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Tony S.

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  1. Tony S.

    Open Air

    Tony S. posted new chapter in Still Alive, Dumbass

    When I knocked on Marvin’s door that late morning, it was Devon who opened it. He blinked at me once, then leaned one shoulder against the doorframe and gave me a slow, exaggerated once-over as if I’d shown up for inspection. “So this is happening,” he said, voice loaded with theatrical gravity. “It’s barely noon,” I replied. “You’re acting like I brought a corsage.” “It’s the energy,” he said. “It’s very ‘I made a reservation.’” From somewhere inside the apartment, Marv
  2. Tony S.
    Thank you so much!
  3. Tony S.
    Good catch! Sorry about that. Fixed!
  4. Tony S.
    The hospital lobby felt different the third time I walked into it, though nothing visible had changed. The same polished floors reflected the muted overhead lights. The same volunteer at the desk offered a practiced, gentle nod when I gave my name. The same faint scent of antiseptic and coffee lingered in the conditioned air. What had shifted was not the space but my posture within it. I was no longer bracing for interrogation. I was not here because something had detonated. I was here because I
  5. Tony S.
    The shift did not announce itself with triumph. It arrived quietly, in the way structural changes always do — not as noise, but as alignment. Lieutenant Somchai called in the early afternoon while I was seated at the dining table, sunlight falling across the wood in a clean, untroubled rectangle that had nothing to do with the week we’d just endured. His tone was different this time. Less neutral. Less procedural. “We have additional cooperation,” he said. The third man — the one
  6. Tony S.
    The quiet after a legal maneuver is never truly quiet. It is evaluative. For three days after the hearing, nothing happened in any visible way. No envelopes. No men lingering in parking structures. No legal filings with carefully restrained language. The river outside my windows carried ferries in its usual rhythm, traffic stalled at the same intersections, the elevator chimed on schedule. If someone had not been watching the edges before, they might have mistaken it for resolution. I
  7. Tony S.
    Legal pressure, when it came, did not arrive as shouting or threats. It arrived printed on thick paper with restrained fonts and the faint smell of toner. The envelope was delivered mid-morning, routed properly through the building’s front desk and signed for with the kind of bureaucratic calm that made it impossible to mistake for coincidence. I was at the dining table with my laptop open when the intercom buzzed, sunlight flattening itself across the wood in a pale rectangle that looked a
  8. Tony S.
    The new routine did not arrive all at once; it assembled itself gradually, piece by piece, until one morning I realized I was living inside it. I started texting Pete before I left the condo, not because he demanded it every single time but because the act of reporting my movement steadied something in me that had begun to feel unmoored. The messages were simple and stripped of emotion—Leaving now. 8:15 AM. Taking Devon to school. Or Grocery run. 5:40 PM. Central branch. No commentary, no s
  9. Tony S.
    By the second week after I’d started medication, the city had begun to feel subtly misaligned, as if someone were nudging its pieces while I wasn’t looking. Bangkok hadn’t changed—traffic still snarled at the same intersections, street vendors still called out over grills that hissed and smoked, the river still carried reflections of glass towers and ferries in long silver streaks—but my relationship to it had shifted. I noticed hands more than faces. Reflections in windows. The way cars li
  10. Tony S.

    Crossfire

    Tony S. posted new chapter in Still Alive, Dumbass

    Marvin didn’t knock. Not loudly—just three firm taps that carried through the condo while the news murmured from my tablet on the kitchen counter. I was still standing there with a mug cooling in my hand, the anchor frozen mid-gesture beneath a blurred still of a parking lot I recognized far too well when I went to pause it. I crossed the kitchen and opened the door. Marvin stood in the hallway with his bag still over one shoulder, hair damp from humidity, expression set into some
  11. Tony S.
    Friday evening slid into the neighborhood with its usual mixture of humidity and noise, the sky paling toward amber as the sun sank between high-rises, traffic bunching up along the main road while neon signs hesitated before committing to night. I realized halfway through tidying the bathroom that I needed to buy new toothpaste. I slipped into shoes, grabbed my phone from the counter, and headed out, nodding at the security desk on my way through the lobby before cutting across the drivewa
  12. Tony S.
    Dinner smelled like something Marvin had coaxed rather than cooked—ginger blooming in hot oil, citrus threading through garlic, steam drifting lazily toward the ceiling as if the meal itself had decided it wasn’t in any hurry to be finished. Devon hovered near the counter with a bowl balanced in one hand and his phone in the other, scrolling while very obviously rehearsing an argument he planned to pretend was spontaneous. “So,” he said, which was always a warning, “Scott was wondering
  13. Tony S.
    The feeling didn’t arrive with any particular drama. It slipped into my days the way humidity does, unnoticed at first, until I realized my shoulders had been tight for hours and my eyes kept drifting to reflections in glass doors, polished car panels, storefront windows—anything that might confirm or contradict the pressure humming along the base of my skull. Someone behind me. Close enough that my body cared. Not close enough to be obvious. I altered my route walking b
  14. Tony S.
    Dinner ended the way most evenings had lately: quietly, stitched together with small pieces of normal that felt almost fragile. Devon dominated the table as usual, launching into a long complaint about a group project that had apparently been hijacked by a boy who refused to label axes and a girl who believed calculators were “spiritually limiting.” Marvin listened with patient concentration, asking the occasional clarifying question like he was conducting a deposition instead of indulging
  15. Tony S.
    The darkness didn’t arrive all at once. It seeped. It moved the way water does when it finds a crack—quiet, patient, impossible to notice until the floorboards have already started to soften. The days after that night blurred together into something dull and colorless. Not tragic enough to alarm anyone. Not dramatic enough to demand intervention. Just… thinning. Each morning felt a little more drained than the one before it, like whatever part of me generated momentum was leaking
  16. Tony S.
    Saturday morning arrived in sensible clothes, the kind that didn’t demand anything dramatic of the world. Light pooled in clean strips across the floor when I opened the door to Marvin’s knock, three soft taps that sounded like courtesy instead of urgency. “You can say no,” he said, already holding up a thermos like neutrality could be weaponized into kindness. A small plastic container rode shotgun in his other hand. “Oats. Scientists insist.” Color crept up the edges of his ears when
  17. Tony S.

