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Category Archives: Fiction

Flash Fiction: Samhain

March 26, 2025 – 10:45 am
Posted in Anxiety, creativity, Depression, Fiction, grief, Uncategorized, writing
Tagged alienation, anxiety, depression, emotional, grief, life, lonely
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Today’s offering is a flash fiction story about feelings.

Difficult feelings, painful to acknowledge feelings, painful to process and face.

Samhain

A.C. Turek

I sit with Gail under a large oak tree near the sword booth. She twirls a red-slathered autumn leaf by its stem.

“Have you ever seen a leaf this huge?”

“It feels like we’re sitting in another Samhain cliché,” I say. “The fair, the witches, the pumpkins and squash.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “But for it to be a real cliché we’d have to get pomegranates and start setting out pictures of William Blake.”

I shift. “He’d like that except, there’s no trace of his spirit.” I’m not speaking of William Blake.

Gail looks down at her leaf, then up again, through narrowed eyes. “Maybe all that talking about it chased it away, or blocked your perception.”

That was not me. I’ve been stabbed. What the hell do you mean?

I said nothing at his funeral, and I should have. It’s a regret. Another knife-twist.

“I’m still so mad at him!” Gail says. “Selfish asshole.” She gets to her feet, limned in the green-gold sunlight. She gestures to the archers on the field. “I’ve gotta go hang with the boys.” With that she takes off, leaving me alone, my grief rekindled.

I sit here, staring through the bent bows, finely drawn silhouettes against deep blue sky. Death by suicide is not what people say it is.

A guy says something, chain mail glitters; Gail’s signature giggle strafes the field. It’s all very purposeful. A collarless dog runs past, brindled and skinny, barking after something. I push myself up to follow it, to find my own purpose, any purpose. I might have taken his dog, had I stood forward and offered. Had my offer had any chance of acknowledgement.

Two costumed knaves balance on a big log stretched across the irrigation canal, sparring with staves. Thick wheat grass cushions either end. A pony cart passes by, obscuring the contest for a few moments. The pony wears fairy wings, and the driver beams beneath her crown while a camera clicks all over them. It’s that literary dude with the long, gray ponytail, from the newspaper. The dog trots toward the pony, then thinks better of it.

A small commotion ensues at the balancing log. Laughter, rude words, clapping. The smaller man has fallen. His moccasined feet are sticking up out of the ditch, bicycling the air.

I realign myself with the dirt track ahead of me. It leads off toward the alley, edged by a weed-footed chain link fence. A faded wrapper hangs in a thistle. The air is flat and stale, and the dog has disappeared.

February character-beating

March 3, 2025 – 12:52 am
Posted in Bioplar Disorder, creativity, Depression, Fiction, Getting the crazy out, Maintaining Mental Wellness, Rapid Cycling, Uncategorized, writing
Tagged bipolar, bipolar disorder, creative writing, depression, fantasy, hero, manic-depressive
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Rushak as a Tree

Image: Twisted leaning pinon snag with juniper behind in the gloaming

Image: Rushak as a tree

It’s finally over. February. Having worked its foul, soul-crushing necromancy, as February always does, springlike weather notwithstanding, and launched me into March madness. Let the rapid cycling commence: Mania’s mental modifications to depression’s non-functionality, swapping every 24-72 hours, despite medication adjustments.

So … writing with bipolar. It seldom ends well for the characters. Pain and creativity go hand-in-hand with us, and we’re navigating these talus field crossings as best we can, but the process can be difficult. The main character/protagonist becomes the whipping being for all the angst their creator would otherwise expend upon herself. (Not that there isn’t plenty of damage left to be done once MC’s wrung out.)

The main thing I feel during rapid cycling is helplessness. The creative outlet for this is the writing, the story, my suffering hero, Rushak. He is swept along through the tempest, up, down and through, as my moods carry him (given the opportunity to write). My feelings of helplessness during these times are the main contributors to his lack of agency at various points in the story. Rush makes a decisive move, and lands afterward in a place of helplessness, and has a terrible floundering time getting out of it alone, if he even can. In an alternative universe, on a separate world, Lohar abides. He usually dies.

Hail to the suffering hero. Depression or mixed state is the time of his great helplessness, whether the scenes will end up in the book or not. If there is violence in me it will be wreaked upon him, or result in self-harm. Without him, I’m not certain I’d be alive.

A Scene of Peaceful Pools

December 21, 2024 – 2:13 am
Posted in Depression, Fiction, Mindfulness, Uncategorized, writing
Tagged despair, fantasy, lonely, mindfulness, nature, water, wip
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The river had dwindled to a series of pools connected by grassy land bridges full of wildflowers, broadleaf plants and blooming bushes. Each pool wore a different aspect. Most seemed clean and empty of thought, their blank surfaces rippling with each changing breeze. In some, a smoky murk obscured the depths in a fog of slow, swirling rumination. One sulked in stagnation and decay, releasing putrid-smelling bubbles. He happened on one pool that seemed to smile. Clear and shallow, it sprouted reeds and watercress. Pollywogs swam there, some small and lithe, others fat as toads, and all had hind legs. They clung to the reeds; their translucent, vibrating tails stirred tiny currents.

One of the pools, an inscrutable, impenetrably deep one, made a home for gigantic trout.

