I go out to the woods after dinner 
when the light is almost gone, 
and breathe in 
mulch and something 
from the farm next door 
I can’t name but know.

Two hundred yards in, 
the oak leans against the sky, 
wide and green-spreading. I’ve 
measured that oak with my arms. 
I counted that it took three of mine. 
I did this more than once. I'm not sure 
what I was looking for then, 
but I walked to it now.

Through the claggy 
Maryland clay under my feet, 
roots stretch 
past the neighbor’s cracked driveway, 
past whatever I thought 
was the end of the division. They feel 
for water.

Someone said, Weaver, I think. 
(I looked him up once. He's a prairie ecologist.) 
He said you cannot know the root 
from the visible plant. You can have 
similar species, but entirely dissimilar 
root systems. 

I read that, 
and my brother came 
to mind, the two of us 
at the same table, 
running around the same yard, 
and I realized how little that explained
who he had become.

So, I stand there, 
in front of the oak,
arms around my own ribs, 
eyes moving up the trunk, 
tilting my head back to see 
the crow way up in its branches.

The oak just stands there, rooted. 
It’s been here since before 
farmland decided it was farmland; 
residential divisions grew houses. 
What it became underground, 
where it goes when it goes deep down, 
I know I’ll never see.

A cardinal sings out. Light drops. 

I go in 
and turn on the kitchen faucet 
to wash the dishes; 
my hands doing that 
while the rest of me 
is still standing out there, 
my arms around the oak.

Author’s Note

John Weaver was a prairie ecologist. Decades ago, he cataloged root systems under grassland. He found something strange: plants that looked nearly identical above ground sometimes had root structures with nothing in common. He studied and wrote about switchgrass and bluestem. I know he wasn’t writing about people. I reread it three times anyway.

My brother and I grew up together. He turned out to be someone I have to become reacquainted with every few years. I used to think that was strange. Lately I think it’s just what happens when two beings share a beginning and their lives go in different directions.

I really did measure the oak with my arms. I’ve done it more than once. I’m not sure why. I think I just wanted to know something had a (mostly) fixed size, when so little else seems to.

Upcoming…

• A prose poem:

  LIGNUM VITAE, 01 August 2026

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Refer a friend

She cracks the claw
with her palm, not the mallet.
Some knowledge skips 
the hands of mothers
and lands in daughters whole.

Author’s Note

Near the end of September, you will get my scribbles every two weeks instead of weekly. To pick up the slack, I will send these poetry cards on the weeks I don’t post a piece. This card is an example of what you can expect.

Each card pairs a short poem or prose piece with a photograph: images from my own backyard and travels, or ones I found that perfectly complement the words. The forms vary: free verse, prose poetry, haiku, whatever the image and idea needed. Some arrive as just a sentence or two that refused to be longer. You are welcome to save them, pass them on, or post them wherever they might do some good.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

THREE WEEKS AFTER the funeral, I drove two hours north to a town I’d never heard of, to a door I’d found through a DNA site and a lot of luck.

I knocked. A man answered, late forties, my mother’s nose exactly. My stomach dropped.

“Daniel Marsh?”

“Yeah.” He looked at me the way you look at someone you’re trying to place.

“I’m Claire Hennessey. Our mother…” My voice broke there. “She passed last month. She asked me to find you.”

He said nothing for a moment. Just held the door and studied me.

“You’d better come in.”

His kitchen smelled like coffee and wood smoke. He poured two cups without asking.

We sat across from each other at a table with a deep scratch running diagonal across it, and I told him about the deathbed, the confession, the twenty years she’d known he’d been searching.

He listened. He didn’t interrupt. When I finished, he set his cup down.

“Can I show you something?”

He came back with a shoebox. Inside: birthday cards, Christmas cards, a few letters in my mother’s handwriting, her looping g’s, her habit of underlining for emphasis. A photograph: my mother and this man, younger, standing in front of a harbor somewhere, both of them squinting into the sun.

I picked up the photo.

“When?” I said.

“Seven years ago. She reached out to me.” He sat back down. “We’d been meeting twice a year since then. She’d come up here, or I’d go down. She never told anyone. Said she would, when she was ready.”

I turned the photograph over. My mother’s handwriting on the back: Danny and me. April 2018.

“She never told my father,” I said. “She never told me.”

“I know.” Not an accusation. “She talked about you a lot. She was…” He stopped, pressed his mouth together. “She was proud of you.”

I sat with that. The shoebox. The scratch on the table. My mother carrying a secret about each of us for seven years, waiting for some right moment that never arrived.

“She asked me to find you,” I said again, more to myself than to him.

Daniel reached across the table and set his hand over mine. Not like a stranger. Like someone who had been grieving her longer than I knew.

