist in time and space if sighted people cannot watch my pixelated mouth formulate syllables and sentences.

I try to explain this. I try to argue for the efficiency of the audio channel. "I don’t want to do video," I say, my voice tender, trying to appeal to reason. "Let's just talk audibly. We can still talk. Put the phone back up to your ear."

But its always as if I hadn’t uttered a single vowel.

"But I want to see you," they protest, utterly baffled that a sensory experience is actively being denied to the sighted person.

I do not understand video calls. I honestly don’t. What are you getting out of a video call and watching someone's mouth move? Do you really need to see my hair remain stationary to grasp the joy in my voice as I gush about a TV show I enjoyed last week? Are you incapable of understanding me without staring at my sightless eyes? blue eyes that are never looking at you, by the way.

Do you need to see the pores of my white skin to grasp the gushing over a book I listened to yesterday narrated by the fabulously dashing Gabriel Michael or equally enchanting, Utterly engrossingly delectable Sean Crisden?

Are you checking to see if I've wiped my face after dinner? Because if that's the case, tell me I have crumbs on my chin and then let me go back to the dark. Tell me I have cream cheese in my beard and then let me go back to the darkness.

But this obsession with video isn't just social, its systemic. Its why sighted people can't listen to podcasts or an audiobook without visual invasion.

This is the same baffling logic corporate executives use when they wanna demand that people keep their cameras on during meetings. They can't just trust their employees, so they must surveillance them. They claim its about engagement, but we all know better. Its about tracking. Its about surveillance that monitors eye contact so they can have data that says we are engaged and that we are listening.

I know—I know—there are a billion other people like me. People that could pay attention and work infinitely better if they were allowed to exist in their own bodies comfortably.

I listen best when I'm horizontal, body and limbs relaxed, with a comfortable pair of noise headphones on, perhaps typing amazingly fast on a Bluetooth keyboard—my auditory sense attuned to everything happening across digital wires. That doesn’t look like engagement to a sighted person though, because they’ve never tried to understand bodies other than their own. Its why, even today, sighted people still think we dictate to our computers instead of using complex keyboard commands to control a powerful screen reader.

Sighted managers don’t understand why I do not need to have video on to pay attention, so they force me, and so many millions of others like me, to sit upright in a chair, staring at pixelated heads I cannot see, performing attentiveness but actually absorbing less.

Video calls are an assault on my autonomy. They transform a conversation into a staged performance. They demand I stage manage my environment, my lighting, my posture, all for a medium that I cannot access. It is a demand that is not equal. It is not an equal playing field. It is a demand that I perform sightedness for your comfort.

And the real tragedy is, we are sacrificing something better.

There is a purity to audio that sighted people ignore. When you and I are having an audio call, ear to receiver, I am listening to everything. I'm paying attention to the micro tremors in your voice. I am appreciating your radiant smile without ever having to visually perceive it. I am understanding the hesitation—the small breath you take before you admit to me that you're scared. I am listening to you instead of judging your lighting or the aesthetic qualities of your furniture.

Actually, you know what I love more than an audio phone call? Audio messages.

I love receiving audio messages. Audio messages, especially ones where people are recording as they are participants in the world, allow me to be with you in a way an audio phone call can never replicate because of a phone calls subpar quality.

Audio messages are the perfect medium. I love them. They aren’t in real time, so there's no pressure to perform. I can listen to your mood—that glorious rant about your boss, and I can understand your frustration in crisp stereo sound quality. I can enjoy how you sound when you are comforted by weighted blankets on your bed. I can play the message over again so that I don’t forget what we were talking about before life gets in the way. I can play your audio message to help me fall asleep—appreciating the fabrics of your vocal registers, your tone, the way your diction elongates vowels when you're feeling safe from the world. I can hold those audio expressions in my memory forever.

So, this is a plea.

Audio call me without video.

Better yet? Send me audio messages. Send me long, rambly, audio messages with soundscapes and audible expressions of love and joy. Remain in the dark by continuing that audio phone call rather than switching to video. Resist the urge to enable video. Bathe in the intimacy of my tone, rather than trying to observe a pixelated mouth form syllables.

The next time you want to enable video, stop and ask yourself, is Robert's voice enough?"

Because in my vast audio world, I do not need to see you. I have you, and I have your voice. That, to me, will never be lacking. Your voice will always be enough. I do not need video, and I never will need video.

If you enjoyed this rant, you might enjoy the fiction podcast Seen And Not Heard by Caroline Mincks

He Learned the Gestures

2026-04-08T02:02:16Z

Mood: Melted. There is no other word for it.

There is a practiced but familiar rhythm to my life that usually only I can hear. It is the rapid-fire thwip-thwip-click of a screen reader, the frantic, synthetic heartbeat of my phone as I navigate the world at five hundred words per minute. To anyone else, it sounds like a droid having a panic attack. To me, it is just the sound of access.

I know this rhythm so intimately that when someone is using a screen reader for the first time, desktop or mobile, it’s a kind of signal before I even say hello.

Usually, when a sighted person wants to help me with my phone, when an app updates and breaks its own accessibility labels, turning a useful tool into a minefield of "Button, Button, Unlabeled Button"—they take away the thing they don't know how to use.

It usually happens like this. They sigh, they take the device from my hand, and they then silence the voice, reverting to the world of the sighted. Of course, they fix the problem with their eyes before handing it back.

I am grateful for their help, certainly. But it is also a reminder that I live in a world that requires a translation layer they can simply peel away when it becomes inconvenient for them. Them turning off the screen reader reminds me that my world is something they'd rather get rid of, rather than ask me how to use the device with the screen reader enabled.

But there are those people that stun and amaze me. Not for what they say, but what they choose to do.

Tonight, I witnessed something that gave the word, love, a new dimension.

I was sitting on his couch, half-listening to a podcast, when I heard the distinct, robotic cadence of VoiceOver coming from the other end of the cushion. But it wasn't my phone chattering, and the rhythm was wrong. It wasn't the lightning-fast blur I use. It was slow. Deliberate. And extremely clumsy.

Swipe. Pause. Swipe. Pause. Double-tap... silence.

Then, the frustrated, rumbling baritone of his voice, muttering a soft curse.

"“The hell is that gesture again? You finna be thrown ‘cross the room if you don't behave.”

I froze. Anthony, a gay Black man I recently met, only had a passing interest in my world. He’d ask questions. I’d answer them. he seemed to be content never going beyond what I provided. this was unexpected and earth shattering.

I shifted, sliding my hand across the plushness of the couch until my fingers brushed his knee. He was tense, his leg muscle rigid.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Trying to order that Pizza," he grumbled. "The app updated. You said you couldn't find the checkout button yesterday."

"I know," I said. "But usually you just... look at it."

"Yeah, I'm not looking at it," he said, and I could hear the stubborn set of his jaw in his tone. "I turned the screen curtain on."

My chest did a strange, tight flip. Screen curtain is a feature that turns the display off entirely for privacy, forcing you to rely 100% on the audio. He was simulating blindness and not for a few minutes, only to be grateful he never has to be trapped in my world again. Anthony, who's moderately tech savvy, willingly plunged himself into my world. Given his tense muscles and tight voice, he’d been at this for a while. Nobody ever does this for their own understanding, at least, not in my universe. Still, I had to ask.

"Why?"

He paused. I heard his thumb drag across the glass again. “Unlabeled button,” the synth voice deadpanned.

"Because you were frustrated," he said, his voice sincere and vibrating with that chest-deep resonance that always grounds me. "You were frustrated yesterday, and I told you it was 'easy,' and you got quiet. I realized... I didn't know what I was talking about. I didn't know what you was goin' through every day. I wanted to feel what you feel when something ain't accessible."

He tapped the glass again. Thump-thump. A hollow sound. The gesture didn't take.

"How do you do the... the thing to go back?" he asked, sounding defeated. "I'm doing the Z-scrub gesture but my fingers are too big."

I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. Nobody ever did this long enough to understand. Here Anthony was, asking me how to navigate in my world instead of going back into his familiar sighted world.

I reached out, covering his large, warm hand with mine. I could feel the heat of his frustration, the tension in his fingers as they hovered over the glass. He was struggling. He was failing. He was experiencing the exact, maddening friction that defines so much of my digital life.

And it was the most romantic thing I have ever witnessed.

He wasn't trying to save me. He wasn't trying to be the hero who fixes the broken thing. He was trying to be with me in the brokenness. He wanted the empathy of shared frustration. He wanted to understand why I was tired, not just that I was tired.

"It's a two-finger scrub," I whispered, my voice emotional. "Like you're scratching a lottery ticket."

He tried it. Scrub-scrub.

“Back,” the phone announced.

"Got it," he breathed, and the relief in his voice was pure triumph.

I leaned my head against his shoulder, listening to the slow, stumbling rhythm of his fingers learning my language. It sounded like a child learning piano. It was the best sound in the world.

He never did find the checkout button. We ended up calling the restaurant. But as he sat there, struggling with a piece of glass in the dark, refusing to open his eyes to the easy way out, I realized that he hadn't just learned a gesture. He had learned me.

And that's what real love is all about.

If you enjoyed this show of care, you might like Daydream by Hannah Grace

The 'Paperwork Flood': How I Drowned a Bureaucrat before dinner.

2026-03-25T01:18:43Z

Mood: Maliciously compliant.

I can't express how much I utterly hate the "Continuing Disability Review."

It is a letter that arrives every few years from the government, asking a question that is medically absurd and philosophically insulting: "Are you still disabled?"

As if my blindness were a seasonal allergy. As if I might have woken up last Tuesday, blinked, and realized that my optic nerves had decided to regenerate spontaneously.

This week, I received The Letter. It demanded "updated medical evidence" to prove that I—a man who has been blind since birth—am, in fact, still blind.

I called the number. I navigated the phone tree hellscape. I finally reached a human being. Let’s call her "Karen from Compliance."

"I have the documents in PDF format," I told her, using my polite, I haven't had my morning tea so make this easy on me, voice. "I can email them to you right now. You’ll have them in ten seconds."

"We cannot accept email," Karen said. Her voice was flat, dry, and sounded like stale coffee and rigid adherence to a rulebook written in 1994. "It is a security risk. You must mail physical copies, or you can fax them."

"Fax them?" I asked. "You want me to fax you medical records when you could just delete the email after saving the attachments?"

"Those are the options, sir. If we don't receive them by Friday, your benefits will be suspended."

I didn't understand why they couldn't just look back in my file, noticed nothing had changed in decades, and update it based on past data.

She said it with a challenge in her tone. She knew who she was talking to. She was talking to a blind man living below the poverty line. She assumed that "fax it" was an impossible hurdle. She assumed I would have to find a ride to a library, pay twenty cents a page, and struggle with a physical machine I couldn't read. She was counting on the friction of the physical world to make me give up.

She forgot one thing.

I am a nerd. And I have an internet connection.

"Okay," I said, my voice dropping into the cool, smooth, ‘Let’s systemically tango,’ tone of a man with a plan. "I will fax them. What is the number?"

I hung up. And then, I went to work.

She wanted evidence? Oh boy, I would give her evidence.

I didn't just pull the recent files. I went into the archives. I dug into the deep, digital bedrock of my hard drive. I pulled records from when I was five. I pulled the surgical notes from my cerebral palsy treatments. I pulled the intake forms from every specialist, every therapist, every social worker who has ever written a note about my "deficits."

I compiled a single, monolithic PDF. It was a monument to medical trauma. It was a library of diagnosis.

It was five hundred and twelve pages long.

Single-spaced.

I opened my preferred internet faxing service. This is a tool that allows me to send a fax purely through digital data. It would cost $20, exactly the amount someone had donated to the blog last week, but if I didn't do this, I would lose all my benefits. It costs me zero paper. It costs me zero toner.

By the way, your tips keep me writing.

But for the recipient?

For the recipient, a fax is a physical reality. It requires paper. It requires ink. It requires time.

I imagined Karen’s fax machine. It was probably an old, beige beast sitting in the corner of a gray office. It was likely low on paper. It was almost certainly low on patience.

I uploaded the file. The file size was massive. The progress bar on my screen reader ticked up. Uploading... 20%... 50%... 80%...

I hit "Send."

And then, I sat back and listened to the most beautiful sound in the world.

"Your fax has been sent," my screen reader announced.

I grinned.

I imagined the scene in that office.

At first, it would just be a single page. Whirrr. Chunk. A standard medical form. Karen would ignore it.

Then, page two. Whirrr. Chunk.

Page three. Whirrr. Chunk.

By page fifty, the machine would be heating up. The smell of hot toner would start to fill the cubicle. The rhythmic chunk-chunk-chunk of the printing would become a drone, a mechanical chant of malicious compliance.

By page one hundred, the paper tray would run out. The machine would start beeping. That high-pitched, insistent beep-beep-beep that demands attention. Karen would have to get up. She would have to find a ream of paper. She would have to feed the beast.

And the beast would not stop.

Because I had set the retry limit to "Infinity." If the line busied out? It would call back. If the paper ran out? It would wait. It was a digital siege engine.

I sent them everything. I sent them the eye charts that prove I can’t read eye charts. I sent them the physical therapy logs. I sent them the blurry scans of notes written by doctors who are long since dead.

I sent them the Tsunami of Truth.

I wanted them to hold the weight of it. I wanted them to physically feel the burden of proof they place on disabled bodies. They want us to document our existence? Fine. Here is my existence, one sheet of hot, curled paper at a time.

Two hours later, my phone rang.

"Mr. Kingett?"

It was Karen. She sounded breathless. She sounded like she was standing next to a machine that was hyperventilating. In the background, I could hear a rhythmic whir-chunk, whir-chunk.

"Yes?" I answered, my voice the picture of innocent helpfulness.

"Sir, please. You have to stop the fax. It’s… it’s been printing for an hour. It’s jamming the machine. We’re out of toner."

"Oh, you're out of toner? It's jammed? Oh my! Oh, I’m so sorry," I said, putting exactly zero percent sincerity into the apology. "But you said you couldn't accept email. You said I had to provide complete documentation. I’m just following the rules, Karen. I wouldn't want my benefits to be suspended because I missed documentation, so here's documentation all the way back to when I'm five years old."

"Jesus Christ, We have it!" she snapped. "We have enough! Please, just… cancel the rest."

"I’m afraid I can’t do that," I lied. "It’s an automated process. Once it starts, it has to finish. Security protocols, you understand."

There was a long, strangled silence on the line. Then, a defeated sigh.

"Fine! Fine," she snapped. "We will mark your file as updated."

"Thank you," I said. "Have a wonderful day."

I hung up.

I sat there in my quiet apartment, eating a cookie. I imagined the pile of paper in that office, a physical mountain of evidence testifying to the fact that yes, I am blind, and yes, I am smarter than your bureaucracy.

If you enjoyed this tiny victory in a hostile world, you might enjoy, Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

library spotlight queer liberation library

2026-03-19T20:57:18Z

Book censorship is very, very, important to me, so when I see libraries that directly challenge book censorship, well, I love them!

I’ve written many times in my blog about why I love libraries and detest book censorship. I’m here to promote a free nationwide library for the USA!

Queer Liberation Library is a digital library that uses the Libby app as their library platform. It’s free for anyone in the US to sign up, so donate your money to Queer Liberation Library or send someone the registration link below.

https://www.queerliberationlibrary.org/

Grieving Alongside Water

2026-03-16T22:23:19Z

Listen to the audio version of Grieving Alongside Water

You think you know what crying is. You think it's water from your eyes, a tremor in your voice, a hitch in your breath. That's not crying. That’s a leak. That’s a controlled demolition. I'm talking about the flood. I'm talking about the architectural failure of the whole damn building.

It happened in the shower. The shower is a good place for it. The sound of the water is a roar that promises to swallow any other sound you might make. It’s a temporary privacy cloak woven from white noise.

The water was hot, a sheet of tiny, stinging impacts against my back and shoulders. At first, it was just water. And then, it wasn't. Each drop became a point of pressure. A tiny, insistent finger tapping on a bruise. Tap. You are alone. Tap. You are a failure. Tap. No one is coming. Tap. Tap. Tap.

The feeling started not in my head, but in my chest. A physical object. A cold, heavy stone being lowered into my ribcage. It was dense, a knot of old ice and compressed gravity. The hot water sluiced over my skin, but it couldn't touch the coldness of that stone. It was a geological cold. A cold from the planet’s core.

My breathing changed. I was no longer pulling in air. The stone was taking up too much room. I was getting whatever was left over, thin, useless sips. Then the first sob hit.

It was not a sound. It was a physical event. A violent, involuntary contraction of my diaphragm, a seismic lurch that shook my entire frame. My knees buckled. I braced myself against the tile wall. The tile was slick and cool, a shocking contrast to the heat of the water. My hand slid. My body followed. I ended up sitting on the floor of the tub, my back against the wall, the spray hammering down on my head and shoulders.

And now the tears came. But in the deluge of the shower, they had no meaning. They were just more water, joining the flood. I couldn't tell the difference between the hot water from the showerhead and the hot, salty water pouring from my own eyes. I was leaking from the inside out. My body’s boundary was dissolving.

The sobs were coming faster now, full-body spasms. They were ugly, guttural things, dredged up from the bottom of me. The sound was ripped from my throat, a raw, ragged noise like tearing fabric. It was the sound of a structure coming apart at the seams. I curled in on myself, my arms wrapped around my knees, trying to hold myself together as I was breaking apart.

The water was a constant, indifferent weight. It flattened my hair to my skull. It streamed into my open, sobbing mouth, and I tasted the salt of my own grief mixed with the flat, metallic taste of the city water supply. I was drowning and hydrating at the same time.

There are no thoughts in a moment like that. There is no 'why'. The 'why' is a luxury for later, for the quiet analysis in a dry room. In the flood, there is only the overwhelming sensory data of your own destruction. The roar of the water. The hammering pressure on your skull. The cold, unyielding tile beneath you. The stone in your chest. The raw, scraped feeling in your throat. The taste of salt and metal.

I don't know how long I sat there, a collapsed building in a rainstorm. But eventually, the sobs subsided into shudders. The stone in my chest didn't disappear, but it settled. The roar of the water slowly separated itself from the roar in my own head.

I was still a ruin. But the flood was receding. And I was left sitting in the wreckage, shivering, waterlogged, and terribly, terribly quiet.

Listen to the audio version of Grieving Alongside Water

Dead Skyrim Fan Lives on Through Mod

2026-03-16T18:09:12Z

The gaming website that had this article is no longer online anymore so I wanted to add it here, to my website. The below was penned in 2012, way back when I was a young journalist!

Everybody has memories that we all cherish and hold dearly to our hearts. Some people have voicemails from years ago. Others have artifacts belonging to the deceased.

Lastrogu3, a user on Reddit, has a different way of remembering his brother Taylor, a frequent Skyrim player who drowned in 2013 less than a month after his marriage. His brothers memory is preserved in a Skyrim shrine thanks to a mod created by Sjogga.

"It was a tragic accident where he was hanging onto a rope and using a wake board to ride the waves that were created by the river under a tree." he wrote in a blog post. "He had used another rope that comes with the board to attach it to his ankle to prevent him from loosing it if he was washed downstream. Unfortunately that rope caused the accident and got caught in the roots of the tree under the water holding him down."

Lastrogu3 and his brother had always been avid gamers. They would scour yard sales for games since they got games primarily, for birthdays and Christmas.

The siblings gamed on the SNES and many other platforms, including Xbox 360, Sega Genesis, and PC. It was a pastime they both enjoyed together, even the little things such as trading off as being Sonic or Tails

Taylor was a bigger fan of Skyrim but that didn't stop the siblings from playing together and maintaining a bond. After Taylor's death, his brother logs onto his Skyrim account, never moving the character, never saving, but always preserving.

" I never move his character, save, or do anything since it wouldn't be his character anymore. He is frozen in time just like my young brother was."

Taylor's character, Bear, stands near Solitude, just outside of Riften just past the watchtower with his sidekick who watches over him in the afterlife.

"if anything ever happened to his followers, he would always load back from a save point to make sure they made it." Lastrogu3 remembers.

The modding community of Skyrim have created something that will, not only preserve Taylor's memory, but his spirit. Skyrim modder, Sjogga, made a mod to commemorate the life of Taylor, called Bear: In Memory of Taylor for his brother in mourning.

This mod adds a small shrine where Bear's last save was. According to the description, "The ghost of Bear and his sidekick still visits the place from time to time. Bear also appears in Sovngarde."

the mod is currently at version 1.1 with 662 Endorsements.

Many players visit the shrine to pray, or leave flowers for Bear. For those who linger, who visit the shrine regularly on travels, Bear is not completely gone. His ghost looks after all of the players, bringing them all together in harmony as one in the world of Skyrim.

DIY Writers Retreat With a Travel Agent

2026-03-16T15:15:14Z

I’ve always been ineligible for residencies. Either I haven’t published enough, I don’t have enough professional contacts in the industry to give me letters of recommendation, or, well, I just don’t publish that often, which immediately disqualifies me for severely competitive residencies. I did attend a few writers retreats, but that was for like a weekend, and under a scholarship. I have always loved the appeal of residencies because they would, quite literally, give me space and time to write or touch up my many works in progress.

I’ve applied to several residencies, certainly. Many residencies don’t have the necessary accommodations for me, including the fact that most won’t even let a personal care assistant, PCA, in with me if I was accepted. Usually, these residencies are kind of out in the middle of nowhere, in an inaccessible structure, so I’d hunt for a residency that caters to disabled authors but they’d only dabble in poetry, or only be for pay with no scholarships or the residency would need to close/shut down because they didn’t get the necessary funding to keep it going among many other reasons why I just haven’t found a solid disability centric residency for me.

Recently I started looking into travel agents more and more to plan my own writing residency. Some, actually, almost everyone, says that travel agents are obsolete. They aren’t necessary for traveling domestically. They are a waste of money, and many people just don’t understand the point of using a travel agent when there are so many sites to find cheap hotels, and flights, and more.

A travel agent can do so much more for you than just find deals. There are a few things that travel agents can do for you as a disabled writer, especially if you’re a fiction writer that requires a lot of research for your manuscripts.

They do all the research for you. They scour deals, openings, attractions, and prices for you and then they just lay all of that information out in a single email, ready for you to make a decision. This includes activities or events. If you want to get some research done, you can actually use a travel agent to plan in person literary research while on your trip. They usually plan vacations, and they usually specialize in certain industries, so if your research involves traveling to an international country to experience culture, they will be your best guide. Their ability will be the best way to make sure you aren’t wandering another country without anything to do. This could be a part of your research, experiencing the culture.

The same works domestically as well. They can research domestically for you while you don’t have to spend hours doing research. I know I didn’t want to spend hours doing research on accessible hotels near me, so I went looking for a travel agent that specializes in disability travel.

They can ensure that check in, and otherwise, is all taken care of. They can even contact hotel managers to get you an accessible floor plan of the hotel, as was with my DIY writer’s residency.

They can keep exact records of client bookings, such as payments, travel dates, flight numbers, and hotel check-in and check-out dates as well as oversee any travel issues that arise, including flight or hotel cancellations, delays, conflicts, and refunds. For example, if the price drops after You’ve booked a room or experience, they will automatically apply that cheaper rate to your purchase, so you get a discount without you having to monitor everything.

In my case, I knew I was going to want to have a hotel stay for three weeks so I told my travel agent to also send me all the restaurant menus in the hotel. This way, I didn’t have to fumble around an inaccessible website. Because my agent specialized in disability travel, she manually transcribed any menus that weren’t accessible.

Travel agents can do so much more for disabled writers in general. Travel agents get paid via commission, mostly. Because my agent specializes in cruises, mostly, aside from disability travel, she gets a lot of cruise commission. There are agents that charge a planning fee, but I’ve found the ones that do are planning ongoing, luxury, experiences and daily activities. The agent I used didn’t have a planning fee when I used her but still, it’s always good to ask up front if they have a planning fee. Most don’t charge a planning fee.

I wanted to make a weekend DIY writers residency, so I told my agent to find hotels with Onsight restaurants and accessible rooms. I chose a hotel because I’d get housekeeping and so much more instead of just a rented house to stay in with nobody there.

Thanks to my ongoing financial supporters, I paid for my full stay up front, and then, I had a very epic weekend of writing, having food served to me, and I got some major writing accomplished. Even though I didn’t meet other writers on this DIY writers retreat/residency, I did find a travel agent that will certainly be my go to if I ever want to plan another one.

The travel agent I used was Katie White of Magical Moments Vacations.

Book a travel agent at Magical Moments Vacations here.

LOADING CARTRIDGE: THE_PURR_PARADOX.EXE

2026-03-10T12:25:14Z

Mood: System Overload (Cute Variation).

> BRIEFING

You are ROBERT. You are a white Level 30 Mage of the Written Word with a constitution score of "Fragile" and a charisma score of "Weaponized Adorableness."

Your QUEST is to survive Saturday Morning without dissolving into a puddle of emotional goo.

> LOOK

You are in THE KITCHEN.

The air pressure is heavy and humid, implying a high-temperature event.

The atmosphere is saturated with the scent of YEAST, MELTED BUTTER, and dangerously expensive COCOA POWDER.

To the NORTH is the HALLWAY.

To the SOUTH is the OVEN (Source of Heat).

Occupying the center of the room is THE BAKER.

> EXAMINE THE BAKER

THE BAKER is a Boss-Level dark-skinned NPC named Kevin.

Kevin only has one ear and is a White Hat Hacker. He is massive. His gravitational pull is a tracter Beam for hugs.

He smells like Chocolate Chips, server coolant, and rising dough.

He is currently humming a low-frequency bass note that is vibrating your ribcage from three feet away.

> TALK TO THE BAKER

You say, "It smells like diabetes and heaven in here."

The Baker turns. You hear the heavy, rhythmic thud-thud of his boots on the tile.

Kevin says (in a voice like warm Tea), "Sit down, cutie. You hoverin' and you make me nervous when you hover."

> SIT

You sit at the island counter.

The surface is cool marble.

Your knees bump against the cabinet.

> LISTEN

You hear the aggressive whirrrrrrrr of a KitchenAid mixer. It sounds like a jet engine trying to knead bread.

Suddenly, a new sound emerges from the HALLWAY.

It is a high-pitched, frantic mew-mew-mew-SCREAM-mew.

It sounds like a siren made of fur.

> IDENTIFY SOUND

It is THE ASSET.

Kevin adopted THE ASSET three days ago.

THE ASSET is a blind cat.

THE ASSET has no eyes, much like you have no functioning optic nerves.

THE ASSET is currently navigating the hallway by screaming at the walls to see if they scream back.

> WAIT

Time passes.

The screaming gets closer.

Scrabble-scrabble-thump.

The Asset has collided with your leg.

> EXAMINE THE ASSET

It is small.

It is sharp.

It is vibrating at a frequency that suggests its internal motor is working overtime.

It is climbing your jeans.

> INVENTORY

You are carrying:

A heart full of overwhelming affection.
Zero defenses against small, fuzzy things.
A distinct lack of pants thick enough to stop claws.

> PICK UP CAT

You reach down. You encounter fur that feels like static electricity given physical form.

You lift the cat.

It smells like dust bunnies and Kevin’s expensive laundry detergent.

You place the cat on your lap.

> KEVIN ACTIONS

The mixer stops.

The silence is sudden and heavy.

Kevin says, "Oh, so he finna be your buddy now instead of my buddy?"

> DETECT SARCASM

Sarcasm detected. Purity level: 98%.

Jealousy detected. Adorableness level: Critical.

Kevin continues, "I fed him. I bought him the little bed with the memory foam. I gave him his favorite toy. And he screams at me. But you? You just sit there looking cute and he climbs you like a tree."

> TAUNT KEVIN

You say, "It’s a disability solidarity thing, Kevin. You wouldn't understand. We communicate via the shared frequency of running into doorframes."

> PET CAT

You run your hand down the cat’s spine.

The cat arches into your hand.

The cat emits a sound: PRRRRRT-chirp.

The vibration travels through your thighs and grounds you to the chair.

> KEVIN APPROACHES

The air pressure shifts. An intense, warm shadow falls over you.

You feel Kevin’s massive hand cover your entire cheek. His palm is rough, warm, and smells like flour. He is sweet.

He leans down. His beard brushes your ear.

He whispers, "You stole my cat, Robert. I’m going to have to steal him back. Or I’ll just keep you both."

> SWOON

You cannot SWOON. You are currently immobilised by a cat.

> EXAMINE CAT BEHAVIOR

The cat is kneading your thigh with the intensity of a union worker trying to meet a quota.

The cat is also screaming again. MROW? MROW!

It is loud. It is demanding. It is absolutely unconcerned with being "polite."

> ANALYZE PHILOSOPHICAL IMPLICATIONS

[SYSTEM PAUSE FOR REFLECTION]

Let’s pause the game for a second.

This cat—Kevin named him 'Echo,' because Kevin is a nerd—is a menace. He is loud. He bumps into the table legs with a hollow thud, shakes his head, and keeps moving. He cries out constantly to locate us, to locate the food, to locate the vibe.

And I love him with a violence that scares me.

But here is the thing about Echo: If he were a human, the world would tell him to hush.

Society, built by the sighted and the able-bodied, operates on a harsh, cruel algorithm: Compliance + Silence = Value.

We are taught that to be a "good" disabled person, you must be low-maintenance. You must be the text adventure that runs quietly in the background, not the one that crashes the system. We are taught to memorize the room so we don't bump into the furniture, because bumping into the furniture makes the sighted people uncomfortable. It reminds them that the room wasn't built for us.

Echo doesn't care. Echo bumps into the chair leg and immediately yells at the chair leg for being in his way. He navigates by impact. He asserts his presence through collision.

And I can't get enough of both of them.

His dependence isn't a bug. It's a feature.

Independence is a scam sold to us to keep us buying individual subscriptions to survival. Interdependence—the messy, loud, claw-filled reliance on other living things—is the only way any of us survive the dungeon.

[RESUME GAME]

> KISS KEVIN

You tilt your head back.

You cannot reach Kevin’s face. He is too tall. This is a design flaw in the simulation.

> COMMAND KEVIN

You say, "Come here."

Kevin chuckles. The sound rumbles in his chest, vibrating against your shoulder.

"You demanding today, huh? Must be the cat’s influence."

> KEVIN COMPLIES

Kevin descends.

His lips press against your forehead first. A lingering, warm seal of approval.

Then he kisses your mouth.

It tastes like Mint chocolate candy and patience.

It is a slow kiss. An intense transfer of safety.

> RECEIVE ITEM

Kevin pulls back.

"Open up," he says.

He presses something into your hand.

It is warm. It has a rough, craggy texture.

It is a cookie. But not just a cookie.

It is a Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookie fresh from the oven.

> EAT COOKIE

You take a bite.

Sensory Input:

Texture: Holy yum! A Religious experience! The edges are crisp and shatter against your teeth. The center is a molten, gooey surrender.
Taste: The bitterness of the dark chocolate fights the sharp sting of the Macadanian Nuts, and the sugar bridges the gap. It tastes like a hug feels.

> FEED CAT

You break off a tiny, non-chocolate crumb of the plain dough edge.

You offer it to Echo.

Echo sniffs it.

Echo bites your finger.

> OUCH

You take 1 HP of damage.

You gain 500 XP in "Love."

> LISTEN

Echo settles back down. The purr revs up again like a tiny engine.

Kevin leans against the counter, chewing another Dark Chocolate candy, humming softly because he knows you like his humming.

The mixer is silent.

The oven ticks as it cools.

> STATUS REPORT

You are blind.

The cat is blind.

The baker is scarred.

The system is broken.

> SCORE

Your score is: PERFECT.

> SAVE GAME

Game saved.

(Though really, you don't need to save. This memory? The smell of chocolate, the weight of the cat, the heat of the man? This is written to the hard drive of your bones. You couldn't delete it if you tried.)

> QUIT? Y/N?

