Cyanide and Razor Blades
A short story about being little at Halloween
Hello folks. This week I'm linking to something I wrote for another space here on Substack, the Soaring Twenties Social Club. This group of wacky artists have been creating their way through the pandemic, and I joined them quite a few months back now but had never yet contributed my own work. I shouldn't have been surprised by how satisfying it was to see it appear with Thomas' glowing introduction, nor how lovely it was to get this story in front of a new audience. And welcome to those of you who came and subscribed here after reading me there; it means a lot.
If you've been a subscriber here for longer than a month you've seen a version of this story before; I put a link to an earlier draft in my Medium some years back. This one, though, is several iterations on from that, and I rather like it now.
If you’ve been a subscriber here for even longer than that, you’ll know that I write a lot in here about childhood, about trauma, and about how we heal, or at least try very hard to. Besides writing, I also work as a somatic therapist, and I learn a ton from my clients nearly every day about how the healing gets done (and how it stalls, or sputters, or doubles back on itself, or takes great strides, or…). It’s really neat to be settling in to looking at fiction writing again with even more sense of how this all goes. And though it’s also painful at times, it’s also neat to be working on writing about my own experiences at last, through a fictive lens.
Easier to do, too, when the healing’s gotten a little further along.
Anyway. Please enjoy the story at the link!
