As we read the writing featured in Capsule Stories Winter 2019 Edition, we found a story hidden between the lines of the stories, poems, and essays. What follows is just one of the many stories you will find in our latest edition.
Covers tucked snugly around her, she was warm from her bare feet, buried beneath layers of thick blankets, to the tip of her nose, burrowed in a flannel pillow. Deliciously content, she didn’t want to move.
I should have told her that I loved her more than anyone else in the world. But the words wouldn’t come out.
She felt so warm and so comfortable, as if the frozen ground at her feet was a soft feather bed inviting her to rest.
If she could choose one moment to exist in forever, this would be it.
Place helps shape our experience. We crave the places where good things have happened. We avoid the bad. The places where we hurt are chronic, and sometimes it’s all we can do to bear them, to live with them as they cramp into knots under our skin. Even as bruises dissipate, they ache.
This was the place they’d held each other close, spoken of their past and their future and where they had shared their bodies and their spirits.
“I’m here,” I told her. “Nowhere else.”
I begin to wonder if maybe the girl prefers it this way: immobilized, unable to tilt her head to look for a way out because she knows she’ll never reach the shifting clouds that her eyes are fixed upon for an eternity.
imprisoned in a moment, / confined to one emotion, / one driving passion
You should sleep now—forget the cold winter.
We only have to breathe slowly, close enough to death but not quite, and dream the cold away.
Get your copy of Capsule Stories Winter 2019 Edition here.
This blog post features lines by (in order) Morgan Russell, Raymond Sosa, Margot Nelson, Morgan Russell, Aaron White, KA Servian, Raymond Sosa, Lucy Zhang, Lee Clark Zumpe, Mark J. Mitchell, and Raymond Luczak.