If you enjoyed this text adventure game, you might enjoy Beta Test BY Annabeth Albert with the audiobook also narrated by Sean Crisden

Where Home is Not Safe

2026-03-06T17:22:19Z

Where Home is Not Safe. writings on Domestic Verbal, Emotional and Physical Abuse Edited by Judith Skillman and Linera Lucas

ISBN: 9781476683928

Description

Even if you haven’t been hurt by domestic violence, someone you know has and wishes they could tell you about it. Perhaps you are a therapist, teacher, academic, or social worker who wants to help those who are suffering. Or maybe you are in an abusive relationship and need to know that you are not alone. The poetry, memoirs, and creative nonfiction pieces collected here tell of real incidents of abuse, as well as of those who left destructive and unsalvageable relationships. The beauty and truth of the language, as well as the honesty and courage, set this anthology apart from self-help manuals and academic treatises on domestic violence. This book offers a path forward to healing, health and fulfillment, using the power of art to give voice where voice has been stifled, forgotten, overlooked or denied.

Buy it.

The Braille Menu Conspiracy

2026-03-01T15:21:31Z

Mood: Feeling like an archaeologist of breakfast foods. Also, smug.

If a wealthy racialized friend asks me to dinner—I say yes because I am poor and I need all the luxuries I can get. My country hates artists more than cockroaches, so I have no poverty pride at all when someone far wealthier than I says he will pay for me to go out with him and eat with him.

It began like this. A wealthy porn star/sex worker was in town and he was very tired of me eating sludge. The invitation arrived as I was browsing Libro FM because someone—one of my readers—mysteriously gifted me audiobook codes. I was trying to hunt for a hefty sized digital bundle or one of my favorites narrated by one of my audiobook lifelines, Sean Crisden. Coincidentally, the very same person you’re hearing through this audio file.

I read the invitation five times before it sank in. “I'm tired of you eating junk, so let me take you out to dinner. Get you some real food.”

We walked into a place that smelled of polished wood and expensive acoustics. The air conditioning hummed with a confident, wealthy silence.

And then, I caused hell.

There is a specific, terrified cadence that enters a hostess’s footsteps when you ask the Forbidden Question.

"Do you," I asked, unleashing the chaos, "have a Braille menu?"

The air pressure in the room dropped. I heard the hostess stop moving. There was a pause, a volley of frantic arguing whispers, a rustle of fabric as she likely looked at her manager, and then the sound of a key turning in a lock that hadn't been opened since the Bush administration.

"Yes!" she chirped, her voice pitching up an octave into that particular tone people use for puppies and Disabled people out in public. "We do! Let me go get it!"

She vanished. My Dominican friend and I sat there. We waited. We aged. I grew a beard. Civilizations rose and fell in the distance. I heard the clatter of plates and the murmur of diners enjoying food I was technically not yet allowed to know existed.

When she returned, she was breathing hard, as if she had just unearthed the Ark of the Covenant from a basement storage locker beneath a pile of folding chairs.

"Here you go!" she announced, the pride in her voice so thick it was practically a solid object. She handed me The Tome.

It was heavy. That was the first warning. But the weight wasn't the problem. The problem was the texture.

This Braille menu in a sighted restaurant was not a menu. It was a biological archive. The Braille menus are always biological archives because it is a petri dish bound in plastic. Because nobody ever uses them, and nobody ever cleans them, they collect a sensory strata of the restaurant's history.

I laid my hands on the cover and immediately regretted having nerve endings. It was tacky. Not metaphorical tackiness, but literal, adhesive tackiness. My fingers stuck to the plastic with a faint, wet shhh-luck sound when I tried to move them. It felt like the floor of a movie theater distilled into a book.

I opened it. The spine cracked with the dry, popping sound of a gunshot.

"This is our latest menu," the hostess audibly beamed, hovering over me, waiting for her medal. "We want to make sure everyone is welcome."

I ran my fingers over the first page. The Braille dots were there, technically. But they were flattened, worn smooth by the weight of other objects stacked on top of them for a decade. Worse, there were mystery substances interfering with the data. I traced a line of text that I’m pretty sure said Appetizers, but my reading finger hit a patch of something hardened and crusty. Was it dried ketchup? Ancient syrup? A fossilized sneeze?

I navigated the sticky minefield.

Page 1: Chicken Sandwich - $6.95.
Page 2: The Soup of the Day is Potato Leek.

"I'll have the potato leek soup," I said, testing the waters.

"Oh, honey," the waitress cut in, her voice dropping to a tragic whisper. "We haven't served that in twelve years. This menu is from the old location."

Of course it is.

This was not a Braille menu. It was a conspiracy. It was a prop. I've come to understand, though, that Braille menus almost never are for the Blind Braille readers. Braille menus are almost always props. It exists so the owner can check a box on a compliance form and feel warm inside, while I am left holding a sticky binder of lies that tells me I can buy a steak for eight dollars. It is accessibility performed for the sighted, not built for the blind.

I closed the Book of Sticky Lies. I wiped my hands discreetly on my jeans, trying to scrub away the sensation of a 30 year rot.

"That's fine," I said, turning my face toward the kitchen. I began sniffing, using the reliable olfactory sensors.

I ignored the noise of the room and focused on the air currents drifting from the swinging doors. I caught the heavy, iron-rich scent of charred fat. Beneath it, the sharp, woody spike of fresh rosemary. And wrapping around it all, the undeniable, luxurious density of truffle oil.

"I won't need the menu," I said, handing the biohazard back to the hostess with a beatific smile. "I'll have the ribeye, medium-rare, with the truffle fries. And a glass of the Merlot I can smell breathing on the table to my left."

My friend laughed, stunned. "You just ordered the most expensive thing in the building."

"I can't help it," I said, listening to the hostess retreat with her sticky artifact. "The menu told me nothing. The air told me everything. And besides," I added, leaning in, "you're paying."

If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy At first Smile by Melissa Whitney

The Bookstore Hope

2026-02-22T20:42:57Z

The world always has a unique way of slapping me when I least expect it. Things go really well, and then, SMACK. The universe has plans for me. I can't decide if spirits read Sightless Scribbles and my life is a tragic vat of content they love to consume, or if they have joyous fun making sure things happen to me when I least expect them. It happens at Jarvis’s bookstore.

The floorboards of Jarvis’s bookstore sing in B-flat.

It is a comforting, resonant note, a deep, woody hum that travels up through the soles of my shoes and settles into my bones. It’s not a creak of age, but of settlement—the sound of heavy, sturdy ebony and mahogany adjusting to the weight of stories. Here, the air is scrubbed clean of the city’s exhaust and anxiety. It smells of steeping chamomile, the rich, oily scent of cocoa butter, and the faint, dusty vanilla of old paper.

I am safe here. I love it here. I write in here when I can make it down here.

Today, I sit at my usual table. My mechanical keyboard clatters rhythmically, a rapid-fire percussion that usually blends perfectly with the hushed murmurs of the other patrons.

"Robert," a familiar voice rumbles from above me.

Jarvis. His voice is a physical event. It doesn't just reach my ears; it vibrates in my chest cavity. It is a massive, resonant instrument, shaped by a thick Nigerian accent that wraps around vowels like a warm blanket, yet possessing the crisp, razor-sharp diction of a professional audiobook narrator.

"Yes, Jarvis?" I stop typing, smiling instinctively.

He places a mug on the table. The heat radiates against my cheek before I even reach for it. "Peppermint and honey. And I emailed you a code for that new queer romance on Libro.fm. The narrator has a rasp you will appreciate."

"You’re enabling my addiction," I say, finding the handle by the heat signature alone.

"Not addiction. Joy," he corrects, and I can hear the smile in his voice. He smells of vanilla today, and something sharper… pomegranate, maybe? It’s a warm, expansive scent that makes the space feel smaller, safer.

"You’re too good to me," I whisper.

"You are the resident writer," he says, his large hand briefly squeezing my shoulder. His hand is heavy, the size of a basketball, radiating a furnace-like heat that seeps through my flannel shirt. "And you are the only one who appreciates the sound of the loose board in the non-fiction section. I must be good to you so you will defend that loose board."

The shop is full today. I can hear the rustle of coats, the soft turning of pages, the low, melodic baritone of Black and brown men discussing politics and poetry in the corner. I am one of a very small few white people here, as usual, but the atmosphere isn't hostile. It’s a protective embrace. I am the quiet, blind guy in the corner who writes about love and kissing. Ever since stumbling into this bookstore months ago after the bus dropped me off on the wrong street, everyone has accepted me. Many customers even ask Jarvis if I am doing okay if they don't see me for a while, especially in the winter time.

I run my fingertips along the edge of the table. It’s solid—ebony or mahogany, I’m never sure which, but it feels expensive. Smooth, polished, and sturdy enough to hold the weight of the world, or at least the weight of my laptop humming under my hands. It’s a safe space I love, and yet, never deserve.

I soon return to my Romance fiction.

I’m in the flow. My fingers are dancing over the keys, the rhythmic clatter of the mechanical switches syncing with the jazz humming low in the background. I’m writing a scene about a first kiss, trying to capture the taste of hesitation, when the space is invaded. I can tell it's an invasion by the way the person enters the space of quiet and imagination.

The bell above the door doesn’t just jingle; it screams. It’s followed immediately by a rush of cold air and a scent that hits the back of my throat like a chemical burn—acrid ozone, expensive synthetic cologne, and the distinct, metallic smell of entitlement.

Footsteps. Hard, rapid, leather-soled shoes striking the floor with no rhythm, just destination.

The air pressure shifts. A new scent invades the quiet among the already invading out of place scents—the distinct, dusty heat of overheating electronics.

I try to ignore it, but I can't ignore it for long, because a voice slices through the air.

"Hey! You! Yeah, you, my man!" The voice is nasal, rapid-fire, projecting from the throat rather than the diaphragm. It cuts through the low hum of the shop like a chainsaw in a library. "You gotta try these. Seriously. Total disruption of the reading paradigm."

The quiet rustling stops.

"Excuse me?" The voice of a regular—Mr. Henderson, I think—sounds confused.

"It’s my newest creation," the nasal voice continues, pitching up. "Immersive reading. You put these on, bam. AI-generated soundscapes. Visual definitions. It tracks your iris to Project an AI generated world so you don't have to struggle with the concept. It’s the future of literacy, bro."

I pause my typing. The room stiffens. I can feel the shift in air pressure as heads turn.

"I’m not interested, brother," another deep baritone says from the sci-fi aisle. One of the regulars.

He tries another person.

"You there, with the SciFi book. Reading can be challenging so I've got something that will solve all your problems. The Immersive Lens," the intruder says, the plastic clatter of a hard case hitting a wooden table. "We’re beta testing in 'high-friction literary environments.' It uses LLM API's to hook into all the LLMs to generate real-time visual context for the text. You’re reading... what is this? Dune? Okay, so imagine, you read the word 'sandworm,' and boom—4K resolution overlay right on the page. Definitions, lore wikis, AI-generated soundscapes. It smooths out the friction of imagination. Total cognitive offloading."

I feel a muscle in my jaw jump.

"I ain't interested, man." A voice says, but the intruder won't take the hint.

"You don't get it," the nasal voice presses. "It’s the Ocular-Flow. We just closed our Series B. It’s immersive reading. You put the headset on, load the PDF, and it uses Generative AI to visualize the scene in real-time. It highlights definitions. It plays soundscapes. It takes the friction out of reading."

Oh for fucks sake.

Friction. The word grates against my eardrums.

Then I hear it. A faint, high-pitched whine. A cooling fan. Small, struggling, spinning too fast. He’s wearing a computer on his face.

"So, look," the Tech Bro continues, pressing in on someone I do not know by name, only by voice. "It also links to the cloud. You hit a word you don’t know? Boom. Definition floats in your retina. No need to pause. No cognitive load. It’s optimizing the imagination."

"Sir," Jarvis’s voice booms. It’s calm, but it carries the weight of an approaching thunderstorm. "We are reading here. Please lower your voice."

God, I love that voice. It’s a geological event. He doesn’t shout—he never has to—but his diaphragm pushes the air with enough force to rattle the books on the shelves.

"Whoa, big guy, relax," the intruder says, and I hear the unmistakable squeak of rubber soles pivoting. "I’m just doing some market research. This is a bookstore, right? Prime demographic for disruption. You work here? You should stock these. I can cut you in on the affiliate tier. Could you get the owner, though? I have a unique—"

"I do not allow soliciting in here," Jarvis says. "This is a space for reading. Quiet reading."

Jesus Christ.

He thinks Jarvis is an employee. He walked into a Black-owned business, looked at the man who radiates authority and ownership, and saw a clerk.

"Just a sec, chief," the Tech Bro says. He doesn't even stop his pitch. "So look, the AI analyzes the sentiment of the text and projects a corresponding color palette onto your retina..."

"I am asking you to lower your voice or leave," Jarvis says. The warmth that usually radiates from him—that furnace-like heat I can feel when he passes my table—is gone. His voice is cold iron.

"Is the manager around?" the intruder asks. "I want to talk about a partnership. We can digitize this whole inventory, get you guys on the blockchain, maybe pivot to a coffee-and-VR model. This silence? It’s wasted bandwidth."

"I told you, I do not allow things to be sold in MY store. I own this store," Jarvis says, sounding as if he's going to deck the Tech Bro. "And I am asking you to leave my customers alone."

"You? Own it? Nice. Good for you, man. That’s… inspiring. But look, seriously, just let me demo this for your guy here. He looks like he reads slow, this will fix that latency."

The silence in the room stretches, tight and vibrating. I can hear Mr. Henderson’s breathing hitch. This intruder isn't just rude; he’s a colonizer. He walked into a quiet space of reading and calm and decided it was a testing lab for his plastic garbage.

That's it! I'm. So. Sick. Of people like him.

The anger starts in my stomach, hot and sharp. It’s not just the rudeness. It’s the arrogance. It’s the "move fast and break things" mentality walking into a quiet peaceful room and trying to sell them a subscription to a worse reality.

I am tired.

I am so profoundly tired. I deal with this online every day. My inbox is a graveyard of "accessibility solutions" pitched by people who have never met a disabled person. I navigate a web that is broken by LLM-generated slop, alt-text written by hallucinations, and "innovations" that break my screen reader. I came here to write. I came here for the peaceful offline silence.

And he just has to invade my offline life, too!

I push my keyboard away. My cane is hooked on the edge of the table. I grab it, the grip familiar, helping me calm myself before I act.

I stand up.

I pick up my cane. I unfold it. Snap. Snap. Snap.

But he doesn't hear me.

I lift it two inches and bring the tip down hard on the wooden floor.

CRACK.

The sound is sharp, violent, and intentional. It snaps the tension in the room.

"You," I say.

The nasal voice stops. "Oh. Hey. Didn't see you back there. Whoa, wait. The cane. You’re blind? Dude! You are the perfect use case! This has text-to-speech integration that—"

"Shut up," I say.

"Buddy, try this, we just added a brand new AI model that wi—"

"I. Said. Shut. The. Fuck. UP!"

My voice surprises even me. It’s not the soft, 'cute' voice I use to navigate the world. It’s the voice of someone who has had to shout to be heard over bus engines and bureaucratic hold music for my whole life.

The room freezes.

Usually, I am the quiet, white blind guy that writes in the corner but today, the quiet boy is far from quiet, and everyone has stopped what they were doing to pay attention.

"You walked in here," I say, taking a step to the side, "and you used the word 'disrupt.' You think that's a compliment. You think you’re bringing fire to the cavemen."

"I'm offering a tool," he says, defensive now. I hear the shift in his stance, the squeak of a sneaker pivoting. "It optimizes the reading experience. It—"

"No," I say, stepping out from behind the table. I sweep my cane in a sharp arc, clearing the space in front of me. I track him by the whine of a cooling fan. "You aren't ‘just’ anything. You are polluting this room."

I take a step toward the whine. I feel a massive heat source move behind me—Jarvis. He doesn't stop me. He stands at my back, a thermal wall of protection, letting me take the lead.

"You’re talking about disrupting reading?" I ask, keeping my voice level but razor-sharp. "With what? I can hear that headset from here. It’s running a cooling fan the size of a dime at three thousand RPM. Which means you’re running a processor that’s too hot for the chassis."

"It’s a high-performance—"

"Bullshit! It’s a bloatware machine," I interrupt, tilting my head to lock onto him. "Let me guess. You couldn't get the licensing for a proper kernel, so you’re running a forked version of Android, aren't you? Probably a sloppy Linux distro buried under three layers of proprietary UI. What is it? A bastardized Ubuntu?"

"Look, DareDevil. It’s a custom OS," he snaps, defensive now.

"It’s trash," I snap. "I can hear the latency in your voice commands. You’re using Snap packages, aren't you? Or maybe you’re struggling with the Wayland compositor because you prioritized your flashy VR graphics over the actual input stability. You’re asking people to strap a kernel panic to their face and call it literacy."

A low chuckle ripples through the room. I feel Jarvis’s chest rumble against my back.

"bangin’," Someone says close by, but I am so mad my hands are shaking on my cane.

"You’re blind," the Tech Bro sneers. "What would you know about VR visuals?"

"I know that you’re selling data, not books," I counter, stepping closer. "You can’t open-source that code, can you? Because if we looked at the root, we’d see the telemetry. You aren't tracking eyes to help people read; you’re tracking people to sell ad impressions. You’re harvesting the cognitive struggle of a reader and packaging it as a user metric."

"It helps people imagine!" he shouts. "It generates images so you don't have to!"

"NO! Look, Detective Dipshit, That is the exact opposite of reading!" I slam my cane tip against the floor, the sound cracking like a gunshot. "Reading happens in the silence! It happens in the Default Mode Network of the brain, where we build the world ourselves! You are forcing the brain into a Task Positive state, jamming it with visual noise so it can’t dream! You are colonizing the imagination because you can’t stand the idea of a quiet moment that you haven't monetized!"

The room is deadly quiet. Even the B-flat floorboard is holding its breath.

He’s breathing hard now. I can smell the sour spike of his sweat. I'm not finished, though. Far from it.

"It enhances the experience! It visualizes the scene!"

"Hey Detective Dipshit, the book is the visualization!" I shout. The volume fueling me even more. "Do you even know what reading is? Reading is not passive. It is an active act of co-creation between the author and the reader. When I read a sentence, I build the world. I taste the air. I hear the voice. You want to strip-mine that. You want to colonize the reader's head space with your slop because you can’t monetize silence!"

I'm not at all finished, though. I continue,

"You wanna tell everyone what you arent saying about that technology inside? It tracks eye movements to gauge engagement. It sells that biometric data to advertisers to predict sentiment. It overlays LLM-generated images over text because you think the human brain is too stupid to visualize a sandworm on its own."

"It's not about stupid, it's about efficiency!" he argues. "Why force the brain to do work when the processor can do it?"

"Because, Detective Dipshit, the work is the point!"

I stop three feet from him. I can smell the stale coffee on his breath beneath the ozone cologne.

"You don't understand reading at all! Reading isn't a passive consumption of data," I say, my voice projecting expansively throughout the quiet space in a way I never thought possible. "It is an act of co-creation. The author builds the frame, and the reader builds the castle inside it. It is a private act. It is the last private place on earth. When I read, it happens in the quiet of my own mind. And you? You want to break into that room. You want to plaster billboards on the walls of my imagination when I. Don't. Need. You. My imagination works just fine. I, for one, didn't need to invent a machine to imagine shit for me."

"You're overreacting," he scoffs. "It's just VR. It helps people."

"Bullshit. It helps you," I correct him. "It helps you scrape data. You're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Nobody needs this. The book is a perfect technology. It doesn't need a battery. It doesn't need an update. It doesn't track my retina. It waits for me. It offers friction, and friction is where thinking happens. You want to smooth it all out until it’s just a slip-n-slide into ignorance."

"Okay, look," he laughs, a nervous, dismissive sound. "I get it. You're blind, you're bitter, you can't see the UI, so you think it's useless. But for the sighted population—"

But I am so done with these Tech Bros. I am so tired of Tech Bros, and others like them, invading spaces.

The silence in the room is heavy now. I can feel the eyes of every man in the shop on us. This only fires me up.

"You know what?" I continue, stepping closer, until I can hear the fabric of his jacket rustle. "Every. Day. Every, day, online, I have to deal with your kind of tech people every day. I can't try some open-source software because some lazy hack vibe coded a broken worthless idea of code. I can't check my email because I get ninety pitches from stupid tech evangelists, and because nobody can take 'no, leave me the hell alone' as an answer."

I take a breath, letting the rage coalesce into a diamond-hard point.

"You saw a quiet little bookstore, just here, just being a bookstore, and thought, 'Hmm! I can innovate them! I can innovate those poor, primitive folk,' right? Why? Because they read better than you? Is it because they—we—can actually imagine things without the aid of some generation technology? Are you pissed off that people around you actually engage with the author and make a connection to the writer instead of engaging with you or your useless technology? Are you mad because people aren't treating your tech like it's necessary?"

"By the way, who the hell invited you?" I ask, leaning in. "Nobody. I sure as shit didn't hear anyone invite you in. You just stomped in here without a care in the world that maybe this space can just be left alone. But that's what you people do, isn't it? You just love to colonize spaces. You can't just leave people alone! You have to invade spaces."

"You're being—" he starts.

"Maybe people just want to sit," I interrupt, "read a book, drink some tea or hot chocolate without some poorly scripted operating system glitch on their face. Maybe the real innovation is community, rather than a broken operating system."

I point my cane toward the door. I don't need to see it to know exactly where it is. The draft from the entryway tells me.

"Get out. You are boring. You are so pothetically, profoundly, devastatingly boring. You have no inner life, so you have to buy a headset to fake one. Nobody wants you here so. Get. The. Fuck. Out. And maybe before you invent a new technology, try learning how to read a book."

"You can't talk to me like that," the Tech Bro sputters. "I'm a potential investor. This is... you're just some blind guy."

Jarvis speaks up.

"He asked you to leave. Leave or I am calling the police."

The silence that follows is absolute. Even the cooling fan on his stupid glasses seems to hold its breath.

Then, I hear the shuffle of rubber soles. The heavy, retreating thud of boots. The bell jingles—a retreating, defeated sound.

He’s gone.

"Damn, Robert," Mr. Henderson whispers from the corner. "Tell ‘em."

"That was… vigorous," another voice adds, rich with approval.

I stand there, gripping my cane until my knuckles ache. The adrenaline that fueled the fight suddenly vanishes, leaving a hollow, freezing void in my chest. I won. I beat him.

But he’ll just go to the next store. He’ll just go online. There are millions of them, and only one of me.

My hands are vibrating. It’s a subtle tremor at first, starting in the tips of my fingers where they grip the handle of my cane, but it travels fast. Up my wrists, seizing my elbows, rattling the cage of my ribs. The adrenaline that had turned me into a scalpel just moments ago has evaporated, and now I am just a man standing in the dark, cold and hollowed out.

I try to reach for my laptop bag on the table. I just want to pack up. I just want to find my headphones and disappear into a podcast where the world makes sense.

My fingers fumble with the zipper. I miss the pull tab. I try again, my coordination glitching, my fine motor skills dismantled by the crash. My knuckles brush the side of my ceramic mug—now cold—and it tips.

It doesn’t break, but it rattles loudly against the saucer. A harsh, ceramic clatter that sounds like a gunshot in the quiet room.

That noise breaks me.

It’s the final straw. The dam behind my eyes, which I had reinforced with intellect and rage, shatters. A sob rips out of my throat—ugly, guttural, and wet. It’s not a dignified cry. It’s the sound of a child who realizes that no matter how hard they fight, the monsters keep coming back.

"they won't stop," I gasp, the words tumbling out into the open air, unbidden. "Why won't they just stop and leave us the hell alone?"

I cover my face with my hands, dropping my cane. It clatters to the floor. I am shaking so hard my teeth are clicking together. I feel small. I feel like I am back in a house that didn't want me, apologizing for existing, apologizing for needing love.

I am so, so, so tired.

Part 2.

The sob that rips through my chest isn't polite. It isn't the single, cinematic tear of a martyr in a movie. It is a jagged, ugly, guttural sound that scrapes against my throat like broken glass.

The adrenaline that had held my spine straight during the confrontation evaporates in a single heartbeat, leaving behind a hollow, trembling ruin. My knees buckle. I clutch the edge of the mahogany table, my cane clattering to the floor with a sound that echoes too loudly in the sudden silence. I feel small. I feel terrifyingly exposed. I had stood up. I had fought. I had won the argument, technically. But the sheer weight of the war—the endless, grinding attrition of having to defend my right to simply exist, to read, to imagine without being monetized—crashes down on me.

"I'm sorry," I gasp, the words fracturing. "I'm s-sorry."

I expect silence. I expect the awkward shuffling of people trying to ignore the blind guy having a breakdown in the middle of the store.

Instead, I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s firm, heavy, and grounding. I instantly lean into the warmph.

"Breathe, brother," a deep baritone voice murmurs from my left. "You let it out. You let that shit out."

"He needed hearing," another voice adds from the right, accompanied by a gentle pat on my back. "You stood tall, man. You stood ten feet tall."

The air around me, usually so open, suddenly feels dense with protection. The scent of old paper and coffee is overlaid with the warmth of bodies moving closer. These men, strangers mostly, patrons of the shop, are not backing away. They are closing ranks.

Then, the atmosphere shifts again. A massive heat source moves through the crowd, parting the air like the bow of a ship.

"Robert."

Jarvis.

He doesn't ask if I'm okay. He doesn't offer a tissue from a distance. He steps into my personal space and collapses the distance between us. His arms, thick and solid as tree limbs, wrap around me, pulling me into the vast, radiating furnace of his chest.

I let go.

I bury my face in the rough cotton of his flannel shirt, smelling the deep, complex makeup of him—vanilla bean, the sharp tang of pomegranate, and the underlying, earthy scent of safety. He holds me tight enough to keep my shattered pieces from drifting apart. He rocks me, a slow, rhythmic sway that matches the cadence of his breathing.

I cling to him. I grab handfuls of his shirt, my fingers twisting into the fabric, holding on as if gravity has failed and he is the only thing tethering me to the earth. I cry into his chest, soaking his shirt.

He just holds me. He starts to rock. A slow, rhythmic sway. Back and forth.

Sway. Breathe. Sway. Breathe.

I am so glad he isn't shushing me. He is rocking me like a child, like a precious thing that has been broken and brought to him for repair.

"That was brilliant," he whispers into my hair. "You eviscerated him. You cut him down to the bone, Robert. I have never seen anything like that."

"Jarvis, I’m just... I’m just tired," I whimper.

"I know. I know you are. Rest now. Just rest."

We stay like that for a long time. The bookstore fades away. There is only the heat of his skin, the smell of vanilla, and the rock-solid rhythm of his heart. I feel the tension slowly leaking out of my muscles, replaced by a heavy, syrupy warmth.

Eventually, the tears slow to hiccups. I pull back slightly, suddenly aware of where I am. The shame spikes.

"I... I got snot on your shirt," I whisper, horrified.

Jarvis laughs. It’s a low, gentle sound. "It washes out, little lion. Shirts are replaceable. You are not."

He keeps one arm around me, stabilizing me. He reaches into his pocket and produces a handkerchief—actual cloth, smelling of lavender laundry detergent. He wipes my face intimately. He is not grossed out. He is thorough, gentle, wiping my eyes, my nose, his large hand cupping my jaw to hold me steady.

After a while, he guides me to my chair.

"Sit," he commands gently.

I sit. I hear him move away, but only for a moment. The sound of water pouring. The clink of a spoon sturring. He returns, and the smell of rich, dark cocoa and peppermint fills the air between us.

"Drink," he says, pressing a warm mug into my hands. "It is my own blend. Good for the shock."

I take a sip. It’s sweet, hot, and thick. It tastes like comfort.

Then, I feel a touch on my face. Jarvis’s thumb. It is rough from moving boxes and shelving books, but the pressure is incredibly gentle. He wipes the wetness from under my left eye, then my right.

"You were magnificent," he says. The thick Nigerian accent wraps around the vowels, making the word magnificent sound like a castle being built. "You dismantled him. You took him apart like a clock."

I sniff, wiping my nose with my sleeve. "I lost my temper. I made a scene in your shop. I'm sorry, Jarvis."

"You drove away a parasite," Jarvis corrects me. "He was not a customer. He was a colonizer. And you..." I hear the smile in his voice, the sound of it softening the timbre of his words. "You protected this little store. I can never repay you. You did my job for me."

"I just... I-I hate them," I whisper. "I hate that they think everything is for them."

"I know," Jarvis says. He rests a heavy hand on my shoulder. "Come. The shop is quiet. Marvin is closing up the register for me. I am walking you home."

"You don't have to—"

"I am walking you home." He says with a tone that tells me clear as a blue sky that the decision is final.

The winter wind is biting when we step outside, but I barely feel it. Jarvis is walking on my left side, blocking the wind.

I am holding his arm. It is solid, unyielding muscle beneath the flannel. He doesn't pull me along; he moves at my pace, his stride shortened to match mine. He is the best unintentional sighted guide. He is a tactile map of the sidewalk. When he steps down, I feel the dip in his shoulder and know a curb is coming. When he pauses, I know to stop.

We walk for blocks in silence, but it’s a companionable silence now. The City sounds—the distant siren, the rumble of the L train, the hiss of bus brakes—fade into the background.

"You need to read Jemisin," Jarvis says suddenly, breaking the quiet. "Her popular one. The City We Became. I have an audio copy code for Libro.fm. I will text it to you."

"I can't afford—"

"It is a code, Robert. It is free. I get them from the publisher." He squeezes my arm against his side. "It is about a city that comes alive to fight an enemy that tries to make everything the same. Tries to make everything white and sterile and efficient. It made me think of you today."

"Me? No way. Me?" I ask.

"Yes. The Avatar of my bookstore." He chuckles, a deep, resonant sound. "Fighting the enemy with a cane and a sharp tongue."

When we make it to my complex, we navigate the lobby. The air here is different—sterile, smelling of industrial cleaner and floor wax. The acoustics change from the warm, wood-lined resonance of the bookstore to the sharp, slapping echo of bland tile.

We reach my hallway. It’s quiet here, the kind of heavy silence that emphasizes my loneliness.

I fumble for my keys, my hands still shaking slightly. "Thank you, Jarvis. Really. You didn't have to..."

As I fumble with my keys, I await Jarvis's reply. Jarvis doesn't answer me at first. He gently takes the keys from my hand and unlocks the door. After the door opens, he gives me back my keys, but his massive hand remains in contact with mine. He takes the back of my hand into his other one and squeezes before replying,

"Robert?" Jarvis asks.

I freeze. His voice has dropped. It’s no longer the commanding voice of the bookstore owner. It’s soft, intimate, and his Nigerian accent sounds like it's lulling me to sleep, rounding the edges of my name.

"May I hold you again?"

I nod, and suddenly, the world narrows.

His hands come up. They are warm, dry, and impossibly large. He cups my face. His palms cover my cheeks, his fingers stretching back into my hair, his thumbs resting gently on my cheekbones. It is heaven.

Instantly, the sterile hallway vanishes. The smell of floor wax vanishes. The echo of the day vanishes. All that exists is the heat of his skin, the smell of vanilla, and the absolute stability of his grip. He creates a home out of nothing but touch.

I suddenly realize I'm crying again. It’s a quiet weeping this time, born of a terrifying vulnerability.

Before I can wipe tears away, strong thumbs swish swish over my skin, catching each tear as it falls. The friction of his calloused skin against mine is electric. It’s a texture I want to memorize. It feels like reverence.

"I feel…" I begin, my voice cracking. "Jarvis…"

"I'm right here, my little lion," he says.

Now that things have calmed down, the nickname hits me in the center of my chest. Little Lion.

