11. distortions

“When the suffering is subtracted from joy, what remains?” – Jonathon Safran Foer

6. Steve Clark

Layla looked over her newborn baby and thought:

When I was younger, we had a boy in our class who was handicapped. He had walked with a strange limp because of an accident when he was younger (or so they say). I felt sorry for him because he didn’t have any friends. Most kids avoided him because they thought they might catch whatever he had. A part of me wanted to keep him company, but I knew better than that. If I associated with him, they would treat me the same way. So I did what everyone else did: ignored him…

Maybe this is my punishment for my actions then.

“Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”- Chuck Palahniuk

4. Resonance can break glass

I didn’t want to wake up from my dream. The perfect dream that I had envisioned since I was a young girl. The perfect dream that I had when I married Tom 2 years ago. I thought life was going to be exactly as I had seen it in my dreams. I never expected this to happen. What did I do to deserve this? I was good person. I gave to the poor, I helped everyone in need. Why was I being punished? Why me? I can’t accept that thing as my so called baby. I refuse to accept it. It’s not mine. It never will be mine. I don’t care what the doctors say, that can’t possibly be human…

When I was five, I broke my mother’s favorite wine glass. At first, she was very angry and upset. I felt terrible about it, I apologized again and again. I thought it was the wine glass she was upset about. Instead she said to me “Oh honey, a wine glass is a simple thing. I don’t know what I would do to myself if something has happened to you.”

To this day, I rewind the glass crashing into the hard wood floor. Thousands of little fragments of glass scattered everywhere.

The American Dream House