psychological fiction
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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
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There is a phenomenon as old as myth itself: the fury of the wronged woman. The Greeks knew it well; the Erinyes, or Furies, primordial goddesses of vengeance, born not of love or justice, but of violated oaths and bloodlines betrayed. They pursued with unrelenting purpose those who had disturbed the sacred order – particularly
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~ A mother’s perspective. “He was never very good with ordinary women. Too intense, too dazzling. Women like that – girls, really, don’t know what to do with men who shine too brightly. They want safety, not blaze. Stability, not confrontation. And he…he was never built for mediocrity. I saw it in him early. The
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Survivor’s guilt is not some abstract post-traumatic affliction best quarantined in DSM footnotes. It is a structural response to a fundamental human experience: the proximity of death, coupled with the unbearable weight of continuing to exist. Non quia interfeci, sed quia superfui.Et hoc crimen nemo audivit, nisi ego. When you’re a child, and the one
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Some boys disappear into obedience. He didn’t. He just burned. They said sit down. He stood. They said blend in. He wore fire. Applause was safer than affection. A spotlight doesn’t flinch when you get too close. He learned to read a room like a script. Smile like a threat. Charm like a blade in
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He didn’t remember being sent away.He remembered the not-coming-back. The trunk shut. The room went quiet. A boy became a border. At age six, a child cannot conceptualise abandonment. Not yet. What they feel instead is dislocation—a wordless confusion about where home ends and why love must sometimes be scheduled. He was a weekly boarder.
Reade Saunders 