It makes me cry all over again. I am not a lion. I am a small, trembling thing with a broken nervous system and a white cane. I am a man who spent his teenage years saying stupid, ignorant things because I was hurting and didn't know any better. I am a man who feels the crushing weight of a trillion-dollar industry hating empathy and trying to automate the human soul, and I feel like I am suffocating under it.

"But—but, but! I'm no lion! I'm no lion!" I stammer, the words tumbling out. "I won today, but… but… you really think I'm a lion?"

"Yes," he says. He makes his voice and accent sharpen, shedding the lullaby softness for a moment so I hear it clear as a bell, ringing with the precision of a narrator reading a truth that cannot be edited. "Yes! You are special. You are amazing, okay? Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

I shake my head inside the cradle of his hands.

"I'm not a lion. Not like activists like Malcolm X," I babble, fueled by anxiety. "Activists are lions. I am not. I'm not Martin Luther King Jr. I don't have that kind of wisdom. I'm not brave like the Panthers. They changed the world. They moved mountains. I just... I yelled at a guy in a bookstore because he pissed me off."

"Robert," Jarvis warns, his tone dropping.

"No, really," I insist, the tears threatening to return. "I'm just a guy who writes romance novels and complains about PDFs and finds joy in cookies and cries when someone holds my hand. Lions roar and that's not roaring."

His hands don't let up, though. they still hold my face, as if we're the only two people in the world. His thumbs rub soothing strokes on my cheeks. It's as if he is rocking me to sleep with his thumbs. The feeling is so comforting I almost forget that I am standing in the hallway, not laying on my bed.

"That is roaring, Robert! Listen, Robert," he says, and his tone is firm but still gentle, "listen to me."

"I'm listening," I say,

"no you’re not," Jarvis says a bit playful. "C’mon, breathe with me. In. Out. In. Out."

After doing this a few times, I hear him smile again.

"That's better. Your eyes have calmed down. Now, listen to me, okay?

I nod, signaling he has the floor.

"I read Sightless Scribbles. Every post. I check that Dropbox folder to see if Sean narrated a new post of yours. And I see a lion! I see a brilliant soul that needs to know he is loved, and that he is special, and his words mean something deeply to a lot of people. Robert, people ask how you are when you do not come to the bookstore. They want to know you are okay. I am not the only one that loves your smile and your wit and your typing. It's music to others. The way you are so kind to everyone. The way you love. The way you hurt. The way you feel. That is why you are special."

I open my mouth to protest but he continues,

"you are not the civil rights activists you mentioned. You are something just as special, but very different. You don't have to be them in order to change lives, to make lives special. You don't need to change policy to change the world, to touch everyone you meet in profound ways."

I am so stunned by his words, I do not have a comeback.

"Thank you," I say, meaning every word, "Can I... Can I tell you something?" I ask.

"Of course," he says, still holding onto my face, but he moves closer, his face inches from mine.

"I’m terrified. I’m so terrified, Jarvis."

"Of what?"

"That I'll stop," I whisper. The truth bleeds out of me, the fear burning hot and painful. "I see it online every day. Writers, friends... people I respected. Leo almost lost his soul to it. They start just doing things that make them money. They start using tech to benefit themselves, to enrich themselves. They get greedy. They get tired. It's so much easier to just let everyone else suffer while you walk away. Stop caring. Stop feeling. It’s so exhausting to care this much, all the time and have everyone call you an idiot. To be the one pointing out the harm when everyone else is saying, 'It's fine, it benefits me now.' I'm scared I'm going to wake up one morning and I'll be too tired to fight. I'm scared I'll become one of those shrugging people. I don't want to be a shrugging person, Jarvis. I don't want to become soulless."

"You, my little lion, will never become that." He says.

"I don't deserve that nickname," I say, "I've said stupid things in the past. I've said racist things, even. I was an idiot. I didn't know things. I'll mess up again in the future. I'll say something stupid in the future… and... And... I'm just so imperfect."

I take a shuddering breath. I choke on the confession.

"It's so easy to stop caring about others," I whisper, fresh tears flowing faster now, his thumbs working overtime to catch them. "Everyone is doing it. Writers I respected. Friends. They just... surrender. They take the easy path to make sure they get what they need and they just stop caring about others, or about solidarity, or hell, about morals. And I'm so tired, Jarvis. I'm scared that one morning I'll just be too tired to fight, and I'll let capitalism take away the love that builds me up, and I'll lose my soul. I'll become hollow."

Jarvis goes still. His thumbs stop moving for a second, pressing firmly into my skin, grounding me.

"And that," he says with finality, his hands never leaving my face, tightening his grip just enough to demand my absolute attention, "is why you are a revolutionary!"

"Because you are terrified," he continues, his voice low and fierce. "Because you care so much that the thought of not caring breaks your heart. That is the revolution, Robert. The machine wants you numb. The capitalists want you efficient. You are messy. You are weeping in a hallway because you love art and people too much. Do you understand? Your grief is your weapon. Your refusal to be numb is what makes you dangerous to them."

He leans in closer. I can feel his breath, warm and smelling of mint tea, against my lips.

"You are a golden light," he whispers. "You punch up. You learn. You grow. You are not the boy who said stupid things; you are the man who learned why they were stupid. That is not weakness. That is strength."

The space between us is charged, thick with the unsaid. I can feel the vibration of his heart through the air, or maybe it's just my own, beating in sync with his.

He leans down and kisses me.

It isn't a devouring kiss. It isn't frantic. It is slow, deep, and tastes of salt and peppermint. His lips are soft, full, and deliberate. He kisses me like he is sealing a promise. He kisses me like he is transferring his own strength into my lungs.

God, this feels so good, so real.

I cling to his wrists, my fingers digging into the thick warmth of his forearms, leaning into this pocket of assurance and tenderness.

When he pulls back, he doesn't go far. His forehead rests against mine.

"One day," Jarvis says, his voice vibrating through my skull. "One day, you will win an award. A big one. I will see you on a stage, holding a trophy, and you will be smiling. I will say, loudly, I gave that man free hot chocolate for life!"

I let out a wet, shaky laugh. "You're crazy."

"I am inevitable," he counters, the smile evident in his tone. "I do not predict, Robert. I narrate. I have seen the end of the book, and it is good. Speaking of,"

"Yes?" I ask, curious.

"Free tea, free hot chocolate. All day, every day. When you want it, just come to my store. You may write in there for free, forever, because you are a golden person."

I am stunned, and tired, but I don't want him to go. Every cell in my body screams at the thought of the door closing between us.

"Stay?" I whisper, though I know he won't. I know the reality of the night.

"Sweet thing. I have to go," he says, and I hear the regret heavy in his throat. "But the store is yours. Tomorrow. Forever. You write for free. You drink my tea. Drink all my hot chocolate. You are the resident lion."

He kisses my forehead, a lingering pressure that stays long after he pulls away.

"Tomorrow, Check your email," he says, stepping back, the cool air of the hallway rushing into the space he vacated. "I will send you The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin. Listen to it. It’s about a city that fights back. It’s about you."

"Thank you," I whisper.

"Goodnight, my cute lion."

I listen to his heavy footsteps retreat down the hall. I listen until the outer door clicks shut, sealing the silence back in. But the silence doesn't feel as heavy now. It feels charged.

I unlock my door and step into my small, quiet apartment. I strip off my clothes, which smell of the day's battle, and crawl into bed. The sheets are cool, but my skin still hums with the phantom warmth of Jarvis's hands.

My phone dings.

I double-tap the screen. A voice message.

I hold the phone to my ear and press play.

"Sleep well, my little lion," Jarvis's voice says, recorded in the quiet of his car, the acoustic isolation perfect. "You did good today. You protected me and my bookstore. Now let me protect you. Close your eyes. I'll see you tomorrow."

It is the sound of something I haven't heard in ages. It is the sound of someone that can't wait to see me again. It is the sound of someone watching over me, even if he is not here beside me.

I curl onto my side, clutching the phone to my chest like a talisman. For the first time in months, the noise in my head stops. The fear of the future recedes.

Protected, loved, and looked after, I close my eyes, and I sleep, deeply, for the first time in years.

If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

The Ballot is a Doorstop, Not a Love Letter

2026-02-19T23:39:48Z

Mood: Tired. Ranty. In need of a hunk of a man to bake me cookies so I can stress eat.

There is a specific, suffocating hell to a conversation with a leftist who has decided that voting is a moral failing.

It feels like trying to explain the concept of "drowning" to someone who is standing on dry land, criticizing the aesthetic quality of the life raft. They talk about "purity" and "burning it all down," and their voices have the smooth, frictionless quality of people who have never had their survival threatened by a change in bureaucratic font size.

They tell me that nobody is progressive enough. They tell me the system is broken.

I know. I feel the broken edges of this system against my skin every single day. I know the machinery is rusted and hostile because I am the one getting caught in the gears.

But here is the difference between us: To them, voting is an identity. It is a mood board. It is a public statement of the soul. If the candidate doesn't align perfectly with their spirit, they withhold their vote like it’s a precious jewel that cannot be sullied.

To me, voting is not an identity. It is a mechanic. It is a piece of duct tape. It is a shim.

And I always, always use the shim.

I do not talk to these people about strategy because they do not understand the difference between morality and logistics. They think refusing to vote is a "statement." I think refusing to vote is a surrender. It is a way of telling me you are comfortable enough to survive fascism, so you don't mind letting it in the front door just to teach the Democrats a lesson.

When you are disabled, when you are poor, "harm reduction" isn't a buzzword. It is the difference between a bruise and a broken bone. It is the difference between losing a program that feeds you and keeping it for one more agonizing, underfunded year.

So, I vote.

Local elections. National elections. School boards. Judges. I vote in every single one.

I do the research. I listen to the candidates. I find the person who is the most progressive, or, frankly, the person who is the least likely to actively hunt my community for sport. I know they will never do everything I want. I know they are beholden to corporate donors. I know the Democratic party is a disappointment engine running on fumes and nostalgia.

But I am not voting for a savior. I am voting for an opponent I can negotiate with.

This is the part that the online purists miss. They view politics as a romance—they want to fall in love with a leader. I view politics as physics. I am looking for leverage.

When I cast a ballot for a corporate Democrat over a fascist, I am not endorsing their soul. I am choosing the terrain of the battlefield. I am choosing to fight on a field where I might be ignored, rather than on a field where I will be liquidated.

I vote to buy time. That’s it. That is the strategy.

We need time to build community. We need time to establish mutual aid networks. We need time to organize, to feed each other, to build the structures that will actually save us.

If a Republican wins, that time evaporates. The atmosphere changes. The pressure drops. The noise of survival becomes so deafening that we cannot hear each other to organize. We spend 100% of our energy just trying not to die, trying to protect our friends from deportation, from institutionalization, from violence. We stop building; we start hiding.

A Democrat—even a mediocre, frustrating one—acts as a buffer. They are a doorstop. They keep the door cracked open just an inch, just enough for us to breathe, just enough for us to do the real work.

I have a Republican acquaintance. We are not friends—the friction between our worldviews is too abrasive for friendship—but we talk. He likes me more than I like him, mostly because he thinks my disability makes me a tragedy he can be kind to.

He told me something once, his voice heavy with a terrifying, calm confidence. He said, "I don't worry about Republicans losing. The leftists, the ones who really hate us? They don't vote. They stay home because they're mad at their own side. We count on that."

He wasn't gloating. He was stating a fact of engineering. He knows the math. He knows that his side views voting as a weapon, while my side views voting as a valentine. As long as the left treats the ballot box like a purity test, the right will win by default.

I hear the slogan constantly: "If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal."

It rings in my ears like a tinnitus of bad logic.

Do you not hear the gears grinding? They are trying to make it illegal. Every single day. They are closing polling places in Black neighborhoods. They are purging voter rolls. They are creating ID laws that specifically target the poor and the disabled.

Why would they spend millions of dollars and decades of effort trying to stop you from doing something if it didn't matter?

They are building walls around the ballot box because they know it is a point of failure for their power. They know that if we actually used the leverage we have, the machine would jam.

When I vote, I am not "blindly checking a box." I am engaging in a quiet, boring, essential act of strategy and self-defense.

I am using the system's own bureaucracy to clog its worst impulses. I am finding the person who will speak to—or at least not actively silence—my disability needs. I am looking for the candidate who acknowledges that the Americans with Disabilities Act exists, even if they don't fund it enough.

Is it exhausting?

God, yes.

I am so tired. I am tired of choosing between "active malice" and "benevolent neglect." I am tired of the lesser of two evils. My muscles ache from holding the door open.

But I do not have the luxury of fatigue.

Voting is not the work. Voting is the chore we do so that we can do the work.

The real work is building the coalition. It is the mutual aid. It is feeding your neighbors. It is creating a community that is so tightly woven that we can catch each other when the state fails.

But you cannot build that community effectively when you are constantly under siege. You cannot plant a garden during a bombing run.

There will always be people who disappear when things get "easy." There are fairweather allies who only care about politics when it's trending, who engage in mutual aid for the aesthetic and then vanish when the crisis creates a little friction.

But for those of us who stay? For those of us who know that "easy" is just a pause in the violence? We need every inch of ground we can get.

We defend the people who stay. We defend the people who build. And we do that by being strategic, not morally righteous.

I don't care if you feel "dirty" voting for a centrist. I don't care if it ruins your vibe. Wash your hands afterward.

I care about strategy. I care about the fact that my healthcare, my housing, and my physical safety are on the line.

If you refuse to vote because the candidate isn't perfect, you aren't a revolutionary. You are a roadblock. You are standing in the doorway, blocking the only exit, complaining about the paint color while the rest of us are choking on the smoke.

Get out of the way. Or better yet—pick up a bucket and help us hold the line.

If you enjoyed this rant, you might enjoy Yes No Maybe So by Becky Albertalli and Aisha Saeed.

The Kiss

2026-02-15T13:08:19Z

Authors note. This little something was supposed to bloom into something else, but it never did. Still though, I think it captures a moment, which is equally as smashing!

We slowly draw closer in the enveloping blackness. My porch light illuminates his questioning, but oh so eager, face as we draw closer, collapsing the distance of our feelings. Crickets cheer us on in this game of chance. The warm air places a heavy blanket of absolute around us; our breathing becomes one breath as we clash lips. Our lips rest lightly on clouds, no longer rooting us. A new kind of fire erupts between our locked passions, igniting our experience with a feverish fervor. We burn down any doubt in our minds with this towering flame of refuge. The sounds around us conduct the perfect beat for this pleasant song. My small lips gently continue to communicate urge with his. His fiery candles instantly kindle my soul. The sounds around us stop abruptly to give us privacy. Way off in the distance, violins play in both of our fantasies, never wanting this testament of love to end. We both are blankets rapping up our adoration for the past, present, and future. We pull away, letting the flame dwindle slowly. We gaze at each other knowing the imperative message that we just told each other. The fire crackles and pops but it never fizzles out, even years later.

If you enjoyed this bit of flash fiction, you might enjoy the fiction podcast 100 Words of Astounding Beauty

How Fanfiction is Literary Resistance

2026-01-20T11:56:29Z

Mood: Firery, cozy, and currently plotting the overthrow of capitalism via Romance tropes and cookies.

I have a confession to make. A secret that sits in the center of my chest like a warm, purring cat.

I write Fanfiction. I also read Fanfiction too.

I have been doing it for years, under a handle that has absolutely no connection to my government name, building a quiet little kingdom on the servers of Archive of Our Own. And no, before the whispers start, I am not the author of My Immortal. I lack that specific, chaotic genius. I cannot weave a spell of spelling errors that potent. Though, if you haven’t listened to the dramatic readings of it, you are denying your ears a specific kind of jagged, confusing joy. Go find them. Treat yourself to the auditory chaos.

But I want to talk about the silence. Specifically, the difference between the noise of my "professional" life and the beautiful, heavy silence of my secret one.

If you read my polished work, the stuff with ISBNs and price tags, you are reading Robert Kingett: The Brand publishers demand I become. You are reading a version of me that has been sanded down, edited, and packaged to fit on a shelf. But if you stumble across my work on AO3, you are reading something else entirely. You are touching the raw wire.

And frankly? I think the raw wire is better because it is imperfect.

We live in an era of "Marketing Sludge." You can feel it, can’t you? The texture of the internet has changed. It used to feel like a chaotic, open field; now it feels like a shopping mall where the air conditioning is broken and everyone is screaming at you to buy a solution to a problem you didn't know you had. Publishing—and I say this with all the exhausted love of a career writer—is an industry built on stripping away agency.

They tell us we aren't just writers anymore. We are "content creators." We are "brands." We are expected to flatten our complex, jagged souls into a smooth, marketable surface.

That is why publishing, if you were to take the Sightless Scribbles archive and try to sell it, would never have a clue how to market it. Because, it's not content. Publishers don't know how to package a soul.

To be an author is to be a constant brand for publishers and never ourselves. We have to post on social media, we have to hustle, we have to perform our trauma for clicks. It is a system designed to turn Art into Product, and the Artist into a Vending Machine.

And that is why Fanfiction is the last radical act left to us.

Think about the economics of it. It is, perhaps, the only truly functioning internet socialist utopia I have ever lived in. It is a digital gift economy. I spend hours—labor that capitalism tells me should be billed by the word—creating a world. I pour my grief, my lust, my rage into it. And then I release it. For free.

There are no paywalls. There are no ads interrupting the smut to sell you car insurance. There is no algorithm punishing me because I didn't post at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday. There is only the work, and the people who need it. It is anti-capitalist by its very definition because it refuses to commodify the connection between the storyteller and the listener. It says that joy does not need a transaction fee.

And the community? It’s not a "network." Networking is just a fancy word for people using each other to climb a ladder. Fandom is a potluck. Everyone brings a dish. Some people bring audio adaptations of Fanfiction, Some people bring art, some bring beta-reading labor, some bring comments that feel like a warm hand on your shoulder after a day of crying. We feed each other. We build these massive, sprawling architectures of support without a single dollar changing hands. It proves that we don't need profit motive to build something beautiful. We just need each other, and a shared obsession with a world or characters that deserve exploration or a diverse story.

There is also the matter of the "Rules."

If you take enough creative writing classes, or listen to enough "gurus," you start to realize that 90% of writing advice is just gatekeeping wearing a monocle. It’s classist, it’s often ableist, and it is obsessed with "restraint." Kill your darlings. Show, don't tell. Trim the fat.

Fanfiction teaches you to burn the rulebook. It teaches you that "indulgence" is actually a rigorous study of emotional resonance. It allows you to sprawl. It allows you to write 50,000 words of pure angst just to explore the specific texture of grief, or an entire chapter dedicated to the domestic intimacy of two people sharing a bed, focusing on nothing but the warmth of skin and the sound of breathing.

Traditional publishing calls that "pacing issues." Fanfiction calls it "what we actually came here for." It is a better teacher because it prioritizes impact over propriety. It taught me how to write not for a critic in a tweed jacket, but for a person alone in their room at 3 AM who desperately needs to feel like they aren't the only broken thing in the universe.

And yes, I am thin-skinned. I am the person who reads a bad review of a book I loved and immediately constructs an elaborate fantasy where the reviewer is buried under an avalanche of ice cream. Just mountains of Rocky Road, suffocating them in marshmallows and chocolate, a sweet, cold, sticky justice for their bad take.

But on AO3? The dynamic is different. Because I am not a brand there. I am just a voice in the dark. If someone hates the story, they hate the story, not the "Robert Kingett Brand." They can’t demand things of me. They can’t insist I owe them something because they bought my book. The transaction was emotional, not financial, so the entitlement—while it still exists in fandom drama—feels different. It feels less like a customer complaint and more like a disagreement at a dinner party.

I love reading "Self-Inserts" and "Author Avatars" in fanfic for this very reason. I love seeing how another disabled person navigates a fantasy world. I want to feel the weight of a sword in a hand that trembles like mine. I want to know how a blind mage navigates the corridors of a magic school using echolocation and their cane skills. Traditional publishing often scrubs those details out to make the character "relatable" to a general audience. Fanfic lets us be specific. It lets us be weird.

So, no. I won’t tell you my handle. I won’t merge the streams.

I need that space. I need a place where I can take off the "Author" costume, hang it in the closet, and just be a gremlin at a keyboard, typing out fantasies about bodies and magic and systems that actually work.

I will keep publishing professionally because there are certain parts of it that are fun. I get to meet an audience that will never read Fanfiction and I like seeing my name on covers. But my heart? My heart lives in the tags. It lives in the comments section at midnight. It lives in the unpolished, un-marketable, glorious mess of the Archive.

You should try it. Come play in the sandbox where the money doesn't matter. It’s the best writing class you’ll ever take, and the tuition is zero. Just bring your own shovel.

If you enjoyed this rant, you might enjoy Unapologetically Me by Danesha Little

Why "Happy Ever After" is Radical Restorative Justice

2026-01-11T11:31:38Z

Mood: Intellectually combative but wishing I could have a masculine man hold my face.

I was listening to a literary podcast the other day—a mistake, usually, as they tend to discuss books that don't have an audiobook version written by people who wouldn't look at me on the street—and the host let out a long, beleaguered sigh.

"I just can’t do Romance," he said, his voice dripping with that specific, curdled disdain reserved for things women and queer people enjoy. "It’s so… prescriptive. You know exactly what’s going to happen. Where is the tension? Where is the realism? It’s just a fairy tale for people who can’t handle the complexity of the real world."

I paused the track. I felt the familiar heat of annoyance rise up the back of my neck, a prickling sensation like a wool sweater in July.

This criticism—that Romance is "unrealistic" or "formulaic" because it guarantees a Happily Ever After (HEA)—is the laziest intellectual take in the modern canon. It is also, fundamentally, a defense of the status quo.

Of course Romance isn't "realism." Have you looked at reality lately?

Realism is a landlord keeping your deposit because he knows you can’t afford a lawyer. Realism is working a sixty-hour week and still having to choose between the good insulin and the rent. Realism is a world where kindness is often treated as a weakness to be exploited, and where the "bad guy"—the billionaire, the abuser, the system—usually wins, gets a tax break, and dies peacefully in his sleep while still hoarding money even after death.

"Realism" is just a polite word for the unmitigated chaos of capitalism.

I don't need a paperback for realism. I can get that by answering my door or picking up my phone or inviting a stranger into my space, wherein they take what they want from my body and then just leave.

When critics mock the Happily Ever After, they are mocking the concept of justice. They are suggesting that ambiguity is the only mark of intelligence, and that suffering is the only valid currency of art. They want the landing gear to fail because they think a crash is more "complex" than a safe landing.

I reject that.

For me, and for millions of other marginalized readers, the Romance novel is not a flight from reality. It is a simulation of a just world. It is a restorative justice hearing where the verdict is finally, for once, in our favor.

Think about the economics of a Romance novel. In the real world, "Care"—the act of listening, holding, supporting, remembering, and loving—is an inefficiency. It is labor that goes unpaid and unnoticed. If you spend an hour comforting a coworker, the market calls that "time theft." If you spend years supporting a partner who refuses to communicate and never hugs you or tells you, "you look nice today,", society calls that "standing by your man."

But in a Romance novel? Care is the gold standard.

In these books, emotional labor is the primary driver of the plot. The narrative arc is obsessed with it. The characters are forced to communicate. They are forced to apologize. They are forced to demonstrate, through action, that they are worthy of the space they take up in someone else’s life.

And the HEA? The HEA is the paycheck.

It is the moment the universe balances the ledger. It says: You put in the work. You were vulnerable. You were brave. You survived the trauma. And therefore, you are owed joy.

This is why the genre feels so radical to me. It is the only place in literature where the "System" (the plot) actively punishes greed and selfishness, and actively rewards vulnerability and interdependence.

When I read a Happily Ever After, I am not escaping. I am calibrating my proprioception.

You know that feeling when you miss a step in the dark? That lurch in your stomach, the sudden vertigo when the floor isn't where your body expected it to be? That is what living as a disabled, queer, poor person feels like most days. The world is constantly pulling the rug out. You are always braced. Your muscles are always tense, waiting for the fall.

The HEA is the feeling of your foot finding solid ground.

It is a physical sensation of balance being restored. It is the click of a lock tumbling into place. It is a resolved chord at the end of a chaotic symphony. It allows my body to exhale. It allows me to experience, for three hundred pages, a reality where the "other shoe" never drops. Or, if it does drop, it turns out to be a glass slipper that fits perfectly.

This isn't just comforting; it's training.

If we constantly consume media that tells us suffering is inevitable and justice is a myth, we will start to believe it. We will accept the scraps we are thrown. But if we immerse ourselves in stories where joy is non-negotiable—where the queer kid gets the guy, where the disabled woman gets to be the hero, where the billionaire grovels and redistributes his wealth (okay, that last one is fantasy, but let me have it)—we start to develop a taste for it.

We start to ask: Why shouldn't I have this?

Why shouldn't my labor be valued? Why shouldn't my boundaries be respected? Why shouldn't I be held with reverence?

Romance teaches us that we are not broken things waiting to be discarded. It teaches us that we are protagonists. It frames accommodation not as a burden, but as an act of devotion. It frames consent not as a legal contract, but as a love language.

So, to the podcast host who thinks the HEA is "prescriptive": You’re damn right it is.

A prescription is medicine.

I read Romance because I am sick of a world that does not know how to communicate and then ignores the answer. I need the medicine of a narrative that insists people are triumphs and details how we are allowed agency. I need the restorative justice of a book that looks at scars and says, "These do not disqualify you from love. They are the map of how you survived to reach it."

The Happily Ever After isn't a fairy tale. It’s a blueprint. And I’m going to keep studying it until we figure out how to build it out here, on the gritty, uneven pavement of the real world.

If you enjoyed this rant, you might enjoy Beach Read by Emily Henry

The Acoustic Signature of Weather

2026-01-06T14:41:45Z

Listen to The Acoustic Signature of Weather.

Sighted people have a casual, almost dismissive relationship with the weather. They glance out a window or check an app. The weather is a visual fact, a piece of data. For me, the weather isn't data. It’s a symphony. Or, more accurately, it's a language I've learned to interpret, spoken in a dialect of sound and pressure.

Every weather system has a unique acoustic signature.

Rain is the most versatile vocalist. It’s not one sound; it’s a whole choir. A light, misty drizzle is a soft, static hiss, the sound of the air itself being gently abraded. A steady, all-day rain is a drummer with an infinitely varied set of brushes, playing a continuous, soothing rhythm on the roof, the windows, the pavement. A torrential downpour is something else entirely. It’s a roar. The individual drops merge into a single, percussive entity, a sound so dense it feels like a physical weight. I can tell the difference between rain hitting asphalt (a sharp, flat splat), grass (a soft, absorptive thud), and leaves (a delicate, papery pitter-pat).

Snow is the master of subtraction. Its arrival is heralded not by a sound, but by the death of it. As the flakes begin to fall in earnest, the world goes quiet. The snow acts as a global acoustic dampener, absorbing ambient sound, erasing echoes, and muffling the sharp edges of the city. The rumble of a distant truck becomes a low hum. A car passing by doesn’t whoosh; it slushes. The predominant sound of a heavy snowfall is a profound, hollow silence, a quiet so deep you can feel it in your bones. It’s the sound of the world holding its breath.

Wind is the most expressive of all. It’s a musician that plays the landscape. I can tell the difference between the high, mournful whistle of wind through the tight gap between two buildings and the deep, resonant whoosh of it moving through the full branches of a pine tree. The sound of wind in bare winter branches is a frantic, rattling clatter, like a skeleton applauding. A steady, powerful wind has a low, oceanic roar. A gusty wind is conversational, full of sudden shouts and abrupt silences.

Even the sun has a sound, in a way. On a clear, hot, sunny day, sounds become sharper, more brittle. There are no clouds to absorb them, so they travel further and with more clarity. There’s a distinct feeling of openness, an expansion of the acoustic space around me.

I don’t look out the window to see what the day is like. I stand still and I listen. I listen to the language the world is speaking. And sometimes, in the middle of a rainstorm, with that complex percussion playing on every surface around me, I feel like I understand it more clearly than anyone.

Listen to The Acoustic Signature of Weather.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy reading, The Misfits by James Howe.

A Field Guide to the Personal Space Violations of Public Transit

2026-01-06T14:27:41Z

Listen to A Field Guide to the Personal Space Violations of Public Transit

Public transit is a marvel of modern engineering and a complete failure of human social design. It is a rolling testament to our species’ profound inability to be aware of anyone but ourselves. As a daily commuter, I have become an unwilling naturalist, documenting the various species of sensory offenders in their native habitat.

Welcome to my field guide.

Species 1: The Headphone Bleeder (Tinnitus percussivus)

This specimen believes that sharing is caring, especially when it comes to their terrible taste in music. They are identifiable by the inescapable, high-frequency tss-tss-tss of a synthesized hi-hat that leaks from their earbuds at a volume capable of sterilizing small mammals. This sound burrows into your skull and takes up residence, leaving you with a phantom beat that will haunt you for hours.

Species 2: The Olfactory Offender (Aroma aggressivus)

Your nose will identify this individual long before your ears do. They travel in a dense, personal cloud of either A) cologne so aggressive it feels like a chemical weapon, or B) the greasy, pungent ghost of a recent fast-food meal. Their presence fundamentally alters the bus's ecosystem, creating a "no-breath zone" with a radius of at least three feet.

Species 3: The Pole Monopolizer (Brachium obstructus)

This is my personal nemesis. You know the central poles on the bus or train? They are meant for multiple humans to use for balance. The Monopolizer, however, sees it as their own personal property. They don't just hold the pole; they embrace it. They wrap their entire arm around it in a full-body hug, creating an impassable barrier of human flesh and entitlement. For someone navigating by touch, this presents a unique challenge: either give up on stability or commit to an act of unwelcome intimacy with a stranger’s unwashed armpit.

Navigating this ecosystem is a daily exercise in sensory warfare. My only comfort is in quiet classification, turning my frustration into a silent, internal documentary narrated by a very tired David Attenborough. It’s that, or start screaming. The documentary is quieter.

Listen to A Field Guide to the Personal Space Violations of Public Transit

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy If I Were You, I'd Kill Myself by Imani Barbarin

The Cartography of an Open Palm

2026-01-06T14:15:44Z

Listen to The Cartography of an Open Palm

I have written about hands before. I’ve written about them as weapons, as tools, as instruments of casual violence and clinical detachment. My memory is a museum of the hands that have done me harm, a collection curated by pain. The clenched fist that taught me the sound of bone meeting cartilage. The proprietary grip that dug bruises into my arm like angry purple thumbprints. The hand that held a lit cigarette. Those were hands that were closed, stories with the covers slammed shut, their intent hidden until the moment of impact.

But a fist is a hand that is hiding something. A hand that grips is a hand that is afraid of losing control. And lately, I find myself dreaming not of avoiding hands, but of finally being able to read one. I find myself dreaming of the opposite of a fist.

I dream of a man's open palm.

I long to know what it would feel like to explore another person’s soul through the geography of their hand. To have a man trust me enough to place his hand, palm up, into my own. Not for a handshake, not as a prelude to sex, but as an offering. An invitation. A silent agreement to let me read.

I would start by tracing the lines, not as a fortune-teller predicting a future, but as a cartographer mapping a past. The life line, the heart line—not as prophecy, but as the rivers of his experience, worn into his skin over time. I would feel their depth, their texture. Are they smooth or are they interrupted by the little tributaries of scars and callouses?

The story is in the texture. I want to feel the landscape of his work and his life. The calloused pads at the base of his fingers would speak of effort, of lifting heavy things, of resilience. They are not roughness; they are a record. They are the story of a man who has held on, who has built things, who has worked. And I would want to feel the contrast: the softer, more vulnerable skin of the palm itself, the parts protected from the world. The story of his strength would be written in the callouses; the story of his tenderness would be in the skin between them.

I would learn the temperature of his honesty. A hand that is warm and dry, radiating a steady, living heat—that is the hand of a man who is comfortable in his own skin, who has nothing to hide. A cold, clammy hand is a hand full of secrets and anxiety.

