introspective - Stories

In the Los Angeles summer of 1969, two straight men attempt to avoid Vietnam by deceiving the local draft board and pretending to be a gay couple. Their plans go about as smoothly as trying to keep peonies alive in Los Angeles.

Meet the Harding boys: Matt and his big brother Justin, their hunky dad Richard, and their fun-loving uncle Patrick.

When Matt gives his father a lavish vacation, it's meant to bring them closer -- but a secret plan to indulge a forbidden curiosity unsettles everything. An old passion reawakens in Richard, soon ensnaring Justin and Patrick too.

Sons collide with fathers, uncles with nephews, and brothers with each other. As the Harding men circle the same questions, the past simmers beneath the surface, threatening to redraw the boundaries of family, loyalty, and lust.

Set in April 1848, the story opens on a fog‑bound morning in San Francisco’s Wentworth Hall, where Julian Wentworth wakes before dawn in a house ruled by discipline and silence. The estate is grand but cold, shaped by the rigid expectations of his powerful father. Julian moves through his morning with practiced composure, though a quiet tension lingers beneath everything — a sense that the household is shifting in ways he cannot yet name.

Horrified, I jumped off and rode home standing on the pedals, moving like the wind. Mother took one look at me and had me lie on the couch with my shorts and underwear around my ankles. She tried to pull the splinter out, and I screamed bloody murder. Then she wrapped some ice cubes in a facecloth, hoping to numb the area before trying again. Have you ever had an ice cube escape its confinement and pause as if deciding how far it should travel? I now know that water seeks its own level, and ice-cold water is no exception. It found the perfect valley to irrigate.

The poem explores the truth that not everyone who walks beside you is meant to stay. Each couplet reflects on how people enter our lives, share moments, and sometimes drift away. The refrain “beside you” reinforces the theme of closeness that isn’t always permanent.

Begin Again starts with one coffee. That had been the whole plan.

Evan wasn't looking for complicated. He had enough of it—a life he'd never settled into, a house in Wicklow he didn't know what to do with, and a habit of leaving before anyone could ask him to stay.

Then he meets Cian, an Irish arborist who is steady, direct, and clear about what he wants.

One night becomes another morning, a spare shirt, and a man who won't pretend this is less than it is. The sex is easy. Letting Cian see him afterward isn't.

Evan knows how to leave before anyone matters. Cian knows how much of that he'll tolerate.

Johnson Tilden was born with Laryngeal Agenesis, which is rare defect where the larynx and trachea fail to develop entirely or are severely incomplete.

Additionally, his vocal cords failed to develop properly, and he was thus rendered mute.

This became a big problem for him when puberty hit.

Under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Benjamin and Alexander built a life behind the word roommate. Afghanistan cost them the rest of it. Now, every evening at dusk, Benjamin sits by a river with the only photograph of the day he let himself be seen.

He kept the photograph. The river keeps the rest.

Seeing clearly what others ignore, feeling the weight of history, and refusing to lie to yourself about what the world has become.

Behind the Iron Curtain, Poland, 1983. The country is under martial law. This is not a war of armies and battlefields, but a conflict between the state and its own society. In a remote military unit, twenty-one-year-old Janusz is trying to survive the army, the system, and himself. Then Rafał arrives. What begins as fascination soon becomes something far more dangerous: desire, fear, tenderness, and a relationship neither of them fully understands.