It was from this one, with what could only be a blessing from Iryla, that he was able to snare his supper. Yet it was this same pool, dark and sheltered, the greenery drooping over its banks, that stymied him, barring him from hard-won peace. For it was this pool that looked the most familiar. It was the image of the pool inside him, and he wanted to fling himself there and drown. The cool pool of despair. That it should be the pool to feed him was not even an irony, for was it not his despair sustained him? It was his despair that kept him sane on this walk through a life in which hope would be madness. He tried to share the thought with Drisal, but it only made his brother sad. He should have known this. For he was alone. Aershmela would mock such a sentiment. Cerel would have no patience for it, because he could not understand. Lara would listen and comprehend, but then she would argue with him that he did have hope, that hope was in the Duality, and that faith and hope would save him.

Only Theris would truly understand. Only Theris would not judge the observation as self-pitying. Only Theris would not try to fix it as Lara did; and only Theris would see the point of it without Drisal’s capacity to be hurt by what he saw.

He smiled, thinking of Theris, thinking that whenever he needed to talk to someone he could talk to his memory.

The fish was good. The breeze was gentle and the twisted roots beneath which he passed the night promised him no discovery.

“I know I have lost”

December 21, 2012 – 2:03 am
Posted in Bioplar Disorder, Depression, Fiction, Getting the crazy out
Tagged bipolar, bipolar disorder, fiction, Gilvaethwy, Gwydion, mental illness, spirit
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Clouds covered the sun through the window, and vague darkness depressed the room, crushed it down into a concentration of gloom and despair. I half-awoke and fell asleep again.

waters of lost souls

” I am named for the saint of lost souls,” I said, though I did not know it to be true. It felt true.

“It’s not ‘souls’, it’s ’causes’,” said Gwydion. “Has your mind exchanged ’cause’ for ‘soul’ for a reason? Are they the same? Or has a cause (a falsehood) been replaced by the truth of a soul?”

“I know I have lost, and though I cannot remember what I have lost, its bitterness and grief and self-pity (self-judgment) remain,” I, Gilvaethwy, replied.

“What is it you have lost?” asked Gwydion.

“I yearn for lost youth, the thick trees that promised eternity.”

“That is no answer, ’tis a complaint. What is it that you have lost? Do you know?”

“Affirmation and meaning through desire and satisfaction, desire and denial, rejection, confirmation of life, or devolvement and depredation of all that might ever have been important, in past or future.”

“Then how is it loss? Is it perhaps no loss at all, but merely an absence of something that never should have been. ”

transformation

“I know I have lost, and because I cannot remember what I have lost, perhaps my mourning is for something that never existed for me:

The becoming that never became.
The becoming that regretted itself.
The becoming of linearity to pointless circling.
The becoming of faith to utter confusion.”

“Do you know what you have lost?” asked Gwydion again, maddeningly.

“I don’t know. Perhaps because I don’t remember the loss, it was not loss,” I parroted, to appease him.

Then I surprised myself. “It was transformation.”

I awoke, bathed in the dreams of early morning, with the promise of wisdom regained. Sleep-clouded thoughts that fascinated so greatly, for whatever reason, that sleep was driven off by wonder or confusion. Before the crow of the cock, the spatter of eggs cooking in butter, the search from the ramparts.

Before the explosion in my mind that I could never see coming, the anger and rage and sadness; for happiness never lasts for me. Creativity and insight and temperance do not last with Gilvaethwy, like they do with Gwydion my brother.

I try to enjoy them while I have them, all the while mourning the certain knowledge that they will soon be gone from me.

Hunted

April 13, 2012 – 8:15 pm
Posted in Bioplar Disorder, Fiction, Getting the crazy out
Tagged bipolar, depression, dreams, fantasy, fear, fiction, spirit
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A loud thump startled him out of sleep. Not loud enough to relieve the darkness of his dreams with waking fears, but more to give a kind of substance to their stalking, nameless shapes. A sound of heavy treading, a clomp upon a stair.

He tensed, his heart beginning to race, but the sound faded even as he sought to identify it.

It was gone. No one had come. It mattered little. He had nothing to offer.

He began to drift, downward, deeper, beneath the sightless rock pools to shelter from the shadow walkers. They circled him, and began to merge. He smelled the dank green moss beneath his hands. He felt the cool breath of the beginnings of despair. And the sound came again, this time with a shriek, and a roar that drowned all dreaming.

It was the wind, he realized, coming awake, a storm wind lurching in fierce gusts from across forever. It beat the crumbling keep with angry fists, careened shrieking around corners and through cracks in the stone, roared overhead like a great beast with a cymbal-crash of battering wings.

A moment of respite, a settling, and then another gust slammed the wall, crushing the mortar like an enormous boulder from God’s own catapult, if such a thing could exist.

The surface against which he pressed himself, he could feel it shake, and heard a quiet voice nearby, almost a whisper, as if in prayer.

He thought himself awake at last, but the darkness remained as it had been. Except for the shadow stalker, which had either vanished or come fully upon him, in tides of pressure that squeezed and bent and twisted him, to flatten, mold or break him; unrelenting as the wind in all its myriad shapes.

All that sound, compressed in his head. Wind crashing skirl…silence.

No sound of whispered prayer. No one there, at all.

Only a grating and grinding behind his heart, the swells of wind, and the cancerous pressure of darkness.

Something about it…he had been here before. He had a decision to make, and quickly. To yield, or to fight it. To brace, or allow it to embrace and crush him.

But not to name it. Absolutely, no.