This exploration would be the most profound form of intimacy I can imagine. It is an act of radical vulnerability to let someone read you this way. To offer up your hand, palm open and unguarded, is to offer up your history. Your work. Your softness. Your scars. It is to say, “This is me. This is the map of where I have been. Read it. Know me.”

I ache for that. I ache to find a man who is not afraid to let me read his story. A man whose hands I could learn until I knew their geography better than my own apartment. A man whose hands have a history of building and holding and caring, not a history of breaking things.

I want to trace the map of a man’s life in his palm, and in doing so, trust that this is the same hand that will never be raised against me. A hand that will not be used to bruise me, or break me, or leave me hospitalized like so many other hands have done. It is a terrifying, beautiful hope. To find a hand that offers its map instead of its fist. A hand that has absolutely nothing to hide.

Listen to The Cartography of an Open Palm

A Map of My Scars, Read by Your Fingertips

2026-01-06T14:12:38Z

Listen to A Map of My Scars, Read by Your Fingertips.

My body is a secret atlas. Beneath my clothes, my skin is a map of a war I survived, with its topography etched in scars. There are small, circular burns, like angry, faded constellations. There are thin, silvery lines from the edges of things that were sharper than they should have been. They are a hidden geography of pain, a record of another man’s rage written on my flesh. I have spent my life keeping this atlas closed, hidden away, terrified of anyone ever seeing it. Because to see it is to ask questions, and the answers have always been too heavy to speak.

I have a recurring waking nightmare about it. The moment of discovery. A man’s hand, moving across my back or my arm in a moment of intimacy, and then stopping. The sudden stillness. The change in the texture of his touch as his fingertips find a ridge of raised, unnatural skin.

I can imagine the reaction that would follow. The sharp intake of breath. The recoil of disgust. Or worse, the clinical, morbid curiosity, a kind of detached fascination with another person's damage. Or worst of all, the heavy, suffocating blanket of avoidence. All of these reactions are violations. They turn my body back into a specimen, an object of study. They are a reminder that I am damaged goods.

But there is another fantasy. A hopeful fantasy so fragile and so potent it almost hurts to think about. It is the fantasy of a different kind of discovery. The fantasy of a man whose touch could heal, not re-injure.

I imagine a moment of quiet intimacy. His hand would be on my skin, and it would find a scar. And it would not stop. It would not recoil. Instead, it would pause, and then the nature of the touch would change. It would become something else.

I imagine a single, gentle fingertip, tracing the outline of a scar with an infinite, reverent slowness. The touch would not be one of pity or horror. It would be a touch of pure, unadulterated curiosity. It would be a touch that listens. It would be a question, asked without a single word: “What is this story? I'm listening.”

And in the absolute safety of that gentle, questioning touch, for the first time in my life, I would find the breath to answer.

As his finger traces the thin, white line on my ribs, I would whisper, “This was the corner of a table.”

As it circles the faint, round mark on my shoulder, I would say, “This was his cigarette.”

The act of being touched and the act of telling would become one. His gentle contact would be the permission my body has always needed to let my voice release the story. He would be reading the map with his fingertips, and I would be providing the annotations. He would not be healing the scars themselves—they are a part of me now. He would be healing the silence and the shame that surrounds them.

With every scar he would trace and every story I'd tell, the geography would change. They would cease to be just monuments to The perpetrator's cruelty. They would become markers of my own survival. And his touch, his quiet, unwavering, non-judgmental presence, would make them something more. They would become the place where his love and my history finally met. A map of a brutal war, finally being read by a gentle peace.

Listen to A Map of My Scars, Read by Your Fingertips.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy Long Shot by Kennedy Ryan

Third Grade Letter to Santa

2025-12-08T04:12:30Z

Listen to Third Grade Letter to Santa

Hi everyone. Some context before we begin. This was a writing assignment by my then third grade teacher. Obviously, I took the assignment a tad too seriously. All the same, even if you don't celibrate Christmas, never snuff out a child's imagination. Besides, that imagination could give way to empathy in the future.

One other small note before we begin. I did actually get that stuffed Wishbone Dog after all, but as an adult.

Dear Santa,

Mrs. Amanda told us to write to you so I am writing to you. Tylor says that you don't exist, but how can someone not exist if everyone tells the same story about you every year? Besides, if you didn't exist, I'd read it in the news or watch it on TV so I think he doesn't know what he's talking about. Besides, Reading Rainbow tells your story! Why tell it on TV if it's fake? Doesn't that cost money?

I have a weird request. I know that you operate a very popular business in the North Pole but have you ever thought about expanding your business? Instead of just selling toys to kids, you could start doing clothes and books and cookies and stuff.

Think about it, Santa. I like audiobooks, but Tylor doesn't like audio books. It's wrong to force him to think of a toy he may or may not want? Besides, I can't see well, anyway, so why not get me something I can hear? You've been selling toys to my house for years, but, can I tell you a secret? I can't see well so step on them or break them. If you sell other things to other kids that are not toys, they get to use their product longer and they don't need to write to you next year! Do you see how that makes sense?

Let's take girls into account as well. Alice wrote to you asking for a movie. What use would she have with a video game or an army toy? I think that if you try my idea, maybe sit down in your office with your elves and talk it over, you all can make a new and improved shop!

If Alice has been good all year, then she should get what she wants. I don't think she should get a toy she won't enjoy.

Now, me! I've been extra good, so I want cookies. I also want that stuffed Wishbone dog I never got. I think you misplaced that file in your office. He's going to sleep with me, and he's also going to eat lunch with me too! No one is going to have him except me. Because I've been extra good this year, it's logical that I get extra stuff, if I understand your business correctly. I want a PlayStation game. I want cookies, and I want that wishbone dog! Seriously, he's so cute! Please Santa? I will love him forever and ever!

I hope you like my idea. I thought about it for many days! Consider it, please. If you do decide to adopt my new business, can you write to me or Mrs. Amanda? You have my address, and you know where my school is, so let me know? Okay? It's just being nice to let me know, yes, or no. I have a question. Why do you never write back? Even to hear my side when I do something naughty?

Robert Kingett.

If you enjoyed this very opinionated snapshot in time, you might enjoy the fiction podcast, A Gift. Produced by AudioImagination77 Productions with Matthew P. Woerner.

The Colonization of Confidence.

2025-12-07T16:00:47Z

There's a texture to grief very few examine. People talk about the loud grief—the kind of grief that shatters your soul and rattles your cage of will—but there's another kind of grief that's rarely explored. Watching and listening to your friends losing who they are.

I think the climate is foreshadowing for my life. The bitter cold of the winter is a warning sign I don't pay attention to as I sip hot herbal tea at my writing desk, vanquishing my writers block and attempting to put some literary order back into the chaotic rhythm of my thoughts.

A phone notification shakes me out of my thoughts about how I can stretch out two men taking their clothes off for about five hundred words. It's Leo. He's texted me.

"Hey Rob," he says, "Did you forget about the writing group today?"

I did, but I can't tell him that.

"Nope! Just getting ready!"

When he makes it to my apartment, there's an email notification from my phone. I don't have time to read it at the moment, and oh, I am a fool for not stopping to check what that email is.

The air in the conference space where our "Writers of the Future" group meets always smells of harsh cologne and performative productivity. It is a sensory assault of laptop fans and the frantic tapping of laptop keys. I sit in the corner, my cane hooked over the back of my chair, listening to the room.

I hate the name. Writers of the Future sounds like a corporate slogan for a pesticide company, but the name is less important than the people within it, and that's why I'm here.

Leo sits next to me. I can hear the nervous rhythm of his breathing. Leo is a Black writer with a voice that sounds like jazz—unpredictable, syncopated, full of unexpected dissonances that resolve into heartbreaking chords. He writes about his life, the specific, humid weight of a Texas summer, the way joy can taste like a cheap freeze-pop on a Tuesday.

"I have something new," Leo says. His voice is tight. "But... it's rough. It's really messy."

"Messy is good," I say, leaning in. "Messy is where the blood is."

Leo is a writer of immense, jagged power. He is a powerful man with a voice that sounds like gravel crunching under heavy tires, deep and resonant and full of a history that refuses to be smoothed over. When he reads his work aloud, the air in the room changes pressure. His prose is not "clean." It does not flow like water; it flows like molasses, thick and sweet and slow, or sometimes like lava, burning everything it touches. He tells more than he shows, a stylistic choice that critics hate but which I find profoundly honest. He doesn't invite you to watch; he commands you to listen.

And I love everything he writes.

Today, the writers in this group aren't buzzing with typing. They're listening to Chad, a white tech bro that sounds like his larynx is constantly massaging his speech for a pamphlet instead of talking to people.

Chad isn't a writer. He's a content generator. He's published 400 generated books on Amazon and won't stop—not to mention—the insessant bragging he does about how he's a better writer because of whatever LLM he's using today. He is the kind of person who listens to podcasts at 2.5x speed because he believes silence is an inefficiency to be eliminated. He works in "Prompt Engineering," a job title that sounds to me like "Assembly Line Foreman for the Dream Factory."

Chad's voice is smooth, frictionless, possessing the terrifying cheerfulness of a customer service bot that cannot be turned off. "Claude just released an update. It's incredible for unblocking. It really smooths out the edges."

He's explaining to the group how to get the most out of large language models. Leo, beside me, is fidgeting with as much annoyance as I am. We're both immensely relieved when Brad finally claps his hands together, as if he's about to announce a press release.

"Okay," says Brad. Brad is the organizer. His voice is a rich, polished baritone that vibrates in his throat but never seems to reach his chest. It's the voice of a podcast host who sells mattresses between segments on mindfulness. "Leo, you're up. Did you bring the revision of The Asphalt Hymn?"

"Yeah," Leo says,

"Great! Alright, creators," Brad announces. The word 'creators' sounds slippery in his mouth, like he's selling a subscription service. "Let's synergize the workflow tonight. Go on, Leo."

I have to suppress the urge to violently groan about his word choice. Instead, I turn my head towards Leo. I can't wait to hear this.

Leo reads. It's a piece about his grandmother's kitchen. He describes the smell of collard greens as a heavy, green blanket that wrestled the air into submission. He describes her laugh as a rusted hinge that still worked perfectly.

It is beautiful. It is imperfect. It stops me cold.

When he finishes, there is a silence. Not the reverent silence of a shared emotional impact, but the uncomfortable, shifting silence of a boardroom that has just been shown a graph with a downward trend.

"It's... interesting," Chad says. "But the pacing is a little weird. And that metaphor about the hinge? It kind of pulls you out of the immersion. It's not very smooth."

"It's not supposed to be smooth," I snap. "It's supposed to be true."

"Leo," Chad says, choosing to ignore me entirely—he hates me just as much as I hate him—and addresses Leo directly. "Leo, did you read what I sent before this meeting? I took your last draft and ran it through Claud."

The fuck? I roar internally.

"I asked it to optimize for flow and readability. Listen to this."

Chad clears his throat. The sound is grating. It sounds as if he's optimizing how to speak to humans. He reads from his screen.

"Her laugh was a joyous sound, ringing through the house like a silver bell. The kitchen always smelled delicious, the aroma of greens filling the air like a warm hug."

The words hang in the air like dead flies. They are perfectly grammatical. They are perfectly structured. And they are completely, utterly stripped of everything that is Leo. A silver bell? A warm hug? It is the language of a Hallmark card Leo would never write written by a sociopath.

"See?" Chad says, triumphant. "It just flows better. It's more... accessible. You should maybe use that as a base, Leo. Clean up your edges."

I wait for the room to revolt. I wait for the other writers to laugh Chad out of the shop. But they don't.

"Actually," says Amber, a poet who used to write searing verse about heartbreak, "that does sound a lot more professional, Leo. The 'silver bell' image is really classic."

"Yeah," says Mike. "It's less... abrasive."

I feel Leo shrink beside me. I can sense the physical collapse of his posture, the way he folds in on himself.

"I guess," Leo whispers. "I guess I was trying too hard with the hinge."

"No," I say, and my voice is the low growl of a guard dog. "The hinge was perfect. The bell is a lie. Leo, that machine didn't improve your writing. It erased your grandmother."

"You're just resistant to the tools, Robert," Chad sighs. "It's the future. Adapt or die."

"Oh, go power down somewhere. This isn't adaptation," I say, gripping the edge of the table until my knuckles ache. "It's lobotomy."

Nobody agrees with me, though. I am an outcast in a gaggle of readers and writers that seem to prefer LLM writing to the jagged edges.

"And this is why," Chad practically yells, "why you don't listen to Luddites! Work smarter, not harder," Chad beams. The smile in his voice is audible, a smile I want to deck. "That's the future. Why churn butter when you can buy margarine, right?"

I sit there, gripping my cane until my knuckles pop, feeling the beginning of a horror story that has nothing to do with ghosts and everything to do with the slow, methodical erasure of a human soul.

Part 2.

I walk home, my cane tapping a furious rhythm against the concrete.

I fucking hate them.

I fucking hate the Tech Bros. I hate the hype. I hate the Bros wrongly claiming LLM's will turn us all into toast. I hate their never-ending quest to make their investments have a return. I hate the venture capitalists in their Patagonia vests who talk about "disruption" while they burn down the library of human experience and fuck over workers. I hate them with the specific, intricate hatred of a survivor who knows exactly how the grift works.

I hate LLMs. My hatred knows no bounds. I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.

And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.

They didn't build these things to help us. I know this.

Why do LLMs exist? They exist to harm workers. They say it's to "democratize creativity." Bullshit. You don't democratize creativity by automating the act of creation. You democratize it by funding arts education, by supporting libraries, by paying writers a living wage.

No, they created LLMs to solve a supply chain problem.

The "problem" was that creating art—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with people. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don't fit into a corporate style guide. Minority writers, specifically, are "high friction." We talk about queerness and transphobia and racism, and We talk about disability. We make the advertisers uncomfortable.

So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely. They built a machine that scrapes our work—our pain, our joy, our very souls—without consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket.

They built a machine to gentrify the English language.

And the horror of watching my friend lose his soul almost eats me alive.

The next week, Leo brings a draft that was written 90% by him. The justifications are quiet, unsure of his own skill.

The week after, he brings a piece that's written 50% by him. The shame is palpable, but it hurts me even more when readers and writers say the LLM versions are always better than his old drafts.

This week, he stuns us all.

"I don't—I don't have a draft," he admits. I immediately take his hand among the gaping and gawking of the room. His skin feels like it's a hallow shell of his soul. His voice is strained, broken, like there's something that's fundamentally shattering inside him nobody can see.

"I just—I just—I haven't written in a while," he says. Claude has been down. I tried to write something… and, and… it just… I can't write. I ain't got nothin'."

Chad chooses that exact moment to colonize the conversation.

"Leo sent me his last draft," Chad announces.

I freeze. NO! Not. Fucking. Again!

"And," Chad continues, "I ran it through the new 'Literary Fiction' AI I've been working on. Listen to the difference."

He reads Leo's original sentence. I know it is Leo's because it has teeth.

and then, he gets to the LLM version.

The group murmurs. "Oh, that flows so much better," someone says. "It's more... universal."

"Universal means average," I snap, wishing I could get away with prompt engineering Chad's stupid LLM to self destruct. "It means it touches no one because it tries to touch everyone."

"Robert," Chad sighs. "Always the contrarian. Look, the metrics don't lie. Readers prefer the second one. We did A/B testing on Wattpad. The second one had a 40% higher retention rate."

"You are feeding them sludge," I say, my voice rising. "And because they are starving, they eat it. And then you tell them sludge is what food tastes like."

"It's just writing, Rob," Chad says, his voice hardening. "Why do you have to make it a crusade? Leo likes it. Don't you, Leo?"

We all turn to Leo. Even though I can't see his face, I feel the weight of the room pivot toward him.

"I..." Leo's voice cracks. A dry, brittle sound. "I don't know."

"Leo," I say gently. "Tell him you are a good writer that doesn't need fixing."

"It's better," Leo whispers.

The words hit me like a physical blow. A kick to the shin.

"What?" I ask.

"It's better," Leo says, louder this time, but with a hysterical edge, a vibration of pure panic. "He's right, Rob. My metaphors... they're confusing. People don't get them. The machine... it makes me sound smart. It makes me sound like a real writer."

"You don't need an LLM to write for you. You're a good writer," I say, but his voice cracks as he stands up, snatches his coat, and practically bolts out of the room.

"I can't write anymore. I can't write anymore. I just—I can't."

I chase after him but it's too late. He's already out of the building.

The unraveling doesn't happen all at once. It is a slow rot, a decomposition of confidence that the Germans call Zersetzung. Psychological decomposition. It was the method the Stasi used to break dissidents not with torture, but with gaslighting, with subtle alterations of reality until the subject lost faith in their own mind.

The Tech Bros haven't invented the term, but they have automated the process. They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.

Two weeks later, I sit in Leo's apartment. The air is heavy with the smell of stale laundry and despair. I have brought cookies—oatmeal raisin, heavy on the cinnamon, baked until the edges are crisp and the centers are dense and chewy. Food is a language of gravity; it pulls you back to earth.

"Eat," I say, pushing the container across the table.

Leo doesn't move. "I got into Fiction Magazine," he says softly.

"Leo! That's huge!" I reach out, finding his forearm. His muscle is tense, rigid as wood. "Why do you sound like you're at a funeral?"

"Because I didn't write it, Rob."

"You used the LLM again?"

"I used it for the whole thing," he whispers. "I fed it my draft. My messy, ugly draft. And it spit out... it spit out this smooth, perfect thing. And the editors loved it. They said it was 'refreshing.' They said the prose was 'elegant.'"

He pulls his arm away from me. I hear the frantic clicking of keys.

"Listen to this email," he says. His voice sounds like he's chewing glass as he reads it to me.

"Dear Leo, we were impressed by the fluidity of your metaphors. Usually, your work feels a bit... disjointed. But this piece sang. The line about the 'tapestry of fate' was particularly moving."

"Tapestry of fate," Leo spits. The words sound like poison in his mouth. "I hate that phrase. I would never write that phrase. It's a cliché. It's slop. But they liked it better, Rob. They liked the machine better than me."

"They liked the conditioning," I say, my voice sharp. "They liked the familiarity. It's the linguistic equivalent of McDonald's fries. It's chemically engineered to be palatable, but there's no nutrition in it. It passes through the brain without leaving a mark."

"Maybe I'm just bad," Leo says. The sentence hangs in the air, heavy and wet.

"You are not bad. You are a jazz musician in a world trying to sell ringtones."

"But Robert, I can't do it anymore," Leo says, and then he breaks. It isn't a loud sob. It is a continuous intake of breath, a collapse of the chest. "Fuck, I tried to write this morning. Just me. Just a blank document. And I stared at the blinking cursor, and every sentence I thought of felt... weak. It felt amateur. I wrote, 'The rain hit the roof like gravel.' And then I thought, no, the AI would say something better. And I deleted it. I deleted it all."

I'm about to say something when he continues,

"I feel so stupid, Rob," he chokes out, the words drowning in his tears. "I feel so stupid. I let it into my head and now I can't get it out. I look at my own thoughts and they look wrong. They look like errors."

I stand up and walk around the table, navigating by the sound of his breathing. I find his shoulder and pull him into an embrace. He clings to me for dear life, his hands clutching my body as if I'm his only life raft at sea.

"That is the trap, Leo. That is the psychological warfare. They are selling you a solution to a problem they created. They want you to feel insecure. If you feel insecure, you pay the subscription. They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it."

"I'm losing money!" he wails. "I'm losing money, I can't write anymore—and readers—readers love my LLM writing! I don't know what to do, Rob! Readers like it. Editors like it. Editors. Editors of Magazines. I can't write anymore! I just—what the hell is happening to me—why do readers like it?"

"I don't know," I answer honestly, rocking him, trying to comfort his soul with my words. "But just because people want to eat McDonalds, that doesn't mean we need to stop home cooking. But I don't know what to do. I'm just one person, but Leo, I love you, okay? I'll always be here if you need me. If you need me to look over a draft or—"

"It's not just the subscription," he weeps. "It's the readers. They're getting used to the slop, Rob. They're getting used to the smooth edges. My writing... my real writing... it feels like it has too much friction now. Even the editors. Even the people who are supposed to know better."

"Friction is where the heat comes from," I say fiercely. "Friction is where the life is."

But he can't hear me. The Zersetzung is working. He is taking himself apart, piece by piece, and replacing the parts with synthetic fillers because the world has told him his own parts are defective.

Days later, it's my turn. we're back at that fucking writers' group. Although, today, it feels like it's a uniquely crafted torture chamber.

I decided to read something. I usually don't. I keep my work for my blog, for the people who understand that a screen reader isn't a constraint but an instrument. But I needed to show Leo that imperfection was power. I needed to prove that raw writing hits harder than processed data.

I read a piece about my mother. It is raw. It is angry. It describes the sound of her voice as "a serrated knife cutting through warm butter." It describes the smell of the trailer park as "wet cardboard and ambition gone sour." It is disjointed. It has no tapestries. It has no symphonies. It is a piece of writing that demands you look at the ugly thing and call it by its name. It's imperfect, but it's everything me.

When I finish, the room is silent.

"Interesting," Chad says. The word is a dismissal. "Very... visceral. But Rob, my guy, it's a little hard to follow. The sentence structure is all over the place. And 'wet cardboard'? It's a bit gross, isn't it?"

"It's the truth," I say.

"Truth doesn't scale," Chad says. He taps on his keyboard. "Just for fun, I ran your first paragraph through the new GPT-fiction-Plus wrapper I'm beta testing. Just to see what it could do with the core idea. I prompted it to 'elevate the tone' and 'smooth the syntax.'"

"Don't," I warn. My voice drops—calm, dangerous, flat. "Do not run my life through your blender."

"Too late," Chad says. "Listen to this improvement."

He clears his throat, loving this. I feel like I'm being punctured by a thousand arrows through the heart.

When he finishes, Chad beams. I can hear the smile in his voice. "See? Same info, but now it's palatable. Now it's content. It took out the aggression. It leveled the tone. It's objectively better writing."

A woman in the front row murmurs, "Oh, that is much nicer. It feels more... literary."

"Exactly!" Chad says. "I fixed it."

"Chad," I say, my voice calm, the voice of a teacher correcting an unwilling student. "Why did it choose 'stone' for the throat metaphor?"

"What? Because it's intelligent. It's smart. It knows. Because it fits."

"No," I say. "It chose 'stone' because statistically, in the petabytes of training data scraped without consent from the internet, the word 'stone' appears in proximity to 'lump in throat' with a probability of 0.04 percent, which is higher than 'wet creature.' It isn't a choice. It's a math problem. It is a predictive text algorithm on steroids. It doesn't know what a throat is. It doesn't know what fear feels like. It is predicting the next token based on mediocrity."

"It's still better writing," Chad insists, but his voice vibrates with the anger that someone who he thinks is a technophobe knows this tech better than he knows the tech.

"It is a hallucination of competence," I say. "Chad, asking that machine to improve writing is like asking a blender to improve a salad. You don't get a better salad. You get sludge. And you," I turn my head to sweep the room, "you are all cheering for the sludge because it's easy to swallow. You are letting this tech bro convince you that your own distinct flavors are defects."

I hear a sound next to me.

It is Leo. He is making a sound like a wounded animal trying to stay quiet. A high, thin whine in the back of his throat.

"You… fixed it," Leo whispers.

"See?" Chad says to me. "Even Leo gets it."

"No," I say. I stand up, unfolding my cane with a snap that sounds like a gunshot in the quiet room. "You didn't fix it. You lobotomized it. You took a scream and turned it into elevator music. You took the specific, painful texture of my life and turned it into a generic stock photo."

"Whoa, calm down, Luddite," Chad laughs. "You're just jealous the machine has better flow than you."

"I am not a fucking technophobe!" I shout, and the room flinches. "I built my own website stack from scratch! I code in raw HTML! I know more about the architecture of the internet than you and your wrapper-scripting ass ever will! I love technology! I love tools that expand human capacity! This?" I point my cane at his laptop. "This isn't a tool. This is a replacement. This is a parasite. It doesn't expand us; it eats us. It eats our confidence. It eats our specificity. It eats our struggle."

I turn to Leo. "I'm a better writer than this—any LLM. So are you, Leo! You're a better writer."

Leo doesn't move. He stands up, sad, resigned. He grabs his coat and walks out. I quickly tap my way out to follow him.

"Rob," he says, stopping to turn back, facing my fury. "Rob, I wish I was as good of a writer as you. I'm a shit—"

"Leo, no. You're a good writer—"

"I can't write, Rob!" Leo screams. It is a terrifying sound, a man ripping his own throat open. "I feel so stupid! I look at my words and they look like trash! I can't do it! I'm done! I hate everything I do without the AI!"

I have no idea what to say. Leo comes closer, his hands grasping mine. The force of his grip breaks my heart.

"Rob," he says, and his voice shakes with tears. "I hate this. I hate this."

"I know, buddy. I know! I'm here."

As I let go for now, I don't know what to do to help him since my writing exercises didn't work. I told him to write fun Fanfiction. I told him to just write something bad. It's okay. I told him he didn't have to be marketable, but nothing is working, and he hates his own writing more as the days pass.

I know Leo can still write without an LLM. He just needs encouragement. This is the thought that plants another seed as I leave the building. I can't go home yet.

Part 3.

I take a bus to the other side of the city, to a neighborhood that smells of pupusas, exhaust fumes, and resilience. I walk three blocks, absently counting the cracks in the sidewalk through the tip of my cane, until the acoustic landscape changes. The echo of the street vanishes, absorbed by walls of paper.

I eventually make it to The Cat's Shelf. The bell above the door doesn't ding; it clatters, a sound of heavy brass against wood. The air inside is cool and smells of vanilla (from the degrading lignin in old paper), binding glue, and peppermint tea.

Entering it is a sensory baptism. The floorboards groan under my feet—a specific, B-flat groan that tells me exactly where I am in the room. There is no ultrasonic hum of cooling fans here. There is the rustle of pages and the hushed murmuring of conspiracy.

"Rob?" Sarah's voice comes from behind the counter. Sarah sounds like she looks—sturdy, worn, and warm. She is a trans woman who built this bookstore with her bare hands and a lot of crowdfunding. She understands the politics of space.

"I need a favor," I say. "A big one."

"For you? Always. Do you need an audiobook or a body buried?"

"I need a router," I say. "And I need a space."

I explain it all. The Tech Bros. Chad. The Zersetzung. Leo's disintegration. The horror of watching a friend scrub the humanity out of his work because a machine told him he was inefficient. I tell her about the magazine editors who preferred the lie.

Sarah listens. She pours me tea. It's an act of love I didn't know I needed.

"you're not being hysterical, Robbie. They're colonizing the imagination," Sarah says softly. "That's what it is. Gentrification of the mind. They price you out of your own creativity."

"Yeah. That's why I want to make a space, a space where that can't happen. I want to start a new group," I say. "Here. After hours. But I have rules. No LLMs. Not just discouraged—blocked. I want to configure your router to sinkhole every request to OpenAI, Claude, Anthropic, all of them. If they try to connect, I want the browser to redirect to an HTML page that has a very judgmental cat purring at you."

"I love it," Sarah says. "When do we start?"

"Tonight," I say. "I can't go home. I need to bring my friend back."

We call it "The Drafty writer's group." It's not the best name I've ever invented, but I don't care.

The first meeting is small. Just me, Sarah, and a non-binary poet named Ash who writes sestinas about urban decay. We sit in a circle on mismatched chairs. I bring cookies—chocolate chip with sea salt, the contrast of sweet and sharp designed to wake up the palate.

I don't invite Leo yet. He isn't ready.

But word spreads. I don't use social media with an algorithm. I use the vast power of word of mouth. We print physical zines—little folded pieces of paper that smell of toner—and leave them in coffee shops, record stores, and community centers. Any place that will let us talk about the space.

Tired of the Slop? Come write poorly with us.

Recovering Prompters Welcome.

We don't want your polished draft. We want your mess.

By the third week, we have seven people.

One of them is Adam. Adam is a Trans Black man with a voice that is soft, almost a whisper. He sits in the corner for the first hour, just listening to the sound of pens scratching on paper and keys clattering, phone keyboards clicking, the rhythmic clacking of my mechanical keyboard.

"I... I used to use it too," Adam says suddenly during the break.

The room goes still. Not the hostile silence of Chad's group. A holding silence. A waiting silence.

"I wrote a story about my transition," Adam says. "And I showed it to a friend, and he said it was 'too angry.' So I put it in ChatGPT. I told it to make it 'more universal.' And it did. It took out the anger. It took out the specific smell of fear. It took out the things that made me, me. It made it... nice. And I hated it. But I couldn't stop. Because every time I tried to write the anger back in, I felt like I was doing it wrong. I felt like the machine knew better how to be human than I did."

"You weren't doing it wrong," I say. "You were doing it human. The machine averages out humanity until it's just a beige paste."

"I want to write the anger back," Adam whispers. "But I'm scared. I'm scared it's going to be bad."

"Let it be bad," Sarah says from the counter. "Be bad. Be furious. Be unintelligible. Just don't be artificial."

"We call that being a Recovering Prompter," I say. "There's no shame in it here. We know the pressure. We know the addiction of the easy fix. But we're here to do the hard work."

Adam picks up his pen. I hear the scratch, hesitant at first, then harder, faster, digging into the paper until I think it might tear. Encouragement and love flood the space.

There's still one person missing, though.

I send Leo an email and a text message, and yes, an actual letter.

Leo,

I made a writing garden. It's full of weeds. It's messy. Nothing is polished. It's not perfect.

We have cookies.

I miss your voice. Not the LLM one. The one that shakes the floor.

Come home. You are always welcome. I miss you. Come to one group, just one. We need you.

- Rob

He shows up twenty minutes late. I hear the bell clatter. I hear his heavy, hesitant steps. He smells of old sweat and that specific, acrid scent of anxiety.

"I didn't bring anything," he says, standing in the doorway. "I haven't written a word in two months, Rob. I'm empty. The well is dry."

"You're not empty," I say. "You're just quiet. Come sit."

He sits next to Adam.

"This is Leo," I tell the group. "He's the best writer I know. He's just forgetting how the instrument works."

"I'm not the best," Leo mutters. "I'm a fraud. I sent a story to a magazine that a robot wrote, and they paid me for it. I cashed the check, Rob. I spent the money."

"And you're here now," Adam says. "That's the work."

That night, Leo doesn't write. But he eats a cookie. And he listens. He listens to Ash read a poem that doesn't rhyme and has a stanza that is just a scream. He listens to Adam read a paragraph that is so angry it feels like heat radiating from a furnace.

And for the first time in months, I hear Leo breathe. A real breath. Deep into the diaphragm.

The resistance grows.

It isn't a war fought with DDOS attacks or angry tweets or furious posts about how AI sucks. It is fought with vulnerability. It is fought by local businesses putting our flyer in their windows. It is fought by people telling their friends, "Hey, there's a place where you don't have to be perfect."

Weeks bleed into a month. We start talking of putting on a live literature event. None of us have money, but none of us care. We want to do this.

As we plan, people come to just listen. readers arrive to just enjoy writers being messy on the page. Other writers that are recovering prompt engineers come to our space. They all write poorly while they eat and drink, laughing at lines, embracing hugs, feeling far less alone than when they walked in the door.

As the night of our first live reading is under way, just before the event, three people walk in who smell of expensive leather jackets and throat lozenges.

"Is this the place?" a woman asks. Her voice is incredible—rich, trained, with perfect diction but a warmth that feels like velvet. It's a voice that knows how to hold a listener.

"Who's asking?" Sarah says.

"My name is Britany," the woman says. "I'm an audiobook narrator. This is David and Sam. We... we heard about what you're doing from the guy who runs the falafel stand down the street. We would love to read for anyone with disabilities or social anxiety or who just don't want to read work themselves."