    Small Repairs

    Tony S. commented on Tony S.'s story chapter in Small Repairs

    That’s the thing with people who have depression or PTSD—admitting they need help and staying consistent with treatment are the most difficult parts. Kent is lucky to have Marvin by his side, but when the depression spirals, it can make him unable to see who’s there for him at all.
  18. Tony S.
    The condo had that after-hospital brightness even with the lights off—surfaces too clean, air too careful. The discharge papers sat on the dresser beside the boardwalk photo from 2016, me and my brother shoulder to shoulder, same stupid haircut, his grin already picking a fight with the lens. A knock, gentle, twice. The framed bleachers photo usually stands guard on the nightstand, two of us grinning back at the room; at the sound of Marvin’s knock I reached for it and tipped it gently
  19. Tony S.
    The dream came on like a siren that didn’t know how to stop. Heat that dissolves the horizon. Radios spitting consonants into the heat. The stink of cordite and camel grass. My squad strung out across a courtyard that wanted to be safe and refused. Reyes left, Miller right, Doc too far from both. I’m yelling cover left but the word breaks its ankle on the step down. A door blows and the doorframe becomes a mouth—red tracers like teeth. Vic-2 coughs and dies. Someone’s throat is a straw with
  20. Tony S.
    The nightmare didn’t wear Ken’s face. That was what unsettled me most when I woke. It left me in a street I hadn’t walked in years, heat clinging to the walls, dust and rot hanging in the air while radios cracked with voices that didn’t belong to anyone I could see. Someone shouted coordinates that came too late. Boots slipped. A body went down somewhere beyond a corner I couldn’t clear fast enough, and the certainty settled into me that stopping meant dying. I woke with my hands
  21. Tony S.
    The nightmare came quietly, without sirens or shouting, shaped instead like a stairwell that smelled faintly of bleach and wet concrete, the fluorescent lights flickering overhead like they couldn’t decide whether to stay on. My boots didn’t echo when I moved, which was what made me stop halfway down and look back. Ken stood at the landing above me with his hands in the pockets of a jacket I hadn’t seen since high school, the Rutgers hoodie zipped halfway like he had just stepped out for coffee
  22. Tony S.
    Morning came the way it always does when you haven’t really slept—too bright, too certain, like it expects you to participate. I woke to traffic and river-light leaking around the curtains, my phone still in my hand from wherever I’d dropped it during the night. For a second I didn’t know where I was. For a second I was eighteen again and the ceiling fan meant summer and Ken was down the hall making toast too loud. Then the condo asserted itself. Glass. Silence. Air-conditioning with o
  23. Tony S.

    Opposite Doors

    Tony S. commented on Tony S.'s story chapter in Opposite Doors

    Nope, different Marvin. Glad you asked! I may wanna put some stories in the same universe in the future but as of now this one is a standalone.
  24. Tony S.
    One morning I saw him again. He was coming back from a run, shirt damp at the collar, headphones resting around his neck. I was fiddling with the mailbox I still didn’t know how to open. “Hi. You’re not Thai, are you?” he asked. His voice had that careful city-English cadence that doesn’t trip over itself. “You’re new—across from me.” “Yeah,” I said. I held up the keycard like a confession. He smiled with his mouth first, then his eyes. “Welcome to the building.” “Thanks.”
  25. Tony S.

    Night Maps

    Tony S. commented on Tony S.'s story chapter in Night Maps

    I don't have PTSD but I do battle my depression and I want this story depicts that as best as possible.
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