Category: Indie Authors

Sit in the Darkness

by Stevie Raine Elliot

I used to measure time in hospital floor tiles.
Three inches by three inches of polished, institutional white,
counting them one by one to keep the noise from coming back.
Because when you try to leave this world
not once,
not twice,
but until the paramedics know the turn into your driveway
the world starts treating your body like an unexploded bomb.
People stand at a distance.
They talk at you in hushed tones, carrying desperate, heavy armfuls of advice.
“Think of your future.”
“Look at everything you have.”
“You just need to get some sleep, pray a little more, try a little harder.”
They hand you platitudes like paper umbrellas in a hurricane,
wondering why you are still getting wet.
They didn’t understand that I wasn’t trying to destroy a life;
I was trying to stop an unbearable, suffocating noise.
I didn’t want to die.
I just couldn’t figure out how to live with the gravity turned up this high.
The dark isn’t just blackness.
It’s a weight. It’s a room with no doors, where the air gets thinner every time you try to explain why you’re hurting, only to be met with panic or a panic-driven lecture.
So eventually, you stop talking.
You pull the silence over your head like a bedsheet.
You sign the discharge papers.
You smile at the doctor.
And you wait for the next drop.
Until the night the room stopped spinning.
There were no choir lights.
No thunderbolts.
No sudden revelation written in the stars.
There was just a knock on the door,
and someone who walked in, sat down on the hardwood floor,
and put their back against the wall next to mine.
They didn’t bring a notepad.
They didn’t bring a list of scriptures or a self-help book.
They didn’t start with, “It’s going to be okay.”
They just sat there.
And in the silence, they did the scariest thing a person can do for someone in the dark:
They didn’t try to pull me out of it.
They just stepped inside it with me.

When they finally spoke, it wasn’t a lesson. It was an invitation.
They looked at me and said,
“You don’t have to fix anything right now. Just tell me where it hurts. I’m not going anywhere.”
And for the first time in my life… I spilled.
I gave them the ugly stuff.
The jagged pieces I usually hid under my tongue so nobody would get cut.
I gave them the shame of surviving what I had intended to end.
The guilt of looking at the people who loved me and still wanting to erase myself.
I gave them the raw, unpolished, terrifying truth of why I no longer wanted to exist.
I waited for them to flinch.
I waited for the recoil, the judgment, the immediate frantic attempt to fix me or call for help.
But they just listened.
They sat in the dirt of my mind and didn’t try to sweep it up.
They absorbed every drop of my agony without letting it scare them off.
They let my pain exist without calling it a mistake.
And somehow, in that quiet, non-judgmental space,
the air started coming back into my lungs.
Because hope doesn’t usually arrive like a lightning bolt.
It arrives like a trickle.
It arrives when someone looks at your brokenness and doesn’t ask you to glue it back together before they’ll stay for dinner.
They didn’t hand me a brand-new life.
They just fed me small, tender spoons of tomorrow.
Reminding me of simple, grounding things:
The smell of wet asphalt after a summer rain.
The sound of a favorite song hitting the bridge.
The way laughter feels when it catches you completely off guard.

They looked at me, really looked at me and said:
“Your voice matters. Not when you’re healed, not when you’re whole, but right now. In this mess. Your life is worth the fight, even on the days you can’t carry the sword.”

I am standing here today not because the pain completely vanished,
but because someone showed me that pain is meant to be shared, not swallowed whole until it destroys you from the inside out.
We have built a culture that fears the shadow.
We tell people to “reach out,” but when they do, we freeze.
We treat suicide like a secret, a scar to be covered, a shame to be whispered about in corners.
We put a stigma on the broken, calling them weak,
when the truth is, they have been carrying a mountain on their chest alone for way too long.
It’s time to break the silence.
It’s time to smash the stigma into a thousand un-usable pieces.
We need to stop offering quick fixes to deeply rooted grief.
We need to learn how to sit on the floor in the dark with each other.
We do not get through this by pretending the storm isn’t real.
We get through this together.
By sitting down.
By opening our ears.
By letting each other bleed out loud without judgment, until the bleeding stops.

So hear me: You are not a burden.
Your pain is not too big for this world,
and your story is not finished yet.
Break the silence.
Speak the truth.
Stay.
Because your voice matters.
Your life matters.
If you or someone you know is in a dark place, speak up, be vulnerable, and get the help you deserve.
The world needs you

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Fragile but not broken by Calla Smith

a person holding white calla lily flower in close up photography
Photo by solod_sha Content creator on Pexels.com

Fragile But Not Broken By Calla Smith

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.

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poetry contribution

Forced Under

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.
                               
                   ~  Cara King~
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2026 PAD Challenge Day 30

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2026 PAD Challenge Day 29

1

2026 PAD Challenge Day 28

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A pad challenge response from Linda M Crate

she believes in me
mother is the name
of God, the title of 
wisdom;
she is a guiding ship
and the port that leads home—

she is the lighthouse,
the womb, the friend, the
parent, and the authority;

she is a song of magic
too oft forgotten—

but she is patient, 
she is kind, she is full 
of effortless beauty
and charm;

she takes my hands any
time i have fallen 
and whispers to get up again—

she believes in me
and all of my strange dreams.
-linda m. crate


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A pad challenge response from Linda M Crate

whisper of your past
playing a game of solitaire
with a deck of twenty eight cards
is as wrong as me being here
without you,

i think of all the adventures we
should be having,
all the things we should be
or could be doing together;

always wanted you to be my sun
because i always knew i 
could be your moon—

but i guess
life had different plans
for us
than everything i wanted,

i thought i could be
your wife;
a beloved melody of a song
you could never 
resist—

turns out i am just a whisper
of your past that you keep
around to remember good times.
-linda m. crate


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A pad challenge response from Linda M Crate

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


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2026 PAD Challenge Day 27

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