Raised by my assassin father to follow in his footsteps, this is the only life I know. I may be a killer, but I have morals—standards—and a line I won’t cross.
I only hunt those who are truly evil. The kingpins, the warlords, the traffickers. There are sick people in this world, people who don’t deserve to walk this earth.
But I don’t work alone. I have a small team that helps me get the job done and leave no trace behind. And they help with some other, more personal things, when there isn’t a mark to take out.
When my team and I are hired to remove Thiago Dellamorte, something feels… off. It’s not until I observe him that I discover the truth. Thiago Dellamorte is one of the good guys, and I have been duped.
Teaming up with him to take out the man who wants him dead should have been an easy job, but one look into his ebony eyes, and I knew I was in trouble. Will this Italian Stallion become a permanent fixture on our team—and in my bed—or will he walk away when the blood stops flowing, shredding my heart as he goes?
My house is a mausoleum no living person should ever have to survive in, but I do, hour after hour and year after year. Every day is always the same. I wake up, have a cup of coffee, and place whatever small glass trinket that caught my fancy the evening before on the shelves that line the walls. I do this with the same consistency that other people send good morning texts to someone they love.
When it all started, I had been spending my evenings immersed in the small things my mother had left behind, in particular her collection of perfume bottles, whimsical animals, and antique glasses. Every day, I would choose one and think that I could start a collection of my own, so I had the shelves installed. Over time, there was nothing left of my mother’s possessions, so I found new and beautiful things to add from small stores, art galleries, or trash bins throughout each day.
Eventually, there was no room for other decorations in my apartment. There were no books or photos, only small objects that were so beautiful to me that they seemed to come from another world. They all sat there collecting dust as I did on the subway when I went to work and came back every day without even the slightest variation.
Over time, I had grown accustomed to the screech of the tracks and the people selling sweets or asking for money, just as I had learned to tolerate the phones and endless chatting of my coworkers in the office. But in my house, there was nothing but the sound of silence and the strains of the world outside in the background. That was the way things were supposed to be: just me and everything breakable.
Sometimes people world try to get it, but I knew better than to let them. My door was padlocked, and the blackout curtains on my windows always stayed down. My home was everything I needed. It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer. It was the only place I could take my shoes off and feel my bare feet on the floor, the only place I could hear myself breathe. I always thought that I would stay there forever, as my mother had done before, until I, too, faded away into some final illness and turned into nothing.
But the city had other plans for me. I had become comfortable with my routines, and I never expected the change that came to be so brutal and sudden. It was my own fault. It was the middle of summer, and I had opened my bedroom window to let in some breeze, and I hadn’t closed it before leaving.
A storm started brewing during the day, and I watched it from the office without suspecting what it would mean for me. The winds were strong when I left for home, and by the time I opened the front door, the rain had started. I stepped inside and could immediately feel that something was different. Something was wrong.
A gust of air hit me hard in the chest, and I flicked on the light only to find all of the glass shelves and all of my precious collection shattered and broken on the floor. It didn’t matter anymore if the outside world got in, so I let the rain pelt in onto the rug and left the door open as I sank to my knees and clutched the broken shards to me even as they punctured my skin and I started to bleed. I heard myself breathe out in what was left of the silence, and then the tears I had never been able to shed came.
I lay on the ground with the destruction all around me and sobbed with every ounce of my being. I cried for my mother and the shadow of a person she had become. I cried for myself and the ghost I had turned into all those years I had closed myself away into a place only fit for mourning the dead.
Calla Smith
Calla Smith grew up in rural Colorado but now lives and writes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She enjoys continuing to discover all the forgotten corners of the city she has come to call home and dreaming up new things to try. Her work can be found in The Madrid Review, Livina Press, Pulp, and more.
The river does not ask how you fell in only takes you, cold and certain, pulling at your lungs like a quiet demand. Branches lean in, witnesses with trembling hands, while the current wraps your ribs in a tightening hush a language of weight, of breath stolen before it forms. You learn the sound of silence pressed beneath the surface, how panic blooms like thunder with nowhere to go. You kick, you claw, but the water is patient, and it knows how to hold. There, in the dim green blur, you meet the heaviness not just of water, but of everything you tried not to carry. And still something in you refuses to dissolve. A fracture of light, a memory of air, a stubborn, flickering yes you rise. You break through not into peace, but into ache lungs burning, body shaking, the world louder than you remember. Because survival is not gentle. It is the gasp, the trembling, the fight to stay when leaving would be easier. And yet you stay. You learn the rhythm again: in, out not just breath, but choice. You become river-shaped strong where it matters, soft where it heals, carving kindness from stone. And though the current still moves, though the depths still call, you stand in the shallows with something unbroken a quiet knowing that even forced under, even undone, even lost in the weight we rise above it all.
give me the large dose small doses of kindness are beautiful, yet sometimes are not enough;
surviving off of crumbs a soul can still starve—
i prefer large doses of kindness that last and linger on more than a single day,
i want do be drowned in flowers, trinkets, affection, compliments, and love;
i want to know i matter to someone else other than me—
i want to linger on the mind as a dream or a haunting crow, whose inky black feathers and eerie song bring no peace in accordance to how a soul treated me. -linda m. crate