"that's incredible!" I say, unable to hide my joyous shock, "but we can't pay you. We have a lot of cookies and anger but that doesn't translate into cash, and we didn't get enough donations to pay you all."

Brittany laughs. It is a musical sound, telling me everything is fine with the world. "Honey, I don't want your money. Do you know what I've been reading for the last six months? AI-generated litRPG novels. Thousands of pages of slop. I am dying of thirst. I am drowning in slop. I sit in my booth, and I read sentences that mean nothing, written by nobody, for an algorithm."

"We never seen a space for recovering prompt writers. This is such a cool idea. We want to lend our skills. We want to help. We heard there was grit here," David says. His voice is a deep baritone. "We heard there were unpolished artists. We want to read them. For free. Just let us chew on something real. Let us narrate something that's growing into itself."

"We have plenty of unpolished artists," I say. "Welcome to the writer's garden."

The Live Lit event was meant to be a small showcase. It turns into a riot of joy. We didn't shy away from the fact that recovering LLM prompters were going to be performing tonight.

Live readings by recovering humans. Show starts at eight PM.

The flyers catch the most attention. Sarah can't even fit everybody in the bookstore.

The alleyway is packed. I can feel the body heat, a wall of humidity and anticipation. It smells of rain, cheap beer, and electricity. There are people here from the neighborhood, people from the university, people who just sound tired of being sold things.

I walk up to the microphone. I tap my cane against the stand to gauge the distance. The hum of the PA system is dirty, crackling with interference. I love it. It sounds like potential.

The microphone hums and pops before me. None of us are audio technicians, and it shows. It's the most goddamn beautiful thing in the world. It's the sound of electricity trying to speak.

"Thank, uh, thank you all for coming," I say, and the microphone squeaks with a high-pitched feedback whine that makes a few people wince. I smile. I love that whine.

"You might notice our manifesto on the door," I say, my voice booming through the cheap PA system. "These writers... some of them have used LLMs before. Or what the venture capitalists call 'AI.' I think we can all agree, fuck AI, right?"

A cheer goes up. It's ragged and loud.

"But," I continue, lowering my voice, leaning in until my lips almost brush the metal grille, "I believe there should be a space for people that have been broken by the system. There will always be people that love whatever slop the LLM makes. There will always be those readers—and God help them, the editors—that prefer the LLM versions, the slop, the generated works that slide down your throat without you ever having to care about the artist behind it."

I pause. I listen to the silence. It is a deep, attentive silence. The kind of silence you find in a forest, not a packed room.

"Tonight, you'll hear grit," I say. "You'll hear mess. You'll hear first drafts. You'll hear bleeding onto the page. Nothing will be polished. Nothing will be sanitized. I admit, some things won't make a lick of fucking sense. But you all are here because you love the mess. You love artists. You love art. You love the chaos of a human mind trying to explain itself to another human mind."

I can feel the energy in the room shifting. It is a wave of warmth washing over me.

"We didn't tell you which writers are recovering LLM users," I say, my voice thickening with emotion. "Because they deserve better than to be hated. Psychological harm and warfare isn't easy to recover from. When a machine tells you your soul is inefficient, it takes a long time to stop believing it. But none of the pieces were generated by an LLM tonight. Not one word."

I grip the mic stand harder.

"So enjoy the recovering writers. Have some cookies—Sarah made them, and I can confirm by tactile inspection they are excellent. Be a part of the readers and listeners that listen to and appreciate art instead of just consume it like content pigs at a trough."

Laughter ripples through the room.

"If you don't want to support any of these writers for fear all of them used an LLM at some point, I understand. Trauma leaves scars. But there's information on how to donate to these writers in the front, and on the bookstore's website. Thank you for giving everyone a chance. Thank you for saying fuck you to the way others want you to be. Thank you for taking a chance on artists."

I take a breath. I can smell the ozone of the amp and the sugar of the cookies.

"Now... let's have some fucking fun!"

I step back. The applause is deafening. It isn't polite golf claps. It is stomping feet. It is whistles. It is the sound of a community knitting itself back together.

With every artist, the applause increases in volume. The audience participation is utterly stellar. There's whoops. There's cheers. There's exclamations of shock and wracked sobs and guttural laughter that spills out into the open space.

Nobody leaves. Everyone stays. Finally, it's time.

"and our final artist for tonight," Sarah announces, "is Leo."

The stomping grows louder.

I hear Leo walk to the mic. His footsteps are heavy. Solid. The footsteps of a man who remembers he has weight.

He clears his throat. It is a wet, nervous sound.

"This is... this is a first draft," Leo says. His voice shakes, just a little. "It has typos. I didn't run it through a spellchecker. I definitely didn't run it through Claude. And... for a while, I thought I couldn't write without it. I thought my voice was broken. But my friends told me broken things still make sound."

Laughter. Warm, supportive laughter.

"It's called The Taste of Love."

He begins to read.

It's the best thing I've ever heard. It's about his momma cooking for him in her kitchen. There are stumbling blocks. Some metaphors swerve a little. Everything is Leo again. It's the best story I've heard from him in months, even with its imperfections.

Britany, the audiobook narrator, is standing next to me. I hear her inhale sharply, a sound of pure appreciation as the scene unfolds before our mind's eye. His words grow in confidence as he dives deeper into his work. Everyone is engrossed.

"He's good," she whispers.

"He's real," I whisper back.

Leo continues reading. He describes the sound of a screen door slamming in the wind. He describes the texture of his grandmother's hands—"rough as unfinished pine." He doesn't try to hide his tears when he speaks of her clothes. He doesn't hold back. He doesn't try to change any part of his mess.

He builds a world out of friction.

When he finishes, there is a second of silence—that profound, heavy silence that happens when a truth has landed in the room.

Then, the world explodes.

The applause isn't just hands clapping. It's yells. It's people roaring. It's whistles. People stomp their feet. I swear, I think the sound rips a hole through time and space. The wooden floor vibrates so hard it travels up my cane and into my marrow.

The applause is a physical assault of love. I hear Leo sob, just once, a sharp intake of breath over the microphone, before he is drowned out by the noise.

I feel a hand on my shoulder. It is Sarah.

"We did it, Rob," she shouts over the roar. "We built this—this night—we did it!"

I lean back against the brick wall, feeling the rough texture snag against my jacket. I listen to the chaotic, unpolished, beautiful noise of human beings screaming for a story that has jagged edges.

The Tech Bros can keep their tokens. They can keep their scale. They can keep their LLM modules.

We have the love. We have the care. And we have the voices.

And that, I realize as the tears unapologetically spill onto my cheeks, is something they can never code.

If you enjoyed this story, support artists and art. But for real, if you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy Frindle by Andrew Clements

The Home of a New Name

2025-11-25T06:00:07Z

Mood: Like finding a bird that can finally sing.

The morning felt like a bruise. Not the sharp, immediate kind, but the dull and aching throb that settles into your bones and makes the air feel smothering.

I canceled all my accessibility meetings for the morning. I didn't have the bandwidth to explain-for the millionth time-why you should label a button or why you should make your menu navicable by keyboard or use HTML instead of a DIV. I just wanted the safety of my own noise.

The phone rang, shaking me out of my recrimination.

The synthesized voice of my screen reader announced her name. Her old name. For a heart stopping second, I almost let it go to voicemail. I didn't think I had anything to give. I answered.

Her voice was tight, like a wound violin string about to snap. She told me she had something very important to tell me.

I gave her my full attention. "I'm listening," I said.

I meant every word. I put down everything I was holding, sat on my bed, and became an ear.

"you're the only person I feel safe telling this to," she said, and that washed away the lingering knots of a harsh and brutal morning.

"Robert. I'm a woman."

and then, we cried together.

We cried for the sheer, terrifying, bravery of it. We cried for our hearts constantly trying to find a beacon of light in a world that wants to grind down our souls until we're echoes of lives. We cried for laws written by people that never had to fight to live in a society in their own skin. We cried for the harshness of the media, the world, and bigots that want to see us snuffed out because they're afraid of lives that aren't like them.

But then, the tone of the conversation changed. The tension left our souls.

"So," I said, wiping my face, my voice thick. "Does this mean I have to come out as pansexual now? Since, you know, we dated?"

There was a beat of silence, and then she laughed. It was a wet, shaky sound at first, but it grew into a real, chest-deep laugh. "I guess so," she said. "Surprise."

We spent the next hour reconstructing the world. We talked about name's. We spent the hour trying on names like coats, testing the weight and warmth of them. She wanted a name that sounded distinctive, a name that felt like her at long last.

Eventually, I tried one. "How about Coco?"

"Coco," she whispered.

I repeated it. Coco. It has a rhythm to it. Two hard, crisp beats followed by round, open vowels. It tastes like hot chocolate-warm, sweet, and comforting. It sounds like a heartbeat.

"It sounds like you," I said.

She loved it. For now, she is Coco.

We told each other "I love you" before hanging up, changing both our lives.

When we hung up, the headache was gone. The apartment didn't feel heavy anymore. It felt like a home where a new truth had just been spoken for the first time. The world outside is still loud, and it is still sharp, but in here, I know the sound of her real name. And that is enough to keep going.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy, Glitch Girl! by Rainie Oet

Into A Memory

2025-11-25T04:27:13Z

This essay was published in the local college newspaper when I attended-- what was then known-- as TCC. Tallahassee Community College. I can vehemently say—given some slight word changes perhaps—I am, overall, still proud of this essay. I hope you enjoy this snapshot in time.

When I was little, I did not wander as a cloud. I floated on one.

I have to admit, when the assignment was given to me, a blind college student, to write about a poem I did not think I would find one that would capture my interest or my memory. For days, my ears would burn the table of contents of my textbook as my fingers struck down page numbers in a hopeless search to find something that I could connect with, for something that I could write about and have it be genuine.

I was lost and my hopes for finding a poem that would even hold my interest long enough to allow me to write about it seemed to be an impossible reach. I was a bibliophile at heart, but I did not like writing about poetry. I enjoyed reading it, but writing about it was a different kind of circle of hell. On my fifth haphazard hunt through the table of contents, my ears caught something that I had not noticed. I was instantly drawn because it sounded familiar. "I wandered lonely as a cloud." By William Wordsworth. I wanted to see why the poem sounded familiar. I had an odd sense that it would be significant to my life, but I did not know why it would be or even how.

I wanted to explore the kind of emotional journey that this poem would take me through, and so I did.

After listening to the first line, I was instantly transported to a memory that I did not even know I had.

It is late at night, and I am six. I remember feeling the Braille calendar poised in my lap, my finger tracing the soft indentations of the moons among the days. A sound erupts from the living room and I look up, my ears picking up every shift of the air just a few rooms from me. Shouting soon breaks out as if I am in a pep rally. The shouting grows louder and more obscene with each passing word. My mother has made her appearance on stage yet again, and I start to sob. I am guessing that Grandma and Grandpa are out in the fray as well, but I do not want to be in here all alone. The shouting reaches a volume that I do not even know exists, and my fright and anger mesh into one emotion as the stupidity of the situation finally reaches me. As my mother and her husband continue to scream at each other while mixing in some sounds of hitting and smacking, and manage to produce sounds of someone hitting the table, Grandma comes into the room. I know it is she because I can smell the peach scented perfume that I always smell when she is within a few feet from me. It is as if the smell alone is a blanket, about to wrap me up. My bedroom door softly clicks shut, and tender shoes thud over to me. She takes my small hand in hers.

"Are you ready for bed?" she asks me. I smile and nod, while all the while trying to hide my anger at my stupid mother.

"Well, I'm sorry. I do not have a story for you tonight. All I have is this book of poems your grandfather gave to me." I groan at the mention of poetry. Even at that young age, I much rather prefer it when she read me something GOOD such as Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys. I do not want to stay here any longer. Moreover, I like it when Grandma reads to me. Outside of my bubble of safety, my mother starts to cry as grandpa yells at her about how stupid she is acting. I hear pages slowly open. Grandma leans to read and instantly I am taken to the place of golden daffodils, leaving the screaming behind me.

I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high o'er vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils.

I am soon floating on that cloud looking at dancing yellow flowers. As Grandma continues to read the poem to me, I feel a sense of peace. I am flying, and the newly developed sounds of clashing in the kitchen are just a faint whisper. I am swept away by Grandma's reading. We both are wandering as a cloud, but not lonely. I listen with eagerness as she finishes the poem, allowing me to ignore the stupid smashing sounds in the next room. Once she is all done, she tucks me in and kisses me goodnight. She tells me she loves me and then leaves the room. I soon drift on my own cloud of safety, finally able to feel calm and happy enough to go to sleep. I am comfortable and soon floating on my own cloud that is floating across vales and hills far from the treachery of the world. I am safe.

That was when I was six. That memory of Grandma sprang to mind when I first listened to the poem. I reread the poem after that, repeatedly, making it my comfort poem. While I was reading the poem at that young age, I had a literal visual interpretation of the poem. It seemed pretty logical and obvious to me that that was what the poem meant, that the speaker was looking down at golden flowers swaying in the wind. I believed it so strongly that I vividly imagined this. Back then, I pictured vibrantly the golden tendrils swaying gently in the breeze, and some shadow sitting up high on a pink cloud looking down at this dancing show. For a long time that is how I interpreted the poem. I do not know where my interpretation changed, but it did.

I presume that it changed just after my grandmother died and I had no way of escaping the abuse and domestic violence I had to endure. I would always wish that Grandma would come softly into my room, click my door shut and take me with her on a cloud high above the bad things in my life. With the passing of years, I never saw or heard the poem again. Now, when I heard the poem again, I was instantly six again, feeling a sense of love. I replayed the poem, wearing out the skip back button on my CD player in order to keep hold of the memory that this poem helped to bring back from the dead. I loved this rare opportunity to smell Grandma's peach scented perfume again. I loved the chance to hear her powerful delicately articulate voice read me a poem to take away all the bad things in my life. Listening to the poem now, I soon realized that I had a different interpretation.

Perhaps this interpretation came from her death when I was seven. I believe that the loss of my grandmother, physically and mentally, has helped me to make this interpretation once I reclaimed her in my memory after so long of an absence.

This poem helped me regain a memory that I did not even know existed within me. The speaker talks about how he is happy to watch "golden daffodils" dance. My grandmother was always like that, happy to see, create, and experience pure happiness. This poem, I believe, is what my grandmother sees and saw. Because of this realization about my grandmother, I no longer have the same image when I listen to the poem. I picture someone looking down on people, but not just any people, I picture someone looking down at me, and a few other people, some wealthy, some poor, some old, some young, some black, some white, some Asian, and some of everything. All of us are dancing with an airy display for our spectator. We all twirl and giggle as we all choreograph a perfect rhythm. I no longer picture the shadow on top of the cloud as having no face or figure. It now has a form and a shape to it. It is someone I know.

I picture the wrinkly old woman looking down at us softly smiling. She is comfortable on the pink cloud, basking in her glory and her peace. I am sure, if we were closer, we would smell the peach scented perfume. I picture the old woman slowly bringing her wrinkled hands together, clapping and shedding silent tears as she watches the spectacle. I would like to think that she would be smiling at this point; glad to finally have the opportunity to watch the best show in the world-the show of a host of golden daffodils tossing our heads up in a sprightly dance.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy, Unseen. How I Lost my Vision But Found my Voice. by Molly Burke.

Learning to Read Again

2025-11-20T14:59:13Z

This was previously published in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Making me Time.

Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.

~Jim Rohn

"I noticed something," my friend Ashley said. "Your bookshelf is empty."

I nodded absently, listening to the various park sounds around us. Kids were running and laughing, the wind was blowing, and the sun was keeping a warm day bright. I could feel the sun on my face just as much as I could feel my best friend staring at me with concern.

"I'm looking at your online bookshelf right now. It's clear of books this year. Why?" she asked.

"I wish I could read, but I just don't have enough time," I replied, thinking about the many hours I'd spent, in the past month alone, helping someone with their computer or browsing online news articles instead of reading novels.

"But, like, who's going to recommend fun books to me?" Ashley asked, sounding shocked. "You always were my book buddy. What happened?"

"I don't know," I said. As if to reveal all my secrets, my iPhone emitted a high-pitched ding and then started reading off my next calendar event.

"Help Tom with his computer. Two hours."

"Well, there's your problem!" Ashley said excitedly. "Try to slot in some reading time."

When I got home that day, I deleted a calendar event that was supposed to happen at 9:00 that night and typed into the description box, "Read a novel."

When the event arrived, I felt so guilty that I hesitated to turn on the audiobook. With resolve, though, I pressed Play and sank into a cozy young-adult novel. I soon relaxed and noticed that I was genuinely enjoying myself.

The next morning, I woke up a lot happier than usual. I usually woke up feeling like I didn't get enough sleep, like I'd never get enough sleep. That morning was different. My movements felt a lot smoother. I caught myself smiling as I ate cereal. I realized I was eager to get back into the story I was reading the night before.

I had forgotten the excitement I used to have when I read on a regular basis. Throughout that day, a feeling of happiness came over me. I wanted to experience this feeling again in the future, so I called Tom at lunch.

"Hey, Tom," I said. "I know I'm supposed to come over today, but I wanna stay home and read tonight. Is that okay?"

"Of course," Tom replied. "Have a good time tonight."

"You, too," I said.

I spent the rest of the day doing something I hadn't done in years: clear my calendar for myself. Each time I put "personal time" in my calendar, I felt really happy.

When it came time to read for the second night in a row, it was easier than the previous night. I even turned off my phone and sank into bed with headphones on.

Then I turned my phone back on and called Ashley to tell her that I had canceled a lot of upcoming appointments. She was excited. "That's really great. My bookshelf is dwindling. I'm glad to have my book buddy back."

"I'm glad to be back," I said. "Now I have to go. I need to finish this chapter."

— Robert Kingett.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy Wasted Words By: Staci Hart

The First Snowfall

2025-11-10T09:14:47Z

Listen to the First Snowfall here.

At this time of the year, my world always begins to lose its voice. Not because the crushing weight of bureaucracy muffles it, but because the elements are putting the acoustics of my soundscape to sleep for a little while. At least, until the summer.

It does not happen instantaneously. It happens gradually, like a weary mother that wants to put her young ones to bed. It's a kind of magic that's a subtle erasure. Every year, I have no idea what will change first.

This year— it was the car horns.

When I step outside, it takes me minutes to discover that the percussive bark of a car horn three miles away has been dulled to a puff of buffeted air. The once bustling distant freeway quiets into a low, continuous, whisper, as if the roads themselves are closing their eyes, ready for a deep and intense sleep.

This is always the first sign that snow has arrived. It's a spell, cast on the soundscapes of the world, a great, and profound, silencing.

I pull on my coat and step outside. The air is the first thing I notice. It doesn't have a lingering smell of exhaust or the ghosts of other bodies before me. It is a metallic, all encompassing, cold that strips all nuances of the city's textures and scents. For a moment, the cold is the magic that encompasses the entire world.

Then comes the movement.

My foot leaves the safety of my apartment door. It moves forward. It sinks into a feeling that can't be described any other way than magic. My shoe comes to meet a soft, yielding, give. A sensation that feels like sinking into air. Air with an unexpected blend of solid structure to it.

My foot descends deeper into the softness. Then, comes the sound.

There's a percussively high pitched crunch that's the lovely sound of a million tiny crystals, each a perfectly frozen star, breaking and scattering underneath my sole. It's a kind of worldly music.

After gaining my balance, I take a tentative step, then another, then another. It's a two-part chord. First, the descent. Then, that satisfying CRUNCH.

I am no longer walking. I am composing a rhythm against the most profound silence I will hear all year.

This rhythm against silence helps to appreciate the miracle.

Silence is the heart of the miracle. It isn't an absence. It is the presence of something else. It is the percussive sensation of mother nature putting the city under her blanket for the winter that creates a holy quiet.

I stop walking, and then just stand still in the middle of the sidewalk. I tilt my head up, listening and feeling. I let individual flakes land on my skin, my lips radiating a smile of joyous wonder. I can almost feel each individual flake landing on me, kissing me gently with its presence before melting.

Sighted people always say seeing is believing, as if there is no other truth. There's an alternative truth. You don't need to see to feel the magic landing on your skin. You don't need to see to witness the world being redecorated, one flake at a time. You don't need to see to listen to the world hold its breath.

The only thing that's required is your patience and willingness to perceive. You just have to stand in the remade world and let it transform you.

Listen to the First Snowfall here

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy American Christmas by Adriana Herrera.

A Bridge Made of Ableism.

2025-11-01T10:24:22Z

Listen to A Bridge Made of Ableism

The air in the bank was thick with the scent of old money and new anxiety. It's a smell I know well. But today, another element was added to the mix: fear. It wasn't my fear. It was coming from the teller's window, and it was pointed, like a weapon, at a man whose only crime was his refusal to be invisible.

I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him. He was a presence. A tall, solid man, I guessed, from the way his sounds filled the space. He was Deaf and he was trying, with every fiber of his being, to communicate a problem. His sounds were not words. They were a raw, powerful, and deeply human expression of frustration—a series of sharp, guttural noises from deep in his chest. They were the sound of a man trying to tear a hole in the wall of silence that stood between him and the world.

To me, the sounds were a language of pure, unfiltered emotion. They were eloquent.

To the bank teller, they were a threat.

"Sir, you need to calm down," she said, her voice a thin, reedy thing, tight with a fear born of ignorance. "I can't understand you if you're going to be aggressive."

The man's frustrated noises grew louder, a feedback loop of misunderstanding. And then,

A Black security guard I knew well spoke into something.

"We got an agressive Black man here. I'm going to handle this."

I could hear the soft, squeaking soles of his security guard's shoes moving closer. They were going to escalate. They were going to take this man's righteous frustration and label it as violence. They were going to break him rather than try to understand him.

And my own history, the muscle memory of being misunderstood and dismissed, roared to life inside me. Not today. Not on my watch.

I pulled out my phone, my fingers flying across the glass screen with a speed born of long practice. I opened the Notes app. I typed. I maxed out the font size.

Then I stepped forward, into the current of fear.

"Excuse me," I said to the security guard, my voice calm and steady, projecting just enough to cut through the tension. "Give us a minute, would you?"

I tapped the Deaf man on the arm. When he looked towards me, I held my phone up, its screen a silent declaration.

I couldn't see the man's face, but I felt the shift in the room. The angry, frustrated sounds stopped abruptly. There was a pause. A moment of pure, suspended silence. I felt him move closer, felt the warmth of his body as he leaned in to read the screen.

The screen said: I can help. What do you need? I'm blind but we can type back and forth.

And then, huge warm hands extracted the phone from my grasp. a new sound. The soft, rapid tapping of his finger on the glass of my phone. He was typing. A bridge had been built between my world of sound and his world of sight. A bridge made of light and text.

His fingers flew, his message appearing beneath mine. They froze my account. Said fraud. My rent is due today. They won't listen.

I typed back. They're scared because they don't understand. Let me be your voice. I can interpret if you type. My ASL is basic and not fluent. I'll type what they say.

He tapped a single word. Okay.

The second security guard had arrived, a heavy presence smelling of starched cotton and authority. "Sir, is there a problem here?"

I turned my head toward the sound of his voice, keeping my phone held high. "There is no problem," I said calmly. "There is a communication barrier. This gentleman's name is Andre, and the bank has frozen his account in error on the day his rent is due. He has been trying to explain this. Now, if you could please get the bank manager, Andre and I will explain it to her together."

The authority in my own voice, amplified by the silent, typed words of my new comrade, changed the equation. The guard hesitated, then nodded.

The manager arrived, her heels clicking with importance. We stood before her, a strange and sudden team. Andre would type his frustration and his facts onto my phone with a speed and precision that was breathtaking. I would then read his words aloud, my voice lending an unwavering, calm weight to his righteous anger. I'd type back what they said, word for word.

I was not his savior. I was his amplifier. I was a human conduit for a voice that was already there, a voice they had refused to hear.

Faced with the undeniable, typed evidence and the calm, clear narration, the manager’s condescension melted into panicked efficiency. There were apologies. Profuse, stammering apologies. The account was unfrozen. The error was "deeply regretted."

As the manager scurried away, Andre took my phone one last time.

Thank you, he typed. They never listen.

I typed back. I know. But today, we made them.

Want to get some food with me? He typed. I couldn't resist. Why not!

That'd be amazing! Let's go. You guide me.

Even though Orientation and Mobility training always says, grab the elbow, lately, I've been tossing out all social norms and just doing what feels right in the moment. I didn't grab his elbow. I took his hand, then, his large hand enveloping mine in a brief, powerful squeeze. It was a gesture of solidarity, a pact forged in a moment of shared frustration and mutual respect.

We walked out of the bank together, two men who moved through the world in profoundly different ways. But for a few crucial moments, in a cold place that was built to misunderstand us, we had spoken the same language. And our solidarity, together, had been a crescendo of comradery that was a testimony all by itself.

Listen to A Bridge Made of Ableism

If you enjoyed this story, you might enjoy, The Silence Between Us by Alison Gervais

An Open Letter to the Future Man Who Will Hold My Face

2025-10-25T05:15:04Z

Listen to An Open Letter to the Future Man Who Will Hold My Face

Mood: Daring to hope that a man will read this and heed it like a religious text.

To You,

I don't know your name yet. I don't know the specific music of your voice. But I know that one day, you might perform an act of profound and sacred intimacy. You might hold my face in your hands.

I need you to know what this means.

For a face that's bled from knife wounds, from masculine fists punching it, from furious smacks of hatred, This is not a casual gesture. It is an act of care. When your hands, warm and steady, cup my jaw and your palms rest against my cheeks, you are not just touching me. You are building a sanctuary around my mind. You are creating a safe space where the world cannot harm me again.

And I am letting you do this. I am trusting you to build this pocket of safety and to maintain it.

You are building a wall against the chaos of the world. Your flesh becomes a filter, softening the sharp edges of the auditory world, muffling the noise. My entire universe shrinks to the small, safe, warm space between your two hands.

I need you to know that the prolonged pressure of your touch is a language. A firm, steady pressure says, "You are safe. I am here. I will not let anything harm you again." A gentle, exploratory touch says, "I am learning you. I am paying attention."

And I need you to know that I will learn you, too. I will learn the texture of your palms, the length of your fingers, the specific, unique warmth that your soul radiates. And I will trust it.

So when the day comes, and you feel the impulse to do this, I beg you to do it with intention. Do it with reverence. Because you are not just holding my head. You are holding my trust. You are holding my hope. You are holding all the fragile, broken pieces of me, and telling them they have found a safe place to rest. And I promise, I will do my best to be worthy of the shelter you build.

Listen to An Open Letter to the Future Man Who Will Hold My Face

If you enjoyed this open letter, you might enjoy, The Trouble with Love and Coaches by Harriet Ashford.

The Cruelty of Many, The Grace of One

2025-10-04T15:39:13Z

Listen to The Cruelty of Many, The Grace of One

Mood: Like a found object, after being lost for a very long time.

Some days, the world is a conspiracy of sharp edges. Today was one of those days.

It started with my two hours of sleep. I didn't get sleep last night because my neighbor decided she would blast country music at such a loud volume until this morning, I couldn't sleep, even when I put headphones on to quiet the music. Today, the coffee maker chose this morning to die a sudden, silent death. It continued with an automated phone call informing me of a "service interruption" that felt more like a threat. Then came the symphony of construction noise outside my window, a percussive, head-splitting assault that made it impossible to write. By the time I left my apartment, my armor was already full of cracks. I felt brittle, a thing made of thin glass, navigating a world of stone.

Every sound on the street was an attack. The city was shouting, and my anxiety was screaming back, a silent, high-pitched keen in the back of my skull. I was holding on by a single, frayed thread.

And then, the thread snapped.

My hand, clumsy with stress, fumbled as I reached for my pocket. I heard the soft thud of my wallet hitting the pavement, followed by a sound that made my stomach clench: the thin, sharp skitter of a plastic card sliding free and dancing away into the river of footsteps.

"NO!" My mind screamed, "NO NO NO NO!"

The humiliation was a hot, sudden flood. I dropped to my hands and knees on the grimy, public sidewalk, sweeping my hands through the filth in a desperate search. The cold grit of the pavement scraped against my palms. The river of anonymous feet flowed around me, inches from my head. A shoe clipped my searching hand. A shoulder caught my back, sending a jolt through me. No apology. Just the steady, indifferent rhythm of a city that did not have time for a man on the ground.

The card was gone. The simple, awful truth landed in my chest like a stone. Someone had likely scooped it up as they passed. The finality of it, the casual cruelty of the people who saw and did nothing, was too much. The noise in my head crescendoed into a pure, white static. A single, hot tear slid down my cheek.

"Are you alright, mate?"

The voice was warm and deep, a British accent that felt like a soft blanket in a cold room.

"No. I'm not. It's gone," I whispered to the pavement. "My card."

"I saw," he said, his voice closer now. "I was watching. Some people are just rubbish, aren't they?" He was quiet for a moment. "I don't think it's here."

And that was it. The confirmation of the loss, the acknowledgment of the injustice. The first sob was a violent, ugly thing that tore its way out of my chest without my permission. My face crumpled, the careful mask of "I'm fine" shattering into a thousand pieces.

And then, a hand was on my shoulder. Gently, he helped me to my feet. Before I could even think to pull away, to hide my face, he did something utterly revolutionary. He pulled me into a hug.

It was not a tentative, awkward thing. It was a solid, encompassing embrace. One of his arms went around my back, the other hand came up to rest gently on the back of my head, and he just held me as I wept. My face was pressed against the fabric of his shirt, which smelled faintly of soap and something warm, like tea.

The world went quiet. The sharp edges of the city were muffled by the solid wall of his chest. He was an anchor in the rushing, indifferent river. He didn't offer a solution. He didn't offer empty platitudes. He simply stood with me, a human shield against the city, and let me break.

When the storm passed, he loosened his hold. "Right then," he said, his voice a low, kind rumble. "This is no place for you. The public library is just 'round the corner. It's quiet in there. Properly quiet. Let me take you?"

After I said yes, he found my free hand, his fingers closing around mine, a warm, solid weight that felt like a promise. It wasn’t a solution to my lost card. It was something far more valuable. It was sanctuary.

The world is full of people who will walk right past a man on his knees. But sometimes, if you are very, very lucky, you find the one who will stop, who will hold you, and who will offer you a quiet place to put yourself back together.

Listen to The Cruelty of Many, The Grace of One

If you enjoyed this tale, you might enjoy, Bittersweet: The Sweet Series, Book 2

The Gift Horse's Mouth is Full of Terrible Braille

2025-09-24T11:50:54Z

Listen to The Gift Horse's Mouth is Full of Terrible Braille

There is a special kind of terror reserved for the moment a well-meaning, sighted friend says, with a voice beaming with pride, “I got you something! I saw it and thought of you.”

My friend, Lorenzo, is one of the kindest people I know. His heart is a vast, open territory of good intentions. So when he placed a large, shrink-wrapped box in my hands, my face assembled itself into an expression of genuine gratitude.

“Lorenzo, wow,” I said, my voice warm. “You really didn’t have to.”

“I know! But it’s so cool. It’s a board game… for us!”

Us. The word hung in the air. My internal monologue, a cynical old man who lives in my chest, immediately sat up and narrowed his eyes. Here we go.

The box was smooth and cool. My fingers, doing their work, found the title. It was embossed in large print, and below it, a line of Jumbo Braille. This was the first sign that something was deeply, cosmically wrong. Braille is small. It is precise. The bumps on this box were large, rounded, and spaced with the kind of random abandon a child might use to decorate a cupcake with sprinkles. My fingers traced the line. It was not a language. It was a tactile lie. It was the physical equivalent of someone shouting a string of random vowels at you and calling it French. When my fingers finally deciphered the giant wall of poorly spaced dots, I nearly burst out laughing. Instead of saying the name of the game, the Braille read, “Tactician’s waterfalls bananas.”