“She wanted us to find each other,” he said. “I think she knew you’d do it. I think she counted on it.”

Outside his window, a garden, bare in November, some kind of lattice frame against the fence. I thought: she knew him. She loved him and kept him, just differently. A whole piece of her life I’d never been given, and she’d taken it with her.

Except she left me a door.

And I knocked.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author’s Note

Some secrets aren’t kept out of shame. They’re kept out of a complicated love that doesn’t know how to explain itself; not yet, not now, maybe never.

This story started with a single deathbed confession and the question underneath it: what if the person you were sent to find was never actually lost? Claire doesn’t get the tidy grief she came for. She gets something stranger and harder and, maybe, more.

Upcoming…

• A poem about what grows beneath:

  ROOT SYSTEMS, 25 July 2026

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

One Hundred-Word Wonders is a writing challenge that highlights how stories can shine even when they’re very short. In the world of micro-fiction, writers create whole tales using only a handful of sentences.

These tiny stories prove how much can be said with very few words, surprising readers with the depth and feeling packed into just a hundred words. How can a story truly come alive in such a small space? Let’s dive in and find out.

Today’s prompt is:

SAY ANYTHING

1. Write a story, poem, or creative non-fiction piece using exactly 100 words. The title doesn’t count toward the word limit. To make sure your work is exactly 100 words, you can use WordCounter or any writing software you prefer.

2. Copy and paste your 100-word piece, along with its title, into a comment below. If you want, feel free to share it on your own Substack site or Substack Notes, and include a link back to this page.

3. If a response touches you, don’t hesitate to tap the little hearts in the comment section.

4. There’s no deadline for these prompts.

5. You’ll find my own response below.

Scales

She got it at twenty-two, three months out of the hospital. Left shoulder blade, curling toward her spine.

The artist asked if she wanted color. She said black. Just black.

Her mother called it a mistake. Her boyfriend said ugly. Her therapist wrote self-expression in her notes, underlined it twice.

Every morning she twisted toward the bathroom mirror. Checked it the way you check a door you’ve already locked.

At twenty-nine she finally told someone the whole story. Not a person.

She pressed her fingers to her shoulder blade and talked until her voice gave out.

It never looked away.

Author's Note

• Look for a new One Hundred-Word Wonders prompt every third Wednesday of the month.

• The next prompt will drop 19 August 2026.

• Check out other writing prompts from: : Justin Deming’s Fifties by the Fire and : Prompt Station on Writer Pilgrim's Substack.

Upcoming…

• Micro-fiction about a daughter’s quest:

  LOST AND FOUND, 18 July 2026

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Refer a friend

THE IRISES ARE open again. She knows this the way she knows her own name; before the knowing arrives, before the word, there is a pressure in the chest that says: yes. this.

She cannot smell them. That went first, or maybe second; the sequence has rearranged itself in the living of it. The doctor said something about nerve pathways, about the brain’s topography shifting underfoot. She nodded. She has nodded at a great many things lately.

But she remembers.

Not the way you remember a face already gone soft at its edges, a date, a year. She remembers the irises the way skin remembers cold water; it lives in the body, not the mind. The tall bearded ones along the fence, Immortality, the white variety, which was their name and the seed catalog’s earnest promise. And the deep purple ones her mother brought in a coffee can in October, planted in the dark because it was October and she was stubborn about timing and it was something that needed doing now.

That smell: powdery and green, and underneath both, something almost animal. Root-adjacent. You could stand inside it.

She stands inside it now.

Her daughter has been in the doorway for some minutes; she knows this without turning, knows the shape of that particular worry, and she does not turn. Not yet. The irises are open. Her hands know how to cup a bloom without breaking the stem, some precision lodged before language made its claims, and she brings her face down to the opened throat of one and breathes.

Nothing comes.

The nose reports nothing.

And still: the smell is there. This is not grief, or not only grief. It is something structural, bone in a body that has otherwise gone porous and wrong. She breathes again. Her daughter stays.

bell hooks wrote we cannot go back. But bell hooks did not have a brain that has decided to keep certain rooms locked and certain rooms open, in no particular order, for no legible reason. The memory of this smell survives here when other things (her daughter’s middle name, the year she graduated, whether she turned the stove off) do not. It is not fair. Nothing about this is fair, and also it is the only thing she has that belongs entirely to her.

The iris: Immortality. She doesn’t remember planting it.

The smell remembers her.

Author’s Note

This poem began with a question I couldn’t shake: what does memory keep when it keeps almost nothing? I was reading about retrospection and the mind’s selective time travel, and about what it means to make memory an instrument of presence rather than escape (including a poem by Diane Seuss that asks what memory can honestly be in hard times). Not a dwelling, she writes. Only instruction.

