Reade Saunders
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There are wounds that excuse folly. There are losses that explain frailty. But there are no wounds, no losses, no fractures that excuse betrayal disguised as virtue. The matriarch who has lived long enough to know suffering has no right to perpetuate it. She who has tasted abandonment, who has seen the chaos of divided…
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I told myself I was trying. That was the word I clung to – trying. A good house, a lovely baby, and a man who worked because he loved us. But each evening I felt the walls move closer, until I was phoning the police because the dark was unbearable. Hospitals too. I wanted someone…
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Each morning, they rose from the Father’s shoulders, ink-borne shadows against a paling sky. One carried memory, the other, thought— but neither ever returned unchanged. They crossed forests of silence, oceans that swallowed truth, and the trembling chambers of men who thought themselves kings. From their beaks fell whispers, half-formed, half-feared: fragments of worlds undone,…
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A curious paradox runs through the modern obsession with “boundaries.” On the one hand, the word has entered the lexicon of therapy culture like a sacrament, invoked with the reverence once reserved for virtues like patience or forgiveness. On the other hand, it has been cheapened, claimed by the woke movement as a shield against…
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I find myself writing to you today, on the evening of my birthday, with your manuscript resting heavily beside me. It is not a gift in any ordinary sense, yet it is a gift nonetheless: a mirror, unflinching, unsentimental, and – at times – merciless. I have read what you have written. It is, of…
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Every divorce spawns three stories: his, hers, and the child’s. Each is stitched together from fragments of memory, grievance, and hope. And each claims the mantle of truth. The father’s voice speaks of betrayal. He sees manipulation in every delay, every “maybe later” whispered down the line of a phone that never rings. He feels…
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Karen did not unravel. She was never tangled to begin with.Her life, like the lives of so many women raised in the shadow of grief, was tightly wound, controlled, cautious, curated. Her brother died when she was seven.She never spoke of it with clarity. Only the occasional reference to a surgery, to her mother’s closed…
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I didn’t expect him to say thank you. But I thought he might see what I was trying to do. I arrived early. Always do. Old habit from court. Always be early, always observe the room before you’re observed. The café was sterile, unmodern, one of those places that pretends to be warm but smells…
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There is a silence that precedes distortion…an eerie stillness, not unlike the hush before the hunter’s arrow finds its mark. In cases of psychological alienation, especially those born from maternal betrayal, the silence is never benign. It is structured. Operative. A veil drawn across the soul’s eyes. It is in that silence that memory begins…
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I thought I understood love. At least, I had mimicked the posture of it. I’d held hands, spoken vows, walked the straight line of domestic duty. I had smiled in photographs and stood still in kitchens with the weight of a thousand invisible expectations pressing against my chest. But when I met her, I realised…
Reade Saunders 