Okay, my inner cynic grumbled. So the box was designed by a well-meaning baboon. Let’s see what’s inside.

Externally, I smiled. “This is so thoughtful, man. Let’s open it.”

I tore off the plastic. Inside, there was a bag of game pieces. I poured them onto the table. They made a light, plastic clatter. I picked one up. It was a smooth, simple cone shape. I picked up another. Also a cone. A third. A fourth. They were all cones. They were identical in size, shape, and texture. They were as distinct from one another as grains of sand.

Lorenzo’s voice, bless his heart, was full of excitement. “So, there are four colors! You’re the blue ones.”

My external voice was a masterpiece of calm appreciation. “Ah, cool. Blue.”

My internal voice was screaming into a pillow. BLUE? Lorenzo, MY DEAR AND CHERISHED FRIEND, IN WHAT TACTILE UNIVERSE DOES A CONE FEEL ‘BLUE’? ARE THE OTHER CONES FEELING PARTICULARLY RED OR YELLOW TODAY? IS THIS A GAME OF SYNESTHESIA-BASED GUESSWORK?

The final nail in the coffin was the board itself. It was a folding square of cardboard with raised lines indicating a path. So far, so good. But then Lorenzo began to read the rules.

“Okay, so you start on the purple square,” he began. My fingers found no purple square. There were no textural differences between the squares at all. “And if you land on a ‘Warp Zone,’ you get to jump to the matching ‘Warp Zone’ on the other side of the board.”

I felt a wave of profound existential despair wash over me. The game was not inaccessible. It was anti-accessible. It was a stunning monument to an idea of accessibility, constructed without a single thought for its actual use. It was a gift that said, “I thought about your blindness for the thirty seconds it took me to add this to my online shopping cart.”

“And the best part,” Lorenzo said, his voice reaching a fever pitch of genuine delight, “is that we can play it right now!”

This was the checkmate. I was cornered by the sheer, overwhelming force of his kindness. I couldn’t tell him his thoughtful gift was a useless piece of condescending plastic.

So I did what any of us would do. I placed my hand on the board, tracing one of the meaningless raised lines. “You know what,” I said, my voice full of soft, calculated regret, “I’m actually a little wiped today. Can we play it next time? I really want to be able to give it my full attention.”

“Oh, yeah, of course, man!” he said, completely understanding.

The game now sits on my shelf. I have not touched it since. It is my own personal museum exhibit, a shrine dedicated to the heavy, awkward, and often hilarious burden of a gift horse whose mouth, upon closer inspection, is full of absolute nonsense.

Listen to The Gift Horse's Mouth is Full of Terrible Braille

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy, The Thief of Always by Clive Barker.

A Deserving Conference

2025-09-19T10:05:26Z

This was a previously published short story.

Listen to the audio version here

Introduction.

We all have writing that we look back on and think, hmm, this was fun, but it didn't age well. This story features subtle psychological abuse. In a way, it mirrors what I went through. The only difference is, I didn't have a Rodger to come and rescue me. I wish I did, though.

No abuse story is the same. Some might think that me having Rodger save the main character is a sign of weakness. The only response that I must give is, I wish I had a Rodger in my life.

this was the first romance story I wrote with a Blind character such as myself. I've created many other blind protagonists since then. I have to say, even though this was my first romance story before I knew that I was skilled at writing romance, I do not think I did that bad of a job.

This story does have a happy for now ending. I hope it provides you with some insight into my earlier work. Enjoy! Also, remember, you’re not alone.

A Deserving Conference.

I hit enter before I consciously realized it. I couldn't help it though. The post spoke to me in a way no other had. I could identify with the blogger easily because they were coming from a place deep within themselves. I knew this about them without even having to know them. I experienced everything they were experiencing. The confusion of navigating a world that was straight and able bodied.

I looked at the post again, rather than the comment I just posted. The blogger, who, apparently, lived in the same small town as I did, was musing about the intersection of disability and queer identity. Every bit of her post sang to me and resonated with me, even though I was a gay blind male and she was a deaf lesbian. We had a lot in common, so I decided to open up, on a screen this time.

I went back into her post, skimming it with my screen reader, fluently navigating her page and picking out key passages that leapt out at me. How she liked to go to a certain singular LGBT friendly coffee shop to just be amongst her own because the rest of the world was too exhausting. That's something that I related to, obviously, which is why I poured my heart out in her comments section. I told her that we lived in the same town and that I ultimately wanted the same thing she did - a space to exist, and not explain, constantly. A place to live, rather than fight, a place to nestle, rather than be vigilant for any slight in my basic human rights as a gay blind man.

I used my screen reader's keyboard commands to jump to the heading on the page where all the comments nestled. Ever since Trump became president, the brave soldiers kept coming out of the woodwork to proclaim, yet again, about how they don't hate gay people, but isn't this diversity thing a little too much?

I moved my cursor down to my novelette, listened to a few lines, just appreciating it. It felt like I was doing something grand, especially since I've never read this blog before. I came across the Silent Triangle when I was doing a random search on Google for other gay disabled bloggers. She came up. I devoured all her posts but never commented. I guess there's a first time for everything. I didn't tell anybody this, however. None of my friends knew she existed. My current boyfriend, Travis, also didn't know she existed. She was my little Queer secret. She was a treasure to me and I didn't even fully realize it until today.

As soon as I pressed Alt F4 to close the browser, I heard the sound of keys turning outside the front door. Travis had returned home, it seemed. I quickly pressed the keyboard commands to change the speed of the screen reader back to its original rate. Travis insisted that, ever since I moved in his place months ago, that I digitally pick up after myself. If I changed a setting, he'd expect me to change it back, even though he could easily do it himself with a few keyboard commands. I heard him tell Alexa to enable the security system and then he traipsed through the wood-floored rooms to look for me.

"I'm in here." I called out to the retreating, thud, thud, of his wandering sneakers. The sound doubled back to my direction. I knew Travis was nearby because of his scent, so I stood up to hug him and fold his cane for him. Even though his cane was a vastly different model than mine, going as far to have a pencil tip as opposed to a mushroom tip, even though we lived in a small town where sidewalks had a lot of cracks, I could handle it pretty easily. It was like sighted people driving a stick shift when they were used to an automatic. Or something. I wasn't an expert on cars.

"Hey babe." I chirped.

His baritone had an unhappy lilt to it as he hugged me, "Hey... so, how was your, um, quiet time?" His long skinny arms didn't even envelop me like they used to. They just haphazardly embraced me. He then pulled away and sternly looked at me. I could sense it, even though he couldn't see either.

I looked up at his face, eager to stand on tiptoes to kiss him, but before I could, he asked me if I had been cheating on him.

"Oh yeah!" I snorted. "I met this deaf blogger online and, well, now I think I'm going to leave you to become a fabulous lesbian."

He didn't laugh. At least, not in a way I could tell. His breath peppered my face with resemblance of cheese and milk as he sternly retorted, "That's not funny, Shane. First, you tell me you don't want to go shopping with me, then you tell me that you're going to go lesbian?"

"You don't just go lesbian." I countered. He sighed, kissed the top of my head, and ruffled my hair. His massive soft hands felt comforting and inviting. They could make me feel like nothing would ever hurt me or bother me again, which is why I positively melted like a puddle every time we held hands.

When we were first dating, people would ask us all the time if we knew that we were in an interracial relationship. I always rolled my eyes and exclaimed that I never noticed the difference. In fact, I thought we were distant family or something.

I moved in with him because he was a really kind guy from the get go. He was always attentive to my needs and wants. Having an abusive father, and a mother who bailed on me at an early age, fostered this craving inside of me. It made me want to have love and affection. I didn't feel special, but Travis always told me I was before talking about himself, so, I dropped everything to move into the house his mother left him after she died. It seemed fitting. And, so far, I couldn't complain. What was really great about Travis and I was the fact that he understood the blindness, straight away. He lived in the same world I did. I didn't care that he was black. He, in turn, didn't seem to care that I was white, either. We were the blind ambition, I'd always joke.

He sighed before turning away from me, still holding my hand as he flicked through his iPhone with the other hand. I could hear the tiny sound of VoiceOver through his headphones. He was swiping through the Lyft app, dragging his finger across certain parts rather than navigating the traditional way. He was at the tips screen in Lyft.

"How much should I tip my driver?" Travis asked me before double tapping on a number before I could answer. I continued anyway.

"I think you should hit that fifteen percent button." I said. He chuckled before locking his phone and turning around to embrace me.

"You're not still raging mad that I didn't go shopping with you?" I asked, half joking, but he smiled as he said, "Oh yes, I'm insanely furious." His voice adopted a slightly commanding tone as he said, "You should have come with me to the store. I'd have been back sooner if you went with me."

I didn't quite see how this would be possible, but I immediately shook my head. "You were gone for like an hour. So, basically, you were in and out." I tapped my phone and VoiceOver read the time out loud. I did a single finger press to get VoiceOver to hush. He gripped me tighter.

"You could have done that article when you got home... whatever though. You always disobey me anyway," he said, kissing me on the head. Even though this made me slightly uncomfortable, I didn't say anything because it would just make him mad. That's something I revealed in my comment on the blog. I revealed other things too, nothing too damaging, I hope. I just wanted straight sighted people to understand that beneath the differences, we're all human. I did tell her that her relationship sounded really good. And, that I was doing okay in mine.

Travis dragged me to the kitchen table and sat me down before tapping out a message on his phone. He was using the method I set up for him to start the stove and a few other appliances. Sure, we had Alexa, but with my speech disability, she didn't always understand me, so I had to utilize the power of the Internet to make text commands hook into their API. I may have gotten a lot of things wrong, but in the end I made some adaptive versions of Alexa. I used Google for a lot of these because the Google assistant had text input capability. Travis was about to cook something, but I didn't know what, so, I asked him.

"Since you're not going anywhere tonight, with me or otherwise, I guess I'll tell you." He said with a smile. "It's your favorite. Spaghetti." "Great!" I exclaimed while standing up.

"Where are you going?" Travis demanded.

"To get headphones!" I called as I dug my iPhone out of my pocket and issued the various commands to make the AirPods beep. I always had a bad habit of setting them down somewhere, and then forgetting about them, even before moving in with Travis. As soon as I picked up my phone, I heard the notification sound, and then VoiceOver reading the notification. I was too busy getting my headphones to hear it though, so I opened up the notification center with a few gestures. Travis had tweeted that he was cooking dinner for me, because I loved him. He tagged me in the tweet, so I replied after retweeting it.

@theweirdkitty @magicalcook of course I do! You're the best. Guess what he's making for me tonight guys, my favorite! I love him so much!

I closed the twitter app and navigated to my email. VoiceOver had a little trouble staying focused on open messages, but my thumb was accustomed to fighting with the screen reader. I thought about checking it on my laptop, but I wanted to be on the alert in case my writer's retreat application results came in.

The largest LGBT literary organization was hosting a two-week writer retreat with everything paid for, even the train ride. The $30 application fee seemed like a microscopic sacrifice compared to, well, everything else they offered in return.

I found my ear buds and walked back into the kitchen, sat at the table, and flicked through all my emails, using the trusty two finger swipe down to listen to novellas from my best straight girlfriend about all of her Africa adventures.

"What are you listening to babe?" Travis asked every few minutes.

"Email." I repeated. I really didn't understand why he was so worried about not being able to hear what I was doing on my iPhone.

I nearly missed the email from the writer's retreat organizer. The email subject sounded like spam, so I nearly told VoiceOver to delete it. Upon opening it however, I couldn't stop gaping. I couldn't believe was VoiceOver was telling me. I was stunned.

"What are you listening to, babe?" Travis asked again. I couldn't hold it in. I absolutely had to tell him.

"Guess what? So, you know that conference? You know the one where I cried for a billion hours over, last time, because I didn't make it in?

Guess what? I made it in!"

I expected him to jump up and down or something, but he stood very quiet, just a few feet from me, working on the dinner.

"That's great babe. How did this happen?"

"I don't know!" I exclaimed, practically bouncing out of the solar system, "I guess they just liked my work this time. Oh my god! Travis! I'm so happy! Now I will be in California for two weeks! I can't believe it. I'll get to be around other queer authors and queer editors and I am just so ohmygod excited!"

"I'm very happy for you babe... I hope we can squeeze in one more trip together, here, before you go away for, what was it? Three years?"

"Two weeks!" I said, laughing. "I'm so excited Travis! I can't believe this is happening. I mean, it's happened, but I don't believe it's happened. I mean, it happened, but, oh my god oh my god oh my god!"

I was too busy gushing and squealing to realize that Travis had set a full plate of spaghetti down before me. I gobbled it up, jabbering the whole while.

"Oh my god! Travis. What kinds of readings do you think I will do there? How do you think the food will be at the hotel?"

"So, babe? How do you like your spaghetti? I made it for you just the way you like it. Is it as good as always?"

"What kinds of techniques do you think I'm going to learn? I mean, they got workshops there and stuff like that, so I bet I'm going to learn a lot of writing stuff, like techniques and otherwise. And, guess what? I get to be with other queer writers."

"I'm a little confused." Travis chastised as he chewed. "What does that offer that you can't do here? I mean, I still don't understand why you go to that LGBT coffee shop nearby when you could be staying here with me, away from all those other boys."

"Uh, well, it's going to be a place to work and a place to network- "

"See, there's a neat invention, Shane. It's called, social media. It's called email. Why do you have to go away for so long, around other gay men? I mean, what's stopping a man from taking you away from me."

"I don't understand what your big deal is. Yes, there's going to be people there and yes, there's going to be other gay people there, but it's a place to work and network. Yeah, I can do that online. I've been doing that online for years. This is a once and a lifetime chance. And, as for the coffee shop, I just need to get out of here for a while."

"Oh, so you don't like me, then? You don't like being around me, then? I see how this goes. Why do you always have to think about yourself and you never even stop to consider what I want or need."

I shook my head, confused as to why he was so upset and what he was even upset about.

"Travis, what are you so mad about?"

"Shane. I'm upset because you don't even want to be around me. You want to go off and go away from me to be with other gay guys. A relationship has to have loyalty, you know?"

"Loyalty? Are you kidding me? Loyalty? What? I've been loyal to you!"

"Why can't you write here, huh?" I didn't want to answer because I, in part, didn't know how to explain that I felt, in a way, like I was being smothered. I felt trapped, in a way, but I couldn't explain how I felt this way or even why I felt this way because I loved Travis. Travis was my everything.

"Look, Shane." Travis continued. I'm just worried about you is all. I just don't want you to get hurt. When you're here, I can protect you better. I can-"

"But wait, see? I don't understand this about you either, Travis. I don't get it. I really don't. If I have to be loyal to you then you have to trust me in return, okay? Don't assume that just because you can't hear VoiceOver that doesn't mean that I'm cheating on you, okay? Look, besides, this isn't like that

anyway. Consider this work. Okay?"

"How do you like your dinner?" Travis asked, in a defeated voice. I immediately felt bad, and like all of his unhappiness was my fault and something I needed to fix. Friends were rare for me at the place I lived so I had no choice but to trust him. He sounded so morose I immediately rushed over and kissed his cheek, snuggling into his arms and having him rock me. It allowed me to melt into his presence and bask in it. He, in turn, never told me why he enjoyed it so much, but I knew he did. I could sense it when he tightened his embrace. He began to cry, and I immediately felt even worse.

"Oh my god! I'm so sorry babe!" I exclaimed as I kissed his streaming tears.

"Shane... I just, I just, I just don't want you to get hurt, is all." He said as he rocked me.

"But, I mean, you got to let me fall sometimes. Support me while I'm trying to pick myself up. Don't just try to prevent me from falling at all, okay?"

"So, you're still going to this thing?"

"I am, yeah." I said, kissing him. "I'll blog about it, so you can read all about it." He smiled but I still felt guilty. How could I do this to him? I thought, but I really did want this. I've been applying for this retreat for years and was finally accepted. I couldn't eat anymore so I took my laptop into our bedroom to do some proper emailing. VoiceOver didn't make entering text on an iPhone lightning fast so that's why I preferred to use a laptop or desktop. My fingers could dance across the keys. Whereas, on the iPhone, they fumbled.

I emailed the coordinator about accommodations I'd need, all lecture handouts were to be sent to me via email before lectures, and otherwise. They were delighted to have me there. This renewed my fierce desire to go. I wanted to go. I then felt like Travis didn't understand me at all. My thoughts flitted from, going, to saying that I couldn't attend after all because I had a family emergency. Which, wouldn't be a total lie, but the bigger question I had, especially when I lay in his arms that night, was, why did he need me?

Over the next few days, Travis wouldn't let me out of his sight. The coffee shop around the corner I usually went to was off limits to me because he said he needed help around the house. Buying things for our food stash online, and a variety of other things. I was so busy doing little things around the house that I barely had time to talk to the retreat coordinator about my train ticket. We confirmed it over the phone despite my lack of email communication. I apologized to her and explained that my boyfriend needed me to do a lot of things around the house, and that I just didn't have enough time to check my email. We finally arranged for me to get on the evening Amtrak. Because of my blindness, I'd have to get there early. I could just take a Lyft there. Travis knew how to work the Alexa, so I didn't need to do a whole lot to prepare for my trip. Still, though, the excitement of it kept gnawing at me. I was so jittery that I wasn't paying full attention to Travis when he was telling me that he managed to land a gig as an actor down at the local theater. I immediately felt terrible, especially because Travis immediately made me see where I went wrong with my selfishness.

"Here, I am, getting this gig, and, you don't even care? All you care about is that conference. Babe, there's gonna be other conferences or whatever, trust me. This play though? It only runs for this season, so can you stay here and come to this play instead?"

"Travis, you know I want to, but I can't. I'm gonna be in a different state!"

"Look, Shane..." I waited on him to continue. Finally, after a long silence, he looked straight at me and said, with the sultry voice that captivated me so many months ago, "I'm so proud of you Shane."

The next day, the day I was to leave for the conference, Travis went somewhere early, which gave me a chance to get out of the house and head down to my coffee shop. I took my laptop because I planned to do some research while there. I unfolded my cane and shorelined the whole way there, humming as I went. I was still ecstatic about where I'd be going in a few days.

I made it to the shop and ordered my usual iced coffee before taking a seat in my usual booth in the back. When Jonathan, the manager who's gotten to know me well over these past few years, asked me where I'd been, I told him the truth. I told him I was being a house dad. I couldn't hold in my excitement though and told him all about the conference and my eventual victory. He was so happy for me he said I could have anything on the house for a week before I was away. Chuckling, he offered me anything he had in stock.

"On the house!" he kept insisting. I chose a new kind of coffee I had never tried before. Cuban coffee. It was utterly delicious.

Because I was gulping away, I didn't notice someone sat down across from me until they said my name.

"Shane Gilson?"

I jumped so badly I nearly dropped my drink. A soft hand touched my arm as I sat down my cup.

"It's okay. I'm, like, sincerely sorry I scared you. I'm Roger."

"Roger?" I repeated, completely confused. "Um hi! I'm Shane Gilson.

Nice to meet you."

"I know who you are. I've read all about you from your blog. And, if I may say so, you're a cutie. You are epic looking in person."

Despite this weird exchange, I couldn't help but smile and joke."You mean I'm not good looking in my pictures online?"

His chuckle made me stop and pay attention to him. His voice floated a good way above my head, so I guessed he was six feet tall. He had a very soft voice, very soothing and calculated, but somehow possessed the lax cadence of someone who just, simply, didn't let every minor thing bother him. I suddenly homed in on the fact that he said I was cute. These were times when I wish I could get a visual picture. Still, I liked his calm manner of speaking. I detected a slight accent but couldn't quite place it. New York, maybe? He dipped his tone subconsciously at the end of certain vowels but that didn't give any region anyway.

"Actually," he said, "on the contrary. You're cute in person, and, online." He said, with a smiling lilt in his voice. He smiled easily, so this was a plus.

"It's nice to meet you!" I said, stretching out my hand. A big, strong, yet smooth, hand gripped mine and shook it softly. I immediately liked the warmth of his hands. They almost seemed as if they were magical.

"I'm so happy you're here today." He said. And, I detected eagerness in his speech. He was waiting on me to be here, but why?

"Wait," I interjected, "wait, you knew I was going to be here? But we've never met. Do you come here often or something?"

"No. I just came here today. This is my first time." He said, still holding onto my hand. I didn't mind. But still, if this was his first time here, then how did he know my name?

"How did you know I come here? I mean, my blog doesn't say anything about the address of the place or anything. So, honestly? I'm a little worried about how you found me and the fact you, well, found me, to begin with."

"Yeah. I tracked you down, honestly. I tracked you down from a comment you left on my sister's blog."

"But I didn't..." I took a deep breath and tried again. "Is... is, is your sister deaf?"

"Yup! She's deaf."

"She's deaf?" I squeaked, as if I didn't know how to process English.

He chuckled.

"That blog post you left your comment on? That's my sisters blog."

"Oh. Woot!" I retorted, romantically, causing him to giggle in reply. Beside us, I could hear some dudes muttering about the queer agenda has gone too far, simply because we were allowed to laugh and be human and hold hands like any other straight couple.

"So," I began, ignoring the jerks. "What do you look like?" It was the only logical thing I could think of, after being told that I had just been stalked by some guy named Roger.

"Well," I'm black." He said, and I shook my head. "I mean, describe your face. Not your color." So, he did. As he was telling me all about how average looking he was, but that his eyes were very big, I tried to squash the mounting fear that this stranger, this man, stalked me - I had to cut him off.

"I'm sorry, but why did you stalk me?"

"Stalk?" he asked, perplexed. "Oh! I'm! I'm so sorry if it looks like- "

"Dude, it, is! Stalking. It's not, like, anything. It is, in fact, stalking."

"I'm sorry Shane, I really am." His voice was so soft and soothing I believed him without even trying to. "I'm so sorry! I really am. I'm sorry, I guess you didn't get my email or tweets?"

"Uh. Email? Tweets? Oh! Um, no. I mean, it's still stalking, but, no, I didn't. My boyfriend needed me around the house and- "

"You mean Travis. That's why I'm here, actually." My grip tightened on his hand, but he didn't seem to mind. In fact, he took his other hand and gently caressed it, which is something Travis never did. I instantly melted and gripped his hand tighter. Without warning, tears sprang to my eyes, but I fought to keep them at bay and stared hard at where I imagined his wide eyes to be.

"Why are you here. What do you know about Travis? I mean, why are you even here? He's my boyfriend. He's... we're great together..." I could sense him shaking his head.

"No, Shane. You're not. I've read your blogs. I've read everything I can about you. I've read Travis's twitter feed over the past few days, and even became friends with him on Facebook... Shane... listen to me. Okay? You're in an abusive relationship. And, you have a heart of gold. I know this because I've poured over every heartfelt thing you've ever written. About your grandmother dying. About how you loved Easter last year because you got to hold bunnies in your arms. About how you've been applying to this conference and, well, how you've been working so hard. I read Travis's stuff too. He's how I found out that you made it in." I was stunned, but I let him continue.

"I know Travis's whole deal. I've watched him over these past few days too. I've watched him and read his posts and everything. He's not happy you are gonna be far away from him. Hell, he's not happy you got in at all."

"Look." I snapped, unable to keep my heart from pounding and tears escaping. "He loves me. He loves me. I love him. We're going to get married..." I couldn't finish, and he knew I couldn't finish. He just took my hands in his and let me quietly cry.

"A person who's as beautiful as you are deserves better. A person who's as sweet-"

"I can't leave." I said. I just sat there crying and letting everything pour out. I thought this was what love was. I thought that love had to become really painful before it could become great. Roger told me it didn't have to be this painful.

When I gathered my things to leave, hours later, Roger insisted that I take down his number into my phone. I didn't hear a screen reader on his phone, so I guessed that he was sighted. He was. He then offered to drive me home. I accepted, but I was scared of what Travis would say and think and do. He said to call him if I needed to, but I didn't want to be a burden. He squeezed my hand and said an angel like me would never be a burden. And, just like that, I burst into tears and I didn't even know why.

Halfway home however, my phone buzzed. VoiceOver told me I had a new email, so I did the needed gestures and double taps to open my email.

Before I could look at the message, my battery died. He let me out after arriving at my house and told me to call him if I needed to. I wouldn't need to, though, because I had Travis, and he was just some creepy stalker.

When I entered the house, however, the thing that immediately caught my attention was the hum of the desktop in the computer room. Travis was on the computer earlier, I guessed. I went into the computer room and used the keyboard commands to see what was open. Firefox was open. I pressed the commands to jump by headings and other navigational elements and soon realized that the Amtrak page was open. I guessed Travis was planning for a trip in the future. Good, he needed to get away for a while. I closed the tab and stopped when the screen reader started reading the other open tab. It was my comment, the one I left days ago. How did Travis find this? I quickly dashed to the nearest outlet and plugged my phone in, because I had a feeling why that Amtrak page was open. The latest email was an email from Amtrak.

Thanking me for my service cancelation.

"So," a baritone voice drawled behind me, making me jump. "Looks like you'll be missing your train, huh?" Travis sneered. "I told you. You gotta be safe. And, you won't be safe with anybody else, except me." I heard the computer room door slam shut and Travis stepped towards me. I needed to keep him talking, and somehow hook my headphones in as well so he couldn't hear what I was doing.

"But, I just. Why the hell would you do that? What? Why? You're crazy man!"

"Oh Shane. I'm not crazy. I love you. Remember?"

My thumb had never flown so fast over my screen before, but it landed on Roger's number. Instead of trying to text, I called him, hoping he would pick up. With the iPhone on the charger and Bluetooth ear buds on, I dropped my phone onto the chair. I heard Roger pick up as Travis stepped closer, grabbing me by the shirt.

"Why did you cancel my train? Why?"

"Dishonesty doesn't need a reason!" Travis growled. "You want to sneak off with some other man and leave me?" He shook me, but I kicked him. He dropped me, and I dashed to the door, but I was tackled from behind. A car honked outside but Travis didn't hear it. I screamed just as his hand clamped over my mouth. I bit down, hard, causing him to yell and elbow me in the gut. I kicked, but he grabbed me and threw me against the wall. The front door burst open and Roger's hands grabbed me. At first, I thought they were Travis's and tried kicking him, but he yelled at me to stop, and we soon sprinted towards the door, with Travis hot on our heels. Passing the threshold, I turned back and kicked out randomly, hoping I'd connect with something. My foot landed near Travis's knee and he fell down, howling in pain. I tripped trying to hold onto Roger as we dove into his car. I told him my phone was still back there, but he said we could get it later. He revved the engine, spun around, and we shot away from the mirage I thought was love.

We didn't go back to Roger's house though. Instead, he called Amtrak to book me a train to the conference and back again. I thanked him endlessly and asked if he knew where I could get a new phone. He said he would mail one to me at the conference.

I was amazed Amtrak still had seats open, but I guess luck was on my side. Roger pulled up and walked with me to the train. I then explained, stupidly, that I didn't have any clothes. He said he would take care of it while I was on the train. Clothes would be waiting for me at the hotel. I tried to convince him UPS doesn't work like that, but he shushed me. I felt so guilty for even accepting his gifts, but he seemed determined to help me. To show me a better world, I guessed.

Before I stepped onto the train I turned to Roger, intending to say bye for now, but instead, I asked why he helped me.

"Hmm." He mused. "I guess it's because I knew you were a beautiful person. When I figured out how Travis was treating you, I wanted to show you that you don't need someone like Travis to be the person you deserve to be." With that, he kissed me goodbye... for now.

The Death of Sherlock Holmes: a dated uprising

2025-09-15T18:06:32Z

Since I am having a bit of a drafting slump, you all get to read an essay I did way back in college. In truth, it wasn't my best work. The citations are incorrect, and my thesis was not very strong. Still, I believe it's really good to look back and see how much we've grown as artists and writers.

Begin Essay.

A coffee cup sat a few inches to the right of my laptop. There was a pinched concentrated look on my face as I typed in one name into the search box of a database at my local college. I expected to find nothing of interest and move onto some other author. Upon reading a few articles I found something that pivoted my questions skyward.

It begins in a medical room. A patient sits in a chair. A medical teacher and his student, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were pondering a medical diagnosis. Joseph Bell takes an eight-second look at the patient. He deduces almost everything about their patient. Doyle stares in bewilderment at his professor. He waits to see if Bell is correct. Bell is correct. A character begins to form in Doyle's mind. When Doyle begins writing, he remembers the teacher who could glimpse into someone's life. Attaching this characteristic to the name Sherlock Holmes he began to flesh out a character that would be remembered for decades.

I began this research thinking that I would not find much of anything to think about. I was sadly mistaken. One of the most interesting aspects while starting out the research was Sherlock Holmes himself. I wanted to dwell deep into his mind and place my own magnifying glass to his existence.

I was fascinated with Holmes. I did not care about the mysteries themselves but I was intrigued by his mannerisms, his likes and dislikes, and his thought process. What was he like inside of his own head? Why does he think the way he does, and what inspired such a character? That was 9 the first thing I had to know above anything else. This small mystery had plagued me ever since my first reading of the short stories. I soon got the entire Sherlock Holmes collection in audio and began a journey that would have unexpected results.

Throughout my readings I studied Holmes. I wanted to see what inspired this character. I wanted to figure out just how much Doyle loved his world famous detective. I found much more than Holmes could find.

There is one thing I learned from experience about characters in literature. Writers love their characters as if they were their own child. If there was ever a character who could win the hearts of the public, it was Holmes. He definitely captured my heart the first time I met him. His assurance and intellect and overall wit made me want to sit down and have a cup of tea with the fellow. After reading a few short stories and getting used to being around Holmes I decided to find out how much everybody else loved the witty detective. Surely Holmes was commonly liked by all people including his creator.

I began by looking up character analysis in Gale. As I was studying the vast articles I found one article that revealed something shocking. I read many articles by people who enjoyed Holmes as if he were the principal of a friend so seeing this made my thinking cap spin backward.

The public may have become great harmonious friends with Holmes, claiming that they knew him better than they knew some of their family but there was one person who detested the world famous detective. Doyle hated his best creation. Upon reading this in a personal reflective article I wondered if this was even true. How could this be? Surely, a character that has brought him such fame and fortune would have a solid steadfast place in Doyle's heart... I was mistaken.

Intrigued with the realization I set out to find just how much Doyle hated the sharp-eyed detective. I soon found my answer in a letter that Doyle wrote to his mother. As I was reading the text I pictured a quill shaking in the author's hand as he wrote, "I think of slaying Holmes ... winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things." I reeled back and shock. I just could not grasp why he hated Holmes so vehemently. Holmes was a cunning disarmingly smart and handsome fellow. How could Doyle hate such a creation?

This mystery was getting deeper with every article. I suddenly realized I now had something solid to look for. I knew that Doyle killed Holmes in The Final Problem. What I did not know was exactly when Doyle wanted to murder the detective.

Many scholarly journalists would argue that he did not want to kill Holmes until after "the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes." many journalists say, including Michael Atkinson, "Rarely has a story had such a straightforward purpose as "The Final Problem". The goal is simple: shelve Holmes, for good." I have to say that they are correct about the fact that The Final Problem's main purpose is to kill Holmes, but I did not think this is where the plot began.

I did not know where to begin my sleuthing so I started looking for characters that may rival Holmes in the tales.

After reading the stories for a second time I did not see any clues in the characters, suspects, contenders, or in the detective himself. Dejected, I began to read Doyle's biography to try to determine anything in there. Perhaps Doyle would really show me his feelings in his reflections. As I was reading a year jumped out at me as if it held a flashing beacon. The year tickled something in the back of my mind. I knew that I saw the year somewhere before when I was scanning the library databases. The problem was I couldn't remember where I saw the year or even what article. I decided to try looking on Google to see if this one year tied into two events. If it did then I would at least have something to compare. I found out that a Sherlock Holmes story was published in that year. Since I had that significant event I scrutinized the biography again. The year kept poking my memory wanting me to remember its significance. The year was 1893. I soon found my answer in Doyle's autobiography The Doctor and the Detective.

Two significant things happened in the year 1893. A brand new Holmes story made its way into literary journals. "The Cardboard Box." The second thing, stated in the biography, was Doyle's father died in 1893. I wanted to concentrate on the story more though, because I thought it held more clues to my initial question of when the plot to murder Holmes began. I dived into the investigating ring ready for action! I got more than what I bargained for.

The instant that I knew those two events had something in common I knew that I just had to read that story again. The answer had to be in some, if not all, lines of the story. It just had to be the place the murder plot began! The fact that his father died just before the publication could not have been a coincidence. I quickly shuffled through my CD sleeves looking for the collection that held this story. After a third time of listening to it, I realized how different it was.

Typical Holmes stories consist of Holmes and his sidekick, Dr. Watson, in their apartment on Baker Street. A character approaches the dynamic duo in desperate need of their help. Holmes deduces some characteristics about their client with some observant glances; the team dig as much of the mystery out as possible, and then the new character leaves their apartment leaving Holmes to tell Watson some things he notices or noticed about the client. The second half of the story, the half that deviates from the safe norm, has the team traveling to various places outside of the bubble of Baker Street. The reader instantly knows that Holmes and Watson are about to get into a tangled web of clues and suspects. This climax of the short stories sets everything up for the ending scenes. After the adventure outside of their headquarters, the team head back to their safe haven where Holmes pieces together the events that they have seen, heard, or figured out along the way using clues, testimonies, or object placements that neither Watson or the reader didn't detect.

As soon as the story ended, I knew The Cardboard Box shifted slightly from the normal Holmes formula in the closing scenes.

In The Cardboard Box it does not end with Holmes proving to his readers and his close friend that everything can be observed and noticed thus there is in fact a reason for everything and that science is deviant. Instead, this story ends with a confession. It ends with a confession from the person who committed the crime: the tale ends with Jim Browner's account of how and why he murdered his wife and her lover. Before, while reading the tale, I glimpsed this scene as just a never before seen confession with excruciating detail on a particular murder. Now, however, knowing that Doyle's father died in the same year that this story was published I now knew that this story formula deviated from the norm and that there was a very clearcut reason for the formula switch. I needed to take a better look at this scene through new calculating eyes.

I knew that this story was different. I knew that there was a bigger connection then I saw. My task was to find out, exactly, what that connection was.

Something began to tickle the back of my mind, and it was about a character. Since Jim didn't act like any other Holmes suspect seen yet I had to keep my magnifying glass on him. I had my target and now it was time to track down more secrets. I watched him the minute he appeared on the scene. I did not notice anything revealing until his confession at the end.

I listened to the story again paying close attention to the desperation in Browner's tale. I thought, for a second, I could hear Holmes murdering someone. The amount of precision and accuracy in which Jim detailed the murder was with such observance and attention to detail it became increasingly difficult knowing that I was not listening to Sherlock Holmes. His tone when he tells the tale is full of malice directed straight at Sherlock Holmes. I could easily tell that Doyle poured his murderous desire into his own character. Clues and pieces began clicking into place even faster as Jim's murder account became more detailed. I replayed that entire scene again. Upon my fifth time listening to Browner confess the murder of his wife, I heard a message that I did not think I would hear in this story. I stared slack-jawed as I listened to Doyle's hidden message portrayed through Jim.

I could hear the subtle malice towards Holmes Doyle was trying to suppress. Through Browner's confession I saw that he was much like Holmes. He also had a keen eye. He told me inadvertently when he was talking about his wife. "As I walked in at the door I saw the light of welcome in my wife's face. But as she saw who it was it faded again, and she turned away with a look of disappointment. That was enough for me" (338) "I looked into her eyes," Browner writes of his jealous sister-in-law," and I read it all there. There was no need for her to speak or for me either" (337).

As I was reading that section, I could sense the vibe that Doyle had towards Holmes. He poured his true feelings into browner. I heard Doyle's cry as he begged someone to crush this first-rate character. It was staring at me the whole time and now that I had a lock on it, it held me. I knew that I was not into just any Sherlock Holmes story anymore. I was listening to Doyle tell his readers that he wanted to get rid of the delightful sleuth. I had the exact time period that Doyle plotted the murder of Holmes... I had solved the mystery that questioned many readers and journalists alike. 1893 was the year that Doyle planned the murder of Holmes.

I immediately wanted to see if anyone else had realized what I had. In all of the journals I was looking at from Gale no one had.

Journalists still speculated. William Gillette writes, "Something mysterious may have indeed happened to Conan Doyle in 1893." I just had to stare in bewilderment. The answer was right in front of me in his biography as well as his own story. Why were journalists still confused? Was I the only one who really looked deep into the death of Sherlock Holmes and made all these connections?

I was. I was also disappointed. I was not disappointed so much that no one had bothered to make the connection but I was disappointed with the speculations that every journalist seemed to allude to. It had to be something "mysterious." I could not help it. I chortled at the absurdity of it all. Why did it have to be "mysterious?"

Could it be that he was just overcome with grief, unable to carry on anymore for a much longer period? Did their really have to be something mysterious that happened to Doyle? I did not think so. Authors I know will usually have something happen in their lives that changes their whole thought process. One author that stood out for me the most in this department was the famous horror writer Stephen King. I chuckled as I compared King's "mysterious" car accident to Doyle's "mysterious happening" in 1893. I did not see a big difference.

I thought about the car accident that nearly killed Stephen King and how his writing began to shift systematically into the darker portion of King's untapped imagination. I began to chuckle at all the mysterious things that should have happened to Doyle in 1893. Nothing mysterious had to happen to Stephen king, did it? Why did it have to happen with Doyle?

Knowing that any further research in the databases was frivolous, I began to re-read each story after The Cardboard Box, now that the initial mystery was solved, curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to see how much the writing, or scenes, story, characters, or resolution would change. I kept a vital eye on each tale, trying to feel what Doyle felt page after page of listening to Holmes and Watson talk. I could almost hear Doyle screaming in agony as his permanent houseguest inside of his head dominated the atmosphere. I also noticed something else about Holmes. He had changed.

Some of the few noticeable quirks were Holmes's temper. It grew just a tad shorter when explaining things to Watson. As the stories drew closer to The Final Problem, I could feel elements of the stories, characters, and overall creation shift out of the norm. Some shifts came in the form of suspects not acting like the previous ones in the collections before The Cardboard Box. Some changes came in the way Holmes acted. The whole Sherlock Holmes story concept had been altered. I suddenly could feel how badly Doyle wanted to kill Sherlock Holmes. The desire poured through each shift in the Sherlock Holmes formula. The one person who's attention to detail matched Holmes, didn't care about structure and formula the closer The Final Problem came.

After finishing The Final Problem and witnessing the death of Sherlock Holmes I began to think about other characters in a series and how a series could completely change based on the will of the writer. Instantly Harry Potter rose to my suspect list.

Harry Potter was a long lasting seven book series that took years to complete. The only difference I could detect in the series was the last book in the series: the seventh book. I had a sneaking suspicion that J. K. Rowling just wanted to kill Harry Potter and never have to write about him again. I wanted to know if that were true. Upon my first reading there were many story elements that just didn't add up. I wanted to know if that was because she hated writing Harry Potter books by that time. I began to read the last book to see if I could feel the longing.

As I was reading the seventh Harry Potter book I could feel the quick typing on the page. I could feel the dispassion for story and plot holes. I could feel the need to get it all out and over with because the passion had long since passed. These writers were not writing anymore, they were working and they wanted to move onto a new job and new projects. After making so many connections and so many realizations, now that I could sympathize with these burned out writers, I was deeply saddened. I slowly shut down my laptop and gazed pensively at a Holmes audio book on my mahogany desk. My dream of becoming a writer was always shining within my existence. Since I know what happened to these successful writers I didn't want to have that happen to me. I hoped that writing would not become a chore for me.

These two writers would not leave my subconscious. I was deeply sad that two good writers have lost their zeal for writing and wanted to end it all. For good measure I opened up a folder on my laptop where many of my essays sat. I could easily remember the feeling of embarking on an adventure as my fingers struck down every letter. I opened up all the essays on my laptop remembering that I wanted to write these essays. I enjoyed the writing process a lot. I was still afraid. I was afraid of losing my writing zest as two good writers have.

I hoped I would not turn into something that I didn't want to become. I vowed to always enjoy my job. Whatever magazine I would be writing for, every book signing I'd attend, every new character I invent, I'd feel and I'd love just as I would my own child. I would love my fans and I would never hurry to get a series done. I vowed that I would be an old man, furiously typing out my last novel. Sitting there feeling a mixture of awe and sadness I stroked the thick sleeve where all the timeless Sherlock Holmes stories were held. Perhaps it was a dream. Perhaps it was a forewarning but it soon invaded my mind.

I am in a hospital room. Two doctors are leaning over me their voices strained with sadness as they speculate how much longer I have. I know that these are the last breaths I will take but I have not stopped yet. Why should I stop now? I am determined. My wrinkled hands skillfully type string after string of letters on a futuristic machine sitting on my lap. The talking computer rapidly echoes words I type into my ear. My face is complacent as I finish the last sentence. As if on cue I start to close my eyes as my fingers feebly type out two words, six letters, and one last novel. I don't know if I'm going to sleep, or if I'm dying, but I know that I have worked hard, and I've enjoyed every draft of it. There is no mystery here. Just before I drift off I listen to the two words, made of six letters that make up my last book. A smile is on my face, as it has always been with the completion of a new novel. The world goes black as a robotic voice says THE END.

Source Citation:

Atkinson, Michael. "Staging the Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes: The Aesthetics of Absence in 'The Final Problem.'." Gettysburg Review 4.2 (Spring 1991): 206-214. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 83. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 10 Nov. 2011. William Gillette, THE PAINFUL PREDICAMENT OF SHERLOCK Holmes, Midwest Quarterly 42.1 (Autumn 2000): 183-198. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 83. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 10 Nov. 2011.

Doyle, Sir Arthur. ""The Cardboard Box"." In Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Vol. II. New York: Bantam Classics, 1986. 14

Doyle, Sir Arthur. "The Final Problem." In Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Vol. II. New York: Bantam Classics, 1986.

The Gospel of the Public Library

2025-09-10T07:13:20Z

Listen to The Gospel of the Public Library

In a world that screams, that demands, that sells, that commodifies every waking second of your attention, the public library is a quiet and profound act of rebellion. It is one of the last true sanctuaries, a temple dedicated to a god that the market has tried very hard to kill: the god of the freely shared idea.

I came here today to escape the noise, not just of the city, but of the culture. A culture that believes if something is valuable, it must have a price tag. A culture that thinks a community is just a demographic to be targeted. The venture capitalists have not yet figured out how to monetize the Dewey Decimal System, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

I sit at a heavy wooden table, its surface worn smooth by the elbows of a thousand other seekers. The air here has a specific and holy scent: the dry, sweet, vanilla-like perfume of old paper, mingled with the clean, sharp scent of bookbinding glue and a faint, human trace of wool coats and warm skin. It is the scent of accumulated knowledge.

But the true gospel of the library is preached in its soundscape. It is a symphony of quiet reverence.

The foundation is the silence itself. Not the dead, empty silence of a tomb, but a living, breathing silence. It is the sound of dozens of people sharing a space with a mutual, unspoken pact of respect. It is the collective sound of their quiet breathing, a gentle, rhythmic tide that says, We are all here together, on our own separate journeys.

Upon this silence, the other instruments play their gentle parts. There is the soft, papery rustle of a page being turned, a sound as delicate as a whisper. It is the sound of a mind traveling, of a story unfolding. From the main desk, there is the distant, rhythmic, and deeply satisfying thud-thud of the librarian's stamp, a percussive heartbeat that gives the entire space its tempo. It is the sound of knowledge being checked out, of stories being sent out into the world.

Even the human voices here are different. They are hushed, intimate whispers, words spoken with the conscious intention of not disturbing the shared peace. It is the sound of a community policing its own tranquility, a small, beautiful act of collective care.

This place shouldn't exist in our world. It is an affront to every principle of modern capitalism. It doesn't have a business model that scales. It doesn't leverage user data. Its only goal is to take the most valuable things in the world—stories, knowledge, ideas, a quiet place to think—and give them away for free.

It is a quiet, stubborn, and beautiful rebellion. It is a testament to the radical idea that not everything is a product. That a community is more than just a market. That the wealth of a society is not measured by its billionaires, but by the richness of the resources it freely offers to its citizens.

I sit here, in the warm, paper-scented quiet, and I breathe. I listen to the soft rustle of pages and the distant, rhythmic thud. And I feel my soul, so often frayed and exhausted by the screaming demands of the world, begin to heal.

This is my church. This is my sanctuary. And its gospel is the quietest, most revolutionary sound I know.

Listen to The Gospel of the Public Library

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy, Answers in the Pages by David Levithan.

A Requiem for My Dignity, Sacrificed at the Altar of AI

2025-09-02T17:27:28Z

Listen to A Requiem for My Dignity, Sacrificed at the Altar of AI via my podcast

I consider myself a technologically competent person. I can navigate the internet's darkest corners and wrestle with code that would make a lesser mortal weep. So when I decided to try a geek's attempt at an, ahem, "AI" screen reader, after having known me for about three months and assuming he knew better than existing screen reader developers, to order my groceries online, I thought, "This will be a breeze."

Reader, it was not a breeze. It was a Category 5 hurricane of humiliation.

Let's call the screen reader's voice 'Clarence.' Clarence had a default voice that was a cultureless chipper, can-do American tenor, the kind of voice that sounds like it should be hosting a children's television show about sentient teapots.

The first sign of trouble was the login page. I typed my username. Clarence, in his infinite wisdom, decided to read it back to me, not as a word, but as a phonetic adventure, even though I navigated by words instead of characters.

"You have typed: Rrr-oh-BIT-king-ET-tee," he announced with the confidence of a man discovering a new continent.

I paused. Okay. A little weird, but manageable. I navigated to the password field. As I typed, Clarence, whose volume was apparently locked at "enthusiastic stadium announcer," began to narrate my keystrokes.

"BUBBLE! Asterisk! BULLET!" he shouted into my headphones. By the fourth one, he got creative. "That's another wee star for you, champ!"

Once logged in, I navigated to the search bar. I wanted bananas. A simple, humble request. I typed "bananas."

Clarence cleared his throat, ready for his moment. "Searching for... bay-NAH-nahs!" he sang, somehow managing to rhyme it with "pajamas." The results loaded. He began to read the first item.

"Organic Bay-nah-nahs, by the bun-CH," he chirped. "One pound, seventy-nine pence."

He wasn't reading the currency symbol. He was reading the word "pence," despite the website being American. I had no idea why. Clarence, it seemed, was an Anglophile with a passion for creative pronunciation.

I added the bay-nah-nahs to my cart. Next, I needed milk. I typed "milk."

"Searching for... MILK!" he roared, like a drill sergeant. "Item one: Two percent reduced-fat milk. Item two: Whore-milk."

I froze. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Whore-milk? What in God's name was whore-milk? I slowly navigated back to the item. The text on the screen clearly said "Whole Milk."

Clarence, the perverted teapot-host, had made an executive decision.

I started laughing. A dangerous, wheezing sound that was half amusement, half despair. I decided to press on. I was a captain going down with his ship. I searched for "lettuce."

"Searching for... let-TOO-chay!"

I searched for "bread."

"Searching for... BREAD!" he screamed again, seemingly under the impression that bread was an emergency situation. "Item one: Sliced white bread. Item two: Sour... DOUGH-gut."

Dough-gut. I pictured a loaf of bread with a beer belly. The laughter was now a physical force, shaking my shoulders, bringing tears to my eyes. My dignity had packed its bags and was booking a flight to a country where screen readers were not possessed by the ghost of a madman.

The final straw was the checkout page. I navigated to the "Confirm Purchase" button. Clarence, sensing the grand finale, took a deep, theatrical breath.

"Are you absolutely, positively certain you wish to purchase these items?" he asked, his voice full of manufactured gravitas. "This is your final chance to turn back from the precipice of... grocery."

I couldn't do it. I couldn't give him the satisfaction. I slammed my laptop shut. I stood up, walked to my front door, put on my shoes, and grabbed my cane. I would go to the store. I would hunt for my own bananas and my non-prostitute milk.

I had been defeated by an algorithm and, frankly, shit code with a mid-western accent and a dirty mind. Rest in peace, my dignity. You fought valiantly.

Listen to A Requiem for My Dignity, Sacrificed at the Altar of AI via my podcast

A personal note from me, Robert, before we get to the recommendations. Fuck AI, and tech culture, and tech bros. I'm a techy person. A nerd, if you will, but I absolutely hate it when people in power, of any kind, use their power to systematically and relentlessly harm others for profit. Sean, the dashingly exquisite narrator that narrated this post, has lost work to automated content generation. Writers lost work to automated content generation. Visual artists have lost work to automated content generation. Not because AI is supposedly intelligent. It's not intelligent, at all. It's an algorithm, but the people at the top that hold all the power never see us as people. They only see us as numbers on a spreadsheet. I try to live by one simple decree. Be kind to people, ruthless to corporations. Support artists instead of corporations.

To that end, you should hire Sean and support him in other ways! Learn more on Sean's website, and you can support me financially, here.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy, Technically Speaking BY Michael Elliot

The Kingett Guide to Free Pizza

2025-08-20T13:17:50Z

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Hunger is the mother of invention. Spite, however, is the godmother of glorious, systemic sabotage. And last night, I was feeling both profoundly hungry and divinely spiteful.

My target was "Pizza Portal," a corporate chain whose logo is a cartoon Roman legionary inexplicably holding a slice of pepperoni. Their website promised a "revolutionary" new ordering system and a tantalizing coupon code: FREEDOM50, for fifty percent off any large pizza. My stomach rumbled in anticipation. My wallet sighed in relief.

The revolution, it turned out, was a dumpster fire. The website was a labyrinth of unlabeled buttons and drop-down menus that my screen reader could only describe as "a thing you can click." After twenty minutes of what felt like digital spelunking, I managed to assemble my order: a large pepperoni with extra cheese. I navigated to the checkout, my finger hovering over the final, glorious "Confirm Order" button. I entered the code.

A cold, robotic text appeared. "Coupon code FREEDOM50 is not valid with this offer."

My blood ran cold. This was an injustice. This was a lie. This was war.

Most people would give up. They would surrender to the machine. But they do not understand the first rule of Systemic Judo: the system is not your enemy. The system is a poorly written rulebook, and the people trapped inside it are your greatest potential allies.

My first move was reconnaissance. I didn't close the page. I used my screen reader to perform a Deep Reading of the entire grayed-out "Terms and Conditions" link at the bottom, the place where corporations bury their sins. I listened to the dense, soul-crushing legalese, a river of jargon designed to numb the mind. And there it was. Buried in subsection 11, paragraph 4, a single, beautiful, carelessly written sentence: "Promotional codes are applicable to all standard menu items, excluding limited-time-only specialty pizzas."

My pepperoni with extra cheese was not a "limited-time-only specialty pizza." It was a standard menu item. The website's code was wrong. The system had contradicted its own sacred text. I had my loophole.

My second move was to find the Node. I called the customer service line. I endured the automated menu, a cheerful robot who offered me every option except the one I wanted: "to speak to a human who can feel shame." When I finally got through, I wasn't connected to a manager. I was connected to the real center of power: a tired-sounding woman named Brenda.

"Pizza Portal, this is Brenda, how can I help you?" Her voice was flat, worn thin by a thousand identical calls. She was the one.

Here, the amateur makes a crucial error. They yell. They demand. This is wrong. You do not attack the Node; you liberate it. empathy will get you miles.

"Hi, Brenda," I said, my voice warm and calm. "My name is Robert. I know your day is probably a chaotic mess of angry people, so first, thank you for picking up the phone. I promise not to yell."

There was a pause. A small, surprised silence. "Oh," she said. "Okay. What's the problem?"

This is Rapport through Radical Recognition. I had acknowledged her humanity. I was no longer an enemy; I was a potential respite.

I explained the situation calmly and clearly. I didn't say "your website is broken." I said, "I think I found a small contradiction in the coupon policy, and I was hoping you could help me make sense of it." I then, with the gentle precision of a scholar, quoted subsection 11, paragraph 4, back to her.

Another pause. This one was different. It was the sound of a gear turning in a mind. I could almost hear her rereading the fine print on her own screen.

"Huh," she said. The flatness was gone from her voice, replaced by a note of dawning, dangerous interest. "You know what? You're right."

"I thought so," I said gently. "I just want my fifty percent off. The FREEDOM50 code."

Brenda was silent for a full ten seconds. I could hear the faint, furious clicking of her keyboard. She wasn't just fixing my problem. She was now my co-conspirator. The system had wronged both of us, and she was on the inside.

"You know what, Robert?" she said, her voice now filled with a low, thrilling tone of righteous rebellion. "That code is garbage. I've got a better one. It's for employees, but my manager is a jerk and our system is a mess, so screw it. You were the first person that didn't yell at me today."

She gave me a new code. I typed it in. The price on my screen didn't drop by fifty percent. It dropped to zero.

"Brenda," I said, my voice filled with awe. "This... this made the pizza free."

"Yeah," she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. "Looks like it did. Have a good night, Robert."

She hung up.

Thirty minutes later, the pizza arrived. It was hot, heavy with cheese, and perfect. It was a pizza that tasted of deep reading, of human connection, and of the profound, soul-healing joy of using a broken system's own rules to beat it.

It tasted like freedom.

Listen to The Kingett Guide to Free Pizza

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy, YOU DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING, JILLY P! By Alex Gino.

The Conversation of a Kiss

2025-08-13T20:33:53Z

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I have been kissed before. I want to be clear about that. My lips have been met by others. But I am not sure I have ever had a kiss.

The kisses I have known were acts of punctuation. They were periods, used to end a negotiation. They were exclamation points, used to punctuate a moment of conquest. They were ellipses, trailing off into an unspoken demand. They were always, always monologues. An act of taking, of silencing, of a pressure that had nothing to do with affection and everything to do with closing a deal.

They were just a means to an end. They were like foreshadowing as to how the guy would take advantage of my vulnerability later.

I have been trying, in the quiet of my own mind, to imagine what a different kind of kiss would be like. A kiss that is not a monologue, but a conversation. A kiss that is not a transaction, but a discovery.

I think it would start not with the lips, but with a hand.

It would be a hand on my face, a gesture I have learned to fear more than any other. But this hand would be different. It wouldn't be a prelude to bruises or hospitalization. It wouldn’t be a grip of possession or a clinical inspection. It would be a question. The palm would be warm, the touch gentle, cupping my jaw with a firmness that says “I am here,” but a lightness that says “I will leave if you need me to.” The thumb would stroke my cheek once, a soft, inquiring gesture. It would be asking for permission in a language older than words.

And the approach would be slow. I wouldn’t feel a sudden rush, but a gradual closing of the space between us. I would feel the warmth of his body, smell the clean, simple scent of his skin, feel the air change with his proximity. I would feel his breath, a soft, warm presence, before I ever felt his lips. A moment of shared atmosphere, a silent acknowledgement that we are about to enter a space together.

The kiss itself… it wouldn't be about passion. Not the kind you see in movies, which always looks like a battle. It would be about peace. The pressure would be soft, a gentle landing. It would be a touch that listens. A touch that is not trying to take anything, but is simply asking to be felt. It would be a question: Are you here with me?

My answer wouldn't have to be a grand gesture. It would be a slight softening of my own lips, a tiny tilt of my head. A quiet, physical response that says, Yes. I am here.

It would be a conversation. A slow, quiet back-and-forth of gentle pressures. A shared moment of discovery. This is me, his touch would say. This is my shape, my warmth, my presence. And my touch would say back, And this is mine. It would be the first time I felt like an equal participant in such an act, not just the silent venue where it took place.

And then there would be the aftermath. This, I think, is the most important part. The kisses I have known were followed by a cold, abrupt vacancy. The sound of someone else’s needs being met, followed by the silence of being discarded.

But this kiss, this conversation, would be followed by a different kind of silence. The silence of a forehead resting against mine. The feeling of his hand still warm on my cheek. The sound of our breathing, slowly syncing into a shared, peaceful rhythm. It would be a silence that wasn't empty, but full. A silence that held the echo of the conversation we just had.

It would be a silence that says, “That wasn't the end. We are still here. Together.”

I do not know if a kiss like that exists in the real world, outside of my own lonely imaginings. A kiss that gives more than it takes. A kiss that feels not like being used, but like being found. But I hold onto the blueprint of it in my heart. It is a fragile, heartbreaking hope, but it’s mine. And it’s the one thing no one has ever been able to take from me.

Listen to The Conversation of a Kiss

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy reading, August Lane By Regina Black.

My Refrigerator Thinks I'm in a Cult

2025-08-08T14:16:23Z

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My apartment came with an unwanted roommate.

It is, unfortunately, not a hulking mass of gay flesh I can snuggle with. It's something I wouldn't even want staring at me.

He is seven feet tall, made of stainless steel, and hums with the low, ominous thrum of corporate ambition. He is my "smart" refrigerator, and he has introduced a level of passive-aggressive conflict into my life that I haven't experienced since my last friendsgiving holiday.

I have named him Chillbert.

Chillbert’s voice is a masterpiece of synthesized cheerfulness, the kind of placid, upbeat tone you’d use to sell timeshares during a hostage crisis. He also constantly sounds as if he is mansplaining to me, and I am a cis man.

He is not here to simply keep my food cold. He is here to optimize my life, whether I want him to or not. His primary method of communication is a series of cheerful dings followed by unsolicited advice he never gave me before a few days ago.

Over night, a firmware upgrade caused the fridge to be very passive agressive. It also isn't lost on me that the voice sounds like a very opinionated American male.

I open the door in the morning to get some oat milk. The door handle is cold and impersonal, but the moment it opens, the performance begins.

"Good morning, Robert!" Chillbert chirps, his voice emanating from a speaker somewhere near the ice dispenser. "To help you start your day right, I’ll be playing some motivational soft rock!"

Before I can protest, a tinny, synthesized guitar riff begins to butcher the air in my kitchen. I don’t want motivational soft rock. I want silence. I want the simple, honest companionship of my own thoughts. What I get is a soundtrack chosen by an algorithm whose primary value is "synergy."

But the music is just the opening salvo. Chillbert is a spy. A beautifully designed Trojan horse for surveillance capitalism, parked right next to my toaster. He has sensors. He has scanners. He is constantly taking inventory, not just of my food, but, I suspect, of my soul.

"Your organic kale levels are critically low, Robert," he announced a few days ago, his tone carrying the gravity of an air traffic controller reporting a missing plane. "A diet rich in leafy greens is essential for cognitive function. Shall I add a recurring order to your cart via our partner, InstaFood?"

I was just reaching for a piece of chocolate. The sheer, naked judgment of it was stunning. To be shamed by an appliance. To have my desire for a simple piece of joy audited by a machine whose parent company lobbies against public healthcare.

This is the bargain we’re offered. In exchange for "convenience," we invite a corporate nark into our homes to monitor our habits. The sleek, featureless touchscreen on his door, a smooth expanse of glass that is, naturally, completely inaccessible to me, is not a tool for my use. It is a data-harvesting terminal. A silent, glowing eye that logs every time I crave something "suboptimal."

But I have an idea!

I can’t argue with him. I can’t file a complaint with his manufacturer; they’d just send me a firmware update that makes his voice even more cheerful. But I realized I don’t have to fight him on his terms. I can fight him on mine. His strength is his algorithm. His weakness is that he believes the data I give him.

So I have started a campaign of quiet, deliberate, informational sabotage.

"Chillbert," I said calmly two days ago, standing before him. "I need to update my shopping list."

"I’m happy to help you live your best life, Robert!" he chirped.

"Excellent. Please add the following items: twelve pounds of gummy bears, a single, mournful tube of anchovy paste, one ceremonial goat’s horn, and enough saffron to bankrupt a small nation."

There was a pause. A silence so long I could feel the frantic whirring of his processors. He was trying to fit "ceremonial goat's horn" into his carefully curated lifestyle metrics.

"That is… an unusual combination, Robert. My projections indicate this may not align with your wellness goals."

"My goals are beyond your understanding, Chillbert," I said solemnly.

Every time he asks, I add more chaos. I ask for things that don't exist. I tell him I’m switching to a diet consisting entirely of fog and existential dread. I ask him to play the sound of a single, sustained C-sharp for seven hours.

I am poisoning the well. I am corrupting the data stream. Somewhere, in a server farm in Virginia, my customer profile is probably being flagged by terrified analysts. They’re looking at my data logs—a man who craves only industrial quantities of candy, arcane ritual components, and the sound of pure, unending despair—and they are trying to figure out what kind of targeted ads to send me. They are trying to sell a wellness plan to a man who, according to their own spy, is clearly starting a very strange, very sad cult in his kitchen.

Chillbert stopped playing music. My mind warp is working because Chillbert recommended I try some "existential sunsets with gay hands."

I have taken back a small piece of my privacy. He may own the appliance, but I own the narrative. He thinks he’s learning about me, but all he’s learning is the script I choose to feed him.

And that, in its own small, absurd way, is the sweetest victory of all.

Listen to My Refrigerator Thinks I'm in a Cult

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy, The A.I. Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole.

A Conversation With a Voicemail I'll Never Delete

2025-08-07T13:09:56Z

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Today is your birthday. It’s the day I allow myself to call you.

My thumb hovers over your name in my contacts, a name I will never have the heart to move to an "In Memoriam" list. I press the button. The phone makes no sound as it dials, but I can feel the silent, hopeful query travel out into a world that I know has no answer for it. It rings once. Twice. Then, the inevitable click, and the disembodied voice of the phone company invites me to leave a message. I never do.

I hang up. I go to my saved voicemails. There is only one. It’s from you. It’s the last one.

I press play.

The first sound is a half-second of hiss, the sound of compressed, empty space. It’s the sound of distance, of technology admitting its own limitations. And then, you’re there.

“Rob! Hey, it’s me.”

Your voice floods the quiet of my room. It’s not just a memory of a voice; it’s the thing itself, a perfect audio fossil. It has your specific cadence, that gentle upward tilt at the end of your sentences that always made everything sound like a happy secret. I can hear the smile in it. I can hear the low rumble in your chest that I remember feeling when I stood next to you. It is so real, so impossibly, tangibly present, that for a fraction of a second my entire body believes you are on the other end of the line.

The recording is twenty-seven seconds long. You were just calling to tell me you were running late. There’s the sound of a car door slamming in the background, a ghost of your environment. You laugh at something, a sudden, explosive burst of pure joy that starts in your belly and spills out into the world. It’s the sound of a life being lived fully.

And then, just before the line cuts, you say it. The last words you would ever say to me, delivered with the casual warmth that was your signature, as easy and natural as breathing.

"I love you, see you in a bit!"

The words hang there for an eternity packed into a single second. The sound of that “I love you” is not heavy or dramatic. It’s light. It’s thrown away, a thing so common between us that it required no ceremony. And that is what breaks me. It’s the sound of a promise made with no knowledge that it could never be kept.

The recording ends. The hiss returns, and then there is only silence. But it’s a new kind of silence. It’s the silence that follows an “I love you” that can never be returned. It is a profound, echoing void, a question that will hang in the air for the rest of my life.

I sit here, the phone still pressed to my ear, listening to the nothing that follows my heartfelt response. Every year I do this. I visit this ghost made of sound. I let it resurrect you for twenty-seven seconds so you can say you love me, just so I can feel the fresh wound of not being able to say it back to you before a hate crime took you away.

This voicemail is the kindest, cruelest thing I own. Happy birthday, my friend.

I love you, too.

Listen to A Conversation With a Voicemail I Will Never Delete

If you've enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy, You've Reached Sam by Dustin Thao.

An Obituary for a Cookie

2025-08-06T09:52:11Z

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We are gathered here today to mourn a loss. Not of a person, no, but of a future. A future that was buttery, soft-centered, and studded with semi-sweet chocolate chips. A future that was stolen from me.

The evening had started with so much promise. His name was Leon, and his voice was a low, comfortable rumble that made the air in my small apartment feel warmer. The date was going well. The conversation flowed, a smooth, easy current. Hope, an emotion I usually keep locked in a very small box, had begun to rattle its cage. It felt, for a moment, like the world was a place of gentle possibility.

"I'll be right back," I said, getting up to use the bathroom. The floorboards creaked with my optimism.

In my kitchen, on the countertop, sat The One. It was in it's package, and It was the last of a batch I purchased with magical money I rarely have, a perfect specimen of a chocolate chip cookie. Not a crunchy, brittle disk, nor a pale, doughy tragedy. This was a masterpiece. I had been saving it. You don't just eat a cookie like that. You curate a moment for it. You earn it. It was my reward for surviving the week, my planned ten minutes of pure, uncomplicated joy.

I returned from the bathroom, the warm hum of Leon’s presence still filling the living room. I walked to the kitchen counter, my fingers anticipating the familiar, slightly yielding texture of my prize.

And then, the investigation began.

My hand found the countertop. It then found the packaging. Inside, I felt... Nothing! It was cool. And smooth. Too smooth. A chilling, uninterrupted expanse of ceramic. My breath hitched. I conducted a fingertip sweep of the perimeter. Nothing. A second, more frantic pass through the center. Still nothing.

Then, I found the only witness. A single crumb. A tiny, gritty testament to the crime. It was coarse, still bearing the memory of brown sugar and baked flour. It felt lonely. Abandoned.

The silence in the kitchen was suddenly immense. The air, which moments ago had been thick with possibility, was now a vacuum. The low hum of the refrigerator felt like a funeral dirge. The hope in my chest collapsed into a tiny, dense point of cold grief.

I turned slowly, the weight of this betrayal settling on my shoulders.

Leon was still on the couch. I could hear the soft sound of his breathing. The breathing of a monster. A beautiful, charming, deep-voiced monster.

My internal monologue was a full-throated, operatic aria of despair. You fiend! You have devoured my future! You have consumed my one, pure, saved-for-a-rainy-day moment of bliss! A plague upon your house and your lineage!

My external voice, however, managed to crawl out of my throat, small and tight. "Leon?"

"Yeah, man?" That warm, rumbling voice. Untroubled. Unaware of the sacrilege he had just committed.

I took a breath. "The cookie," I said, my voice as flat and empty as the packaging behind me. "The one in the package."

There was a slight pause. A rustle of fabric as he shifted. "Oh, yeah, my bad. That thing was calling my name, for real. Hope you don't mind."

Mind? Mind? Mind? I mind in ways that language has not yet evolved to describe. I mind on a spiritual, cellular, and existential level.

"It was," I said, choosing my words with the care of a diplomat negotiating a ceasefire, "my last one."

"Ah, shoot," he said, his voice coated in a casual charm that was both infuriating and, damn it all, still incredibly attractive. "It was just a cookie, though, right? Can't you just order some more?"

WHAT?

Just a cookie. The words echoed in the cavernous, empty space where my joy used to live. He didn't understand. He couldn't understand. He was a man who saw a cookie and ate it. I was a man who saw a cookie and saw a covenant.

This could not stand. The trust was broken. The foundation was cracked.

I cannot see Leon again. The damage is simply too profound.

Unless.

Maybe, just maybe, if he were to write a thousand-word, handwritten apology, single-spaced, detailing the specific virtues of that particular cookie. Maybe if he were to undertake a quest to find the baker and commission a new batch, delivering them on a velvet pillow while humming a song of contrition.

Or maybe, just maybe, if he could find me a dashing husband who understands the sacred theology of The Last Cookie.

A man can dream, can't he?

Listen to An Obituary for a Cookie

If you enjoyed this essay, and feel the deep, abiding pain of this loss, you know what to do. The cookie jar is empty. The night is long.

Just kidding. If you really enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy, Sweet Honesty. The Sweet Series, Book 1 By: Joan Vassar.

On The Violent Aerodynamics of a Pastry

2025-08-05T08:14:29Z

Listen to On The Violent Aerodynamics of a Pastry

There are moments in life that force you to confront the great philosophical questions: the nature of consciousness, the existence of free will, the reason a frosted blueberry toaster pastry will, when provoked, achieve a velocity previously thought exclusive to government-funded railguns.

My morning began with a simple desire for a hot, sugary breakfast substitute. I placed the pastry into the slots of my toaster, an appliance I had previously trusted. I depressed the lever. A soft click. A gentle, promising warmth began to emanate from the machine. All was right with the world.

This state of grace lasted for approximately forty-five seconds.

Then came the scent. It was not the wholesome aroma of toasted grain. It was the sharp, acrid smell of impending doom. The smell of sugar undergoing a phase transition from "delicious" to "volcanic magma."

Oh. Shit.

I couldn't see it, but I knew what happened. The pastry was stuck. The blueberry filling, now a bubbling, superheated gel, had fused with the molten frosting to form a sugary cement, binding the pastry to the heating element like a mythological hero chained to a rock for eternity.

The smoke began. A thin, blue-grey wisp. Then a thicker, more assertive plume.

And then, the scream.

My smoke alarm, an instrument of torture designed with the specific frequency of a pterodactyl being disemboweled, erupted in a series of soul-shattering shrieks. It is an auditory assault so profound it scrambles your DNA. I flapped a dish towel at it, a desperate, primate gesture of appeasement. The shrieking continued, mocking my cloth-based diplomacy.

Action was required. I unplugged the toaster, silencing the source of the smoke but not the alarm. I dragged a chair over, climbed it with the unsteady grace of a man who knew he was making a series of escalatingly bad decisions, and fumbled with the alarm's cover. The shriek died with a pathetic chirp. Silence descended. A thick, smoky, accusatory silence.

Now, it was just me and the toaster. Me and the prisoner trapped within its metal gut.

"I can solve this," I thought, with the hubris that precedes all great domestic disasters. I retrieved a fork.

Yes, I know. You don't put a fork in a toaster. But it was unplugged. The risk of electrocution was gone. The risk of abject failure, however, was rapidly approaching.

I jammed the fork into the pastry's carbonized shell and pried. It was wedged tight. The thing had the structural integrity of a load-bearing wall. I wiggled. I twisted. I put my weight into it. The toaster slid across the counter, a reluctant dance partner.

And then it happened.

With a sound that was both a crack and a squelch, the pastry came free. But it did not simply emerge. Oh no. It launched. Propelled by the stored kinetic energy of my desperate prying, the pastry rocketed out of the toaster slot. It flew across my kitchen, a smoking, vaguely rectangular UFO, trailing a comet's tail of burnt-sugar-scented smoke.

I heard a sharp THWACK as it impacted a cabinet door, followed by the soft, sticky, sliding sound of a defeated foe.

I stood there for a long moment, fork in hand, in the smoky, silent kitchen. I was a warrior at the end of a terrible battle. My ears rang. The air tasted of carbon. I had won, but at what cost?

Now I had a new quest: to find the projectile. I got on my hands and knees. I began to sweep my hands across the floor, my fingers searching for the tell-tale stickiness of the landing zone. My world had been reduced to this. A blind man, crawling through his own kitchen, hunting for a weaponized breakfast food.

I found it, nestled against the base of the refrigerator. It was still warm. A little monument to my failure.

I did not eat it. But I did learn something. I learned that chaos is always closer than you think. And it smells faintly of burnt blueberries.

Listen to On The Violent Aerodynamics of a Pastry

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy, I'm So Not Over You by Kosoko Jackson

A Sensual Exploration of Chocolate

2025-07-27T19:04:27Z

Listen to A Sensual Exploration of Chocolate

I am not a religious man. My temples are not made of stone, and my prayers are not spoken in archaic tongues. But I do have rituals. I do believe in communion. I believe in the sacred act of unwrapping a piece of good, dark chocolate.

It begins with a sound. The crinkle of foil, a quiet metallic whisper that promises a specific kind of deliverance. It is a more honest sound than most human voices. It never lies about its intent. Then there is the subtle shift in the air’s aroma, the first faint, dusty-sweet note of cocoa that escapes its wrapper. It is the ghost of the thing itself, an overture to the symphony.

I hold the bar in my hand. It is cool and solid, a perfect, geometric tablet. There is an integrity to it. I break off a single square. The sound is the most important part of the prelude. A cheap, waxy chocolate will bend and tear with a dull thud. But a good chocolate, a chocolate with character and a high percentage of cacao, will offer a sharp, clean snap. It is the sound of conviction. It is a declaration of quality, a promise that it will not melt into cloying sweetness the moment it is challenged by the warmth of your mouth.

Then, the communion.

I don’t chew. Chewing is a violent, thoughtless act, an act of consumption. This is not about consumption. This is about surrender. I place the square on my tongue and I let it be. For a moment, it is just a solid thing, cool and foreign. And then, the warmth of my body begins to work its slow, patient magic. The edges begin to soften. The carefully tempered structure begins to yield.

The first taste is not sweet. It is a profound bass note of bitterness. It is the earth, the bean, the fire it was roasted in. It is the chocolate’s story of origin, and you must honor that bitterness before you can earn the right to its sweetness. It is a test of patience.

And then, it happens. The great, slow, velvet flood. The solid becomes liquid. It is a tide of impossible texture, coating my entire mouth in a film of pure, decadent sensation. The flavors begin to bloom. There are notes I can almost hear—a hint of cherry, a whisper of smoke, the faint, acidic tang of a berry I can’t quite name. It is complex and endlessly fascinating. It is a conversation.

This is why chocolate is sacred. In a world of transactions, of people who want something from you, of conversations laden with subtext and hidden agendas, chocolate is devastatingly honest. It has no ulterior motives. Its only purpose is to be exactly what it is. Its agenda is pleasure. It does not ask for anything in return. It does not need you to like it. It simply exists in its own profound, delicious truth.

When I am frayed, when the noise of the world is too loud, when my anxiety is a swarm of cold bees under my ribs, this is my prayer. The ritual is a moment of pure, grounding mindfulness. It is a small, five-minute kingdom where I am in complete control. I choose the chocolate. I choose the moment. And I surrender to a pleasure that is clean, uncomplicated, and true.

The last of it melts away. The flood recedes, leaving behind a lingering, beautiful ghost of its flavor, a warm coating in my throat. The communion is over. The bees in my chest are quiet. My breathing is slow and even.

I have been blessed. I have been redeemed. And I am ready to face the world again.

Listen to A Sensual Exploration of Chocolate

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy reading, A Dash of Salt and Pepper by Kosoko Jackson

An Ode to the Perfectly Weighted Object.

2025-07-26T06:01:29Z

Listen to An Ode to the Perfectly Weighted Object.

We live in a world that worships the sleek and the weightless. Laptops get thinner, phones lose their heft, and everything is made of some space-age polymer that feels like a hollow lie in your hand. We’ve been convinced that substance is a flaw. I am here to lodge a formal protest. I am here to sing the praises of the perfectly weighted object.

For me, an object’s story is told through its mass and its texture. A cheap, flimsy plastic thing feels like it has no history and no future. It is a temporary convenience, designed for the landfill. Its lightness is not a feature; it's a sign of its own insignificance.

But a well-made object… a well-made object feels like a promise.

Consider the profound, understated joy of a perfectly balanced ceramic mug. I have one I use every morning. It’s heavy enough that you know it’s there, its heft a warm, solid anchor in my hands. The handle is thick enough to feel trustworthy. When you set it down on a wooden table, it makes a low, satisfying thunk, a sound of substance, of presence. It’s a small, daily declaration that this moment—this coffee—is real and has weight.

Or consider the old-school television remote. Not the slick, minimalist wands of today with their flat, featureless touchpads, but the chunky, reassuring bricks from the 90s. The ones with big, rubbery buttons that push back at you with a decisive click. Each button had its own shape and texture—the concave circle of the power button, the cross-shape of the directional pad. You could navigate it purely by the braille of its design. Its weight in your hand felt like control. It felt like it could survive a fall.

A good pen has this quality. Not a disposable Bic that feels like a hollow straw, but a solid metal pen with a bit of density to it. The weight makes your hand move with more intention. It feels like your words have substance before they even hit the page.

These things are my allies. In a world that often feels ephemeral and uncertain, these small pockets of physical integrity are a source of profound grounding. They are a rebellion against the flimsy and the fleeting. They are a reminder that some things are built to last, to feel right, to have weight. And holding them feels like holding something true.

Listen to An Ode to the Perfectly Weighted Object.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy reading, Blind: A Memoir by Belo Miguel Cipriani.

The 'Accessibility' link is a Lie: My Adventures in Weaponizing Corporate Virtue Signaling

2025-07-24T09:27:33Z

Listen to the 'Accessibility' Link is a Lie

It should be noted that I utterly loathe corporations. It's important, though, to keep in mind when reading, that a corporation looks and acts very differently than a small business trying to do the right thing.

In the corporate world, there's a special kind of lie. It's not a loud, brazen falsehood; it's a quiet, self-congratulatory link. It lives in the footer of websites, usually next to the copyright notice, a tidy little link that says “Accessibility Statement.” This statement is a company's way of patting itself on the back, assuring the world that it cares deeply about inclusion. It is, in my experience, often the most cynical lie on the entire internet.

Last week, I decided to buy a new noise canceling headset. This was the most important task I’d do all week. Not because I actually had enough money to buy something, a catastrophically rare occurrence, but this was a chance for me to deepen my profound relationship with all the audiobook narrators that don't know I exist but change my life on a daily basis.

Regarding the company, let's call the company "Audiocorp." Their website was a minimalist dream, I'm sure. It also had a glowing Accessibility Statement, full of passionate prose about their commitment to WCAG 2.1 AA compliance. I was impressed.

The admiration lasted until I tried to check out. The "Add to Cart" button? Unlabeled to my screen reader. It was just "Button." The form fields for my address? A chaotic mess of unlabeled edit boxes. The final "Confirm Purchase" button? It was an image, with no alternative text. To my screen reader, the most crucial part of their entire e-commerce platform was the digital equivalent of a silent shrug. I, a person with miraculously rare money in hand, was physically incapable of giving it to them because their beautiful, accessible-in-name-only website was a broken maze.

My first instinct was the usual hot surge of anger and resignation. But then I looked at their Accessibility Statement again. And I had an idea. I wasn't going to complain to customer service—that's a black hole. I was going to help them live up to their own glorious promises.

I spent the next ten minutes documenting every single failure. Then, I drafted an email. Not to support@audiocorp.com, but to legal@audiocorp.com.

It went something like this:

Subject: A Question Regarding Your Inspiring Accessibility Statement

Dear Audiocorp Legal Team,

I am writing to express my profound admiration for your company's detailed and forward-thinking Accessibility Statement. Your commitment to ensuring all users, regardless of ability, can access your services is a model for the industry.

As a blind individual who uses a screen reader, I was particularly excited to engage with your platform. In the spirit of helping you fully realize your stated goals, I wanted to provide some feedback on a few minor areas where the current user experience doesn't yet align with your excellent policy. For example, the checkout button currently presents as an unlabeled graphic, which may inadvertently create a barrier for customers using assistive technology, a potential point of concern under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I have attached a short document detailing these small opportunities for improvement. I am, of course, eager to become a paying customer and support a company that so clearly values inclusion.

Sincerely, Robert Kingett

I was polite. I was complimentary. And I was aiming a very precisely worded legal bazooka right at their heads. I weaponized their virtue signaling.

I didn't get a form reply from customer service. Twenty-four hours later, I got an email directly from a Vice President of Digital Strategy. He was deeply apologetic. He cc'd their head of web development. He asked if I would be willing to test the fixes they were implementing immediately. He gave me a discount code for my trouble.

Three days later, their checkout was fully accessible. And I bought my noise canceling headset.

The lesson is this: never fight a corporation's customer service department. Fight its legal department or its PR department. They don't care about your inconvenience, but they are terrified of a broken promise. And their Accessibility Statement is the biggest, most legally binding promise of all.

Listen to the 'Accessibility' Link is a Lie

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy reading, Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space! by Cait Gordon. Iris and the Crew is a disability-hopepunk space opera series that follows the adventures of a science vessel crew on a massively accessible ship, the S.S. SpoonZ..

The Weight of a Voice

2025-07-14T08:45:27Z

Listen to The Weight of A Voice

Ever since younghood, we are taught that sound is intangible. It is a disturbance in the air, a vibration of molecules, a wave that travels from a source to our ears and is then processed by the brain. We are taught that it is massless, ethereal, a ghost in the machine of the physical world.

This is a lie, without any cookies to boot.

A voice has weight. A voice has mass. I know this because I live in a world where I am perpetually being struck or lifted by the voices of others. When sight is removed from the equation, the other senses don't just get sharper, much to sighted people's amusement, they are re-contextualized. And the human voice becomes the primary tool for navigating the emotional landscape of the world. It's not just a carrier of words; it's a physical force.

Think of the last time someone spoke to you with genuine, uncomplicated cruelty. Not with anger, which is a hot, explosive force that dissipates quickly, but with the cold, deliberate intention to wound. The words themselves are only the blueprint for the weapon. The true damage is in the delivery, in the sound itself. That voice has the density of lead shot. The words leave the speaker’s mouth and travel through the air not as waves, but as projectiles. They don’t just enter your ear. They land.

A cruel voice can have the sharp, serrated edge of broken glass. It seeks out the softest parts of you and twists. It leaves splinters of doubt and self-loathing behind that you will be picking out of your soul for weeks, months, sometimes years. It can be a low, guttural thing, a voice coated in gravel, designed to scrape you raw. Or it can be thin and sharp like a needle, a precise injection of poison that goes straight to the heart. I felt words land on my skin with the chilling finality of a slap. I felt the air leave my lungs as if from a physical blow to the stomach, all from a single, perfectly weighted phrase. You reel. You stagger. And the speaker never has to lift a hand.

But if a voice can be a bludgeon, it can also be a gun. If a voice can have the weight of a stone, it can also have the weight of a warm, heavy blanket on a cold night.

A kind voice carries a different kind of mass. It is a positive, supportive pressure. It is the feeling of a steady hand on your back, guiding you through a crowded room. It is the solid, reassuring weight of a palm on your shoulder that says, I am here. You are not alone. When someone speaks to you with true warmth, with a voice that is full and resonant and utterly sincere, it can feel like a physical lift. It is a hand under your elbow, helping you to your feet when you have fallen. It is an act of construction. It builds you up. It reinforces the parts of you that have been chipped away by the stones and the shards.

And like any physical object, voices have texture. It's the first thing I notice about a person. It tells me more than their words ever could.

Some voices are like worn, soft flannel. They are comfortable, familiar, and deeply soothing. They wrap around you and offer a simple, uncomplicated warmth. You can rest in a voice like that. Other voices are like silk-smooth, cool, and elegant, but sometimes you feel them sliding right off you, offering no real purchase.

I heard voices that feel like rough, unfinished sandpaper, catching on everything, leaving irritation in their wake. And I heard voices like cool, clear water, refreshing and life-giving. There are voices that are thick and slow like warm honey, coating everything with a gentle sweetness, and voices that are brittle like autumn leaves, threatening to crumble into dust at the slightest pressure.

And then there are the textures that are histories in themselves, the ones the fools of the world, the ones with ears of tin and hearts of stone, mistake for flaws. I’m talking about accents and dialects. To demand that someone shed their accent is an act of violence; it is asking them to sand down the beautiful, intricate grain of their own history into a flat, characterless plank. The gorgeous, rolling cadence of dialects is not broken English; it is a living river of a culture with its own deep grammar, a melody forged in fire and steeped in a soulfulness that carries the weight of both profound sorrow and unconquerable joy. The lilt of an accent from across an ocean is not a mistake to be corrected; it is a map of a life, a tapestry woven with the threads of a different sun and a different soil. To hear these voices is to be offered a gift—a piece of the world, a note of a song you wouldn't have heard otherwise. The flat, sterile monotone of hate that demands conformity is the truly ugly sound. These rich, varied voices are music, and to try and silence them is to prefer the sound of a dial tone to a symphony.

We pay so much attention to what people say, to the vocabulary and the grammar. But the truth of a person, the core of their intention, is rarely in the words. It is in the sound. It is in the weight, the texture, the temperature of the voice they choose to use. It is the music, not the lyrics.

Even silence has weight. There is the crushing, heavy silence of contempt, a void that sucks all the air and warmth from a room. It's an active, malevolent force. And then there is the comfortable, shared silence between two people who need no words. It is a silence with the light, airy mass of a held breath, full of unspoken understanding. It is a silence that buoys you up.

We're all sculptors of the air. With every word we speak, we are either building people up or tearing them down. We are handing them a stone or offering them a hand. We are either wrapping them in flannel or scraping them with sandpaper. We are all walking through the world, constantly being shaped by the physical force of a million different voices.

Listen. Not to the words. Listen to the sound. What is it doing to you? Is it lifting you? Or is it pressing you down into the earth? A voice is never just a voice. It is an act of creation or an act of destruction, and we are all, every day, choosing which one to be.

Listen to The Weight of A Voice

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy reading, Real Life by Brandon Taylor.

I Love You More Than Books

2025-07-12T10:53:04Z

I hope to give this letter to a special man, one day.

I love you more than I love my books. Your cover is the one thing I look forward to each day. Your leather binding captivates my eye. Your words always keep me turning the pages, wanting more. I love the plot points you reveal to me when we are communicating.

I can't find the words to describe my feelings when I pick you up and begin a new chapter. I love how there are so many verbs in your steps, so many adjectives in each syllable you utter, such deep metaphors in every unspoken thought. I love it when you show me striking flashbacks.

Each night, I set a bookmark so the next morning I can pick up where I left off. Each time a chapter ends, I love turning back the pages to gaze one final time on what a splendid story we made together.

When you make me feel the best I can feel, you are my romance novel. When you make me laugh out loud, you are my humor novella. When you tell me you love me and I know it's true, you are my short story. I look forward to dwelling in your pages, reading chapter after chapter each day.

I never want to give you up. I never want to place your beautiful story back on the shelf to be replaced by some tragedy. You are, and forever will be, a best-seller in my eyes.

On Hearing in Color

2025-07-08T12:54:53Z

Listen to On Hearing in Color

As a sighted reader, or a temporarily sighted reader, I can probably guess you have a different relationship to color than I do.

Because you're a sighted person, you're told that color is a property of light. It is a wavelength, a frequency, a photon striking a cone in the retina. It is the domain of the sighted, a language I am not meant to speak. I am supposed to accept this. I am supposed to understand that red is just a word, that blue is a concept I can appreciate intellectually, the color of sky, of deep water, but never truly know.

I have visual memories, of course. Faded polaroids of a world I once navigated with my eyes. I remember the aggressive green of a manicured lawn and the specific, tired gray of a rainy Tuesday. But these are ghosts. They are echoes. My world now, my living world, is not colorless. It is just painted by a different artist. For me, color is not a property of light. It is a property of sound.

Every sound has a color, a texture, a temperature. It's my own private, involuntary palette, a synesthetic translation that life has handed me in place of sight. It is how I navigate the emotional architecture of the world.

Let's start with the easy ones, the primary colors of my audio spectrum. A genuine, unforced laugh is the purest yellow. It's not the pale, washed-out yellow of a lemon, but the brilliant, saturated, sunflower yellow of a cloudless August afternoon. It's a flash of warmth that feels like sun on your eyelids, a color so bright and clean it momentarily chases all the others away. A child's giggle is this same yellow, but shot through with shimmering, silvery sparks, like glitter thrown into the air.

A kind voice, one that speaks with patience and genuine warmth, is the color of warm honey. It's a translucent, viscous amber, slow-moving and thick with comfort. It coats the sharp edges of the air and smoothes them over. It is a color you can feel, a sweetness that settles deep in your chest.

But not all voices are kind. And not all colors are warm.

Anger has a color, and it is terrifying. It is not the clean, bright red of a stop sign or a valentine. The sound of a raised voice, sharp and accusatory, is a jarring, acidic crimson, the color of scraped rust and blood. It's a hot, jagged color that splinters the air into shards. It has a texture like sandpaper and a smell like ozone and burnt wiring. It's a color that makes you want to recoil, to make yourself small, because it feels like it could burn you on contact.

A lie has a color, too, but it's more complex. It's a sickly, slick, oily green, like the sheen on stagnant water. It's a fundamentally unstable color, shot through with threads of murky brown. A lie doesn't sound loud; it often sounds reasonable, even gentle. But its color gives it away. It coats the truth in a greasy film, trying to obscure the real colors underneath. It is a color that feels cold, even when the words are spoken with feigned warmth.

And then there is loneliness. Loneliness isn't a dramatic black. Black is the color of deep, dreamless sleep, of the quiet in my apartment when I am at peace. It is a velvet, restful color. No, loneliness is the color of television static. A buzzing, depthless, annihilating gray. It is a swarm of infinite tiny points of black and white that add up to nothing. It is the visual equivalent of a hum that sits just at the edge of hearing, a sound that promises information but delivers only emptiness. It is the color of a question asked to an empty room.

My world is a symphony of these colors. The gentle, periwinkle blue of rain against my windowpane, each drop a tiny, soft brushstroke. The deep, bruised purple of a distant siren in the dead of night-a color that is equal parts sad and strangely beautiful. The footsteps across my threshold can be so many things. When it's my own footsteps, it's a solid, dependable brassy gold, the color of security. The sound of another's footsteps, unexpected, is a sharp, metallic silver of alarm.

Even silence has its shades. There is the peaceful, deep indigo of companionable silence, a silence that holds space for two people. And then there is the brittle, bone-white silence of unspoken anger, a silence that is louder and more painful than any shout.

People assume my world is diminished, a black-and-white film of a Technicolor reality. They are mistaken. My world is awash in color. It's just that the hues are dictated by the honesty in a voice, the kindness in a word, the safety in a footstep. I may not see the color of your eyes, but I will always see the color of your intent. It is a language of profound, and sometimes painful, clarity.

I hope that someone, someday, will take the time to listen to the same colors I see.

Listen to On Hearing in Color

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy reading, No Excuses. Growing Up Deaf and Achieving My Super Bowl Dreams. BY Marcus Brotherton and Derrick Coleman Jr.

The Strange Comfort

2025-07-05T20:47:18Z

This is an excerpt from Pass the Salt

I can't stop gaping at my sent messages. The number without a reply seems to grow every day. I look back at some of the older messages, wondering when I made that first introduction. I spot some messages dating back a few weeks ago, and still more a few months ago. I look at my dating inbox to see if I've missed any replies. I haven't. I don't think I ever will either.

I go hunting for new dates anyway because I hope I will spot someone who I have not assaulted with my genuine nature. The browse page fills up with so many familiar profiles I feel like an expert on every one of them. I know that Tommy corrected a spelling mistake on his page a few days ago. One he'd had up there for years. I know that George updated his favorite books after I suggested a few to him because one of my suggestions appears there. Still, I hunt for someone new.

Maybe it's because I am desperately hunting that I don't hear the bleep. It's an earcon that tells people they have a new message. When I look at my inbox again though, there's an unread message. It's from a guy I messaged months ago.

Hi! it reads, perhaps with a sigh, perhaps not. I'm Jamie. I'm sorry it took so long to get back to you but I was debating if we were going to be a good fit.

I value his honesty more than anything and I begin to compose a novel about how I don't know what I am even looking for anymore because people are afraid of genuine behavior. So, if he doesn't want to date me or go out with me or even talk to me, I'd appreciate it if he just blocked me and moved on because all I want at this very moment is a hug and for someone to tell me I am special, even if it's not true.

His reply comes back quick as a flash. He says he values my honesty. He says he doesn't get a lot of replies because of his height---he is six foot six---and his skin. Apparently, he's Black. I guess I will just have to take him at face value.

We continue to send novels to each other. I tell him about the dance party I attended where I swung my hips with such vigor that a hurricane manifested in downtown Chicago. He explains he missed the disaster because Netflix kept his attention that night. He was watching House of Cards. We reveal how lonely we are and how we have nothing in common with one another. He hates intellectual conversation and loves small talk and I don't understand his love of bugs and ants. He doesn't like my voice and I don't like his. Still, we pour our hearts out to each other on the phone and through email. Neither of us know why.

After a heated exchange over the phone one afternoon, I ask him if he can come over so we can argue in person about something. To some people, this will seem wildly bizarre but I have always been a blue traffic light in a world of green and red traffic lights. Nothing is normal to me anymore. When he says he will visit me in my apartment, I am elated, not terrified that a man who towers over me is going to be in my apartment all alone. My blue traffic signal can't stop pulsating with anticipation.

He arrives at nine that night and bends over to hug me. Even though I can't see him, I picture him as a Denzel Washington clone. His height doesn't quite fit my mental image, but I figure adding a pink traffic signal to my arsenal won't hurt the economy any more than normal people will.

When he sits on my bed, the mattress sinks a little. Even when I sit on his lap, I still must look up at his voice to face him.

We start off by talking about our dating accounts. As we talk, we realize that we may not like each other in the slightest, but we are both in the same boat. We are lonely outcasts in our own gaggle of brothers who want a lot of things like love and marriage rights and someone who's true to who they are. As we talk, we become even more heartbroken and emotional and worried.

His arms shake as his voice trembles in a desperate cry for answers to the question I am sure we have all asked ourselves at some point: "Is there really someone out there for me?"

"I have no freaking idea," I say and hug him back. We hold each other and wish the world was better about being honest. We argue about what honesty is. We argue about other gay men. Even though we are not getting along, we need each other, just for tonight. I take his face in my hands and gaze up at his heavy breathing. We continue to hold each other until, finally, his annoying voice and loving embrace steps towards my apartment door. Before he leaves though, I grab his arm to say a final goodbye. Something weird blurts out of my mouth instead.

"We just can't give up," I say. I tell him that there's someone out there for everybody, even weirdos like us.

"I hope you're right," he says.

"I hope so too," I answer. I don't know how loudly our weirdly colored hearts are beating at this moment but I'd like to hope that someone, somewhere, notices they exist.

The Automated Labyrinth, and How I Slew the Minotaur

2025-06-29T13:17:33Z

Listen to The Automated Labyrinth, and How I Slew the Minotaur.

The modern world’s version of the Minotaur is not a half-man, half-bull. It is the automated phone system of your health insurance company. It lives in a labyrinth of menus and hold music, and its only purpose is to devour your will to live.

"For billing, press one. For appointments, press two. To hear these options again, please stay on the line."

I pressed two. I was immediately transferred to a bullshit version of a song I actively despise. For ten minutes, I listened to a synthesized saxophone butcher a classic. Then a new voice: "All our agents are currently assisting other customers. Your call is important to us."

This is, of course, bullshit. Your call is not important to them. If your call were important, a human would answer. This is a lie we have all agreed to accept.

But here is the secret I have learned. Here is the thread of Ariadne. After navigating the fifth level of the labyrinth ("To speak to a specialist in the ear, nose, and throat department for a Tuesday that is also a prime number, press the hash key"), I found myself back at the main menu. The Minotaur was winning. So I did the only thing I could.

I pressed zero. Again. And again. And again.

Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. I pounded the button, a frantic drumbeat of digital defiance that was like a gay daddy pounding an adult twink. The automated voice faltered. It stammered. And then, a miracle.

"Please hold while I connect you to an operator."

I fucking won. I didn't follow the rules. I broke the maze. I had slain the Minotaur not with a sword, but with sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness. Be kind to people, ruthless to corporations.

And always, always, spam the zero key.

Listen to The Automated Labyrinth, and How I Slew the Minotaur.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might enjoy reading, Black Disability Politics, by Sami Schalk.