I kept returning to the irises. Immortality is an actual cultivar, white and tall, and the cruelty of that name against what dementia takes felt like the prose poem’s center of gravity. The woman in this poem can no longer smell her garden. But something held.

My sister lost her sense of smell and has dementia. I wanted to write about what holds.

Upcoming…

• July’s writing prompt:

  One Hundred-Word Wonders, 15 July 2026

  This year, every prompt will come directly from movie titles.

  For those who want a head start, this month’s prompt is: SAY ANYTHING. Write in exactly 100 words, a story, poem, or creative non-fiction in any genre, using the prompt. Pieces should be exactly 100 words, no more or less. The 100-word count does not include the title. Hold your piece until the 15th.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Two hundred fifty years since the ink dried
on words that meant different things
to different people even then.

They come. Have always come.
Suitcases carrying what memory can’t hold alone:
a child’s laugh, the shape of a familiar street,
the weight that doesn’t have a name yet.

Before ink, before ships,
before anyone called it discovery—
nations already here.
Lenape, Cherokee, Lakota, Diné,
ten thousand years of names for every river
this country renamed after its generals.
Nobody asked them about arrival.
They learned what it costs
to be declared strangers
on land your grandmothers are buried in.

	Before the suitcases, before the willing,
	others came in the hold,
	bodies the ledgers listed as cargo.
	They cleared the land, raised the houses,
	broke open the fields, fed a country
	calling itself free
	while calling them property.
	Their descendants are still here,
	turned away at voting lines that run past closing,
	counted in cells, handed textbooks
	that give them three pages and move on.

The Irish crossed when the fields went black.
Arrived hollow. Stayed. Built.
The Italians brought basil on their hands,
the memory of sun-warm stone,
and found factory floors, hard streets,
the long way in.

This is how a country gets made.
Not once. Over   …   and   …   over.
And now they are coming again:

	Guatemalans fleeing what no one here wants to see;
	Venezuelans who lost everything before they lost the country;
	Cubans who know what it is to be disappeared;
	Afghans who stood beside our soldiers
	and got a plane ticket and a broken promise;
	Haitians who survived the gangs, the collapsed government,
	the ground that opened under their feet,
	and were told their protection here
	was temporary, as if suffering has a deadline;
	Pakistani, Lebanese, carrying children
	who don’t understand why the door
	that was open
	isn’t anymore.

The government has a word for them.
Several words. None of them accurate.
Buses in the dark. Flights with no destination
anyone will confirm.

Two hundred fifty years of this same argument:
who belongs, who decides,
whose fear gets to write the law.

	We know whose grandmothers came through Ellis Island
	speaking the ‘wrong’ language.
	We know whose grandfathers built the railroads
	and got thanked with exclusion acts.

We know who built this country
before any of them arrived,
and what it cost,
and what it bought them.

We haven’t figured out what to do with that yet.
But we know it.
We’re standing here, knowing it,
which is something.
Which has to be something.

Author’s Note

“History’s Shadows” began three years ago as an elegy for arrival. I’ve revised it now, in America’s 250th year, because elegy isn’t enough anymore.

The poem sits uneasily beside something Shakespeare wrote more than four hundred years ago in England, a speech for Sir Thomas More that the Queen’s censor banned before it could be performed. There’s an irony worth sitting with: an Englishman wrote these words, on English soil, for a country this one eventually fought to leave. That the argument he was making then belongs so completely to America now, in its 250th year of independence from that same England, says something about how old this argument actually is. And how unfinished.

Sir Ian McKellen performs it here, and it is worth every minute:

More asks the mob to imagine being cast out themselves. What country, by the nature of your error, / Should give you harbor? He calls their cruelty what it is: mountainish inhumanity. The word mountainish does something no modern word quite does. It means vast, and cold, and indifferent to whether you live.

We are not done asking that question. We haven’t been, for two hundred fifty years. The asking is, maybe, the most American thing we do.

Here is the speech:

Upcoming…

• A prose poem about memory:

  IMMORTALITY, 11 July 2026

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Refer a friend

She walked the river path
most evenings that winter,
not because it helped
but because standing still
was worse.

Someone had called.
	One of those calls.
And after, the world kept going:
cars, grocery receipts, someone’s dog
running loose across a parking lot;
all of it obscene somehow,
all of it carrying on.

She wasn’t looking for anything
by the water.
That’s important.
She wasn’t ready to be comforted.

But one night she stopped
because children were laughing
somewhere behind the trees,
that high-pitched, stupid laughter
that means nothing except
the body is young and doesn’t know yet—

and she felt it move through her
like a current through cold ground,
brief, almost painful,
nothing like happiness.

More like a door
she hadn’t noticed
because she’d been pressing so hard
against the wall beside it.

Months passed.
She doesn’t talk about it
as a transformation.
She’ll tell you she still has bad mornings,
still picks up her phone
to call a number that goes nowhere.

But she started sitting with people
differently—her neighbor
whose husband left in February,
a girl at work
who smiled too much
and meant none of it.

She recognized something.
Knew what to bring,
what not to say.

She had room now, is all.
Room she hadn’t asked for,
hadn’t earned exactly,
merely
found herself holding.

	That’s what Gibran meant, maybe.
	Not that grief is worth it.
	Not that.

Only that it goes somewhere,
takes up space inside you,
and when it moves,
if it moves,
it leaves something behind
that wasn’t there before.

	A hollow.
Wide enough
to contain joy,
to let someone else in.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author’s Note

I first read The Prophet in my late teens. I’ve gone back to it several times since, and for a long time Gibran’s line about sorrow and joy was just words my eyes moved across. Not bad words. Just words that hadn’t found anything in me to catch on yet.

That’s how some lines work. They wait.

You have to live enough, lose enough, before the language has somewhere to land. And then one day you’re reading the same sentence you’ve read before, when it hits you, and you think, oh … that’s what that meant.

I’m in my sixties now. I understand the line differently than I would have at twenty, or thirty-five, or forty-five, or even fifty. Not better, necessarily. Just from the inside rather than the outside.

The woman in this poem isn’t healed. She hasn’t arrived anywhere. She just has more room than she used to, and she didn’t choose that, and she’s learning, slowly, imperfectly, what to do with it.

I think that’s closer to how grief actually works than any metaphor about dancing in the rain.

Upcoming…

• An update to a poem (one day before the 250th anniversary of U.S. Independence):

  HISTORY’S SHADOWS, 03 July 2026

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Refer a friend

After the cease-fire,
a child’s boot in the road.
Just one.
The news moves on.
The boot doesn't.
Somewhere its match
is still on a foot
or it isn't.
Nobody reports which.

Author’s Note

Near the end of September, you will get my scribbles every two weeks instead of weekly. To pick up the slack, I will send these poetry cards on the weeks I don’t post a piece. This card is an example of what you can expect.

Each card pairs a short poem or prose piece with a photograph: images from my own backyard and travels, or ones I found that perfectly complement the words. The forms vary: free verse, prose poetry, haiku, whatever the image and idea needed. Some arrive as just a sentence or two that refused to be longer. You are welcome to save them, pass them on, or post them wherever they might do some good.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

The sun finds its highest point
and quietly begins to turn,
but here, in the green dark,
the daisies don't know it yet.
They keep opening, 
small and white,
as if the year had only just begun.

Author’s Note

Near the end of September, you will get my scribbles every two weeks instead of weekly. To pick up the slack, I will send these poetry cards on the weeks I don’t post a piece. This card is an example of what you can expect.

Each card pairs a short poem or prose piece with a photograph: images from my own backyard and travels, or ones I found that perfectly complement the words. The forms vary: free verse, prose poetry, haiku, whatever the image and idea needed. Some arrive as just a sentence or two that refused to be longer. You are welcome to save them, pass them on, or post them wherever they might do some good.

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

Mariupol burned room by room.
Somewhere a mother pressed her child’s face
against her coat, as if fabric
could stop what was coming.

In Gaza, the rubble arithmetic:
a shoe, a schoolbook, a ceiling fan
unmoored from the ceiling it once cooled.
The living count the dead
until counting breaks them.

Beirut again. And then again.
There’s a kind of city that knows
how to be destroyed, has practiced it,
wears the knowing in its cracked facades.

Tehran’s daughters cut their hair in the streets
and the hair fell like an argument
no government could answer,
only arrest.

What do we do with so many names?
Write them. Say them aloud.
Watch how the mouth moves
around syllables that used to mean a person.

There’s no sentinel standing at the edge of this.
No beacon. The dark doesn’t work that way;
it doesn’t wait for light to oppose it.
It just sits there, patient, full.

And still someone plants tomatoes
in the rubble-yard.
Still a child in Kyiv draws a horse
with four good legs, running.

Not hope, exactly.
Something rawer. The body’s refusal
to stop wanting what it wants.

Author’s Note

Some poems begin as arguments and end as griefs. Battlefields started years ago as a broader plea; the kind you write when the scale of suffering feels too vast to name. But vastness can be its own evasion (my self-imposed distance from the reality of it all).

Returning to the poem, I couldn’t justify the abstractions anymore. Not with Mariupol. Not with Gaza, Beirut, Tehran’s streets full of women who decided their hair was worth the