Why I Wrote This
The day began beautifully.
The stream was clear enough to count the stones beneath it. Sunlight reached all the way to the bottom, turning the gravel amber and silver. Dragonflies skimmed the surface. Somewhere upstream a bird kept repeating the same bright sentence into the trees.
The crossing looked easy.
The water was cool around my boots, the current just strong enough to remind me that rivers are always moving, even when they appear almost still. Every few steps a stone shifted slightly beneath my weight, and I adjusted without thinking.
As I worked farther from the bank, the water rose almost without my noticing. It was at my knees before I remembered it had been around my ankles. The current leaned a little harder into my legs. Once or twice I stumbled just enough to laugh at myself before finding my footing again.
The stones became smoother. The spaces between them grew wider. I noticed my hand reaching for balance before I had decided to lift it. It looked strangely distant, pale against the moving water, as though I were watching someone else’s arm solve a problem my mind had not yet recognized.
I kept going. The river was beautiful.
Then I tumble.
Rocks slam into my ribs. My shoulder cracks against stone. My hip scrapes along the bottom. Bruises bloom fast under the skin, dark and hot, spreading like ink in cold water. The world turns over and over — sky, water, gravel, sky again. I can’t tell which way is up. Cold fills my mouth. My lungs burn. Every time I try to right myself, another rock finds me, bruising deeper, knocking the air out again.
I am being carried downstream. Far downstream.
My hand is thirty miles away from the rest of me. I can see it floating there, pale and useless, as if it belongs to someone else. My body is no longer mine. It is just something the stream is using, rolling and battering and washing clean of whatever I used to be.
Time loses its edges.
I don’t know how long I have been under. The roar in my ears is the only constant. It drowns out thought. It drowns out everything except the next rock, the next bite, the next helpless spin.
Then, without ceremony, the river spits me out.
I wash up on a gravel bank, gasping, coughing, cheek pressed into wet stones. My body is a map of bruises. My hand is still thirty miles away. The water keeps moving beside me, innocent now, as if it didn’t just try to erase me.
When I finally reached the bank, the stream looked exactly as it had when I entered it.
The water glittered. A bird was singing.
The river had not changed.
Only my understanding of it had.
PROTECT
RANK
The High Cost of Misreading One of Your Own
RANK is a raw literary pack story about belonging, hierarchy, and what can happen when a group gets one of its own catastrophically wrong. It is strange, visceral fiction about the stories groups tell themselves and the price someone can pay when the story becomes more powerful than the person.
Inside RANK
Here's a look inside the book.
Preface
The new female arrived in a hard plastic den.
We heard the rolling metal before the scent reached us — tires crushing gravel, the sharp tang of brake heat, old rainwater trapped in the wheel wells. Then came the heavy tread of the large man’s boots, carrying with him a thick slab of outside air pressed tight around one unmistakable thing.
Fear.
Not the loud, spraying kind that turns every head and fills the air with hot piss. This was older fear, held fear — fear dried into fur, warmed again by breath, and carried deep in the bones.
The large man gripped the den with both hands because she was heavier than her frame suggested. The crate bumped against his thigh with every step. Air moved through its square ventilation holes in shallow, careful breaths.
The terrier mix hit the front wire first. He exploded into a frenzy of reports: arrival, female, wrong, female, wrong. His whole body snapped tight with every bark, back end jerking as sound tore out of him.
Box-Head came up behind him in silence. She planted her front feet, lowered her thick skull just enough for one lip to curl, revealing a single white line of tooth. A rule made visible.
The old Chihuahua king rose from his blanket. His front legs spread wide, chest puffed far too large for his body. His gums carried the hot scent of age and authority. His wet eyes held law. He had few teeth left, but he arranged them carefully, as though the entire pack still waited to be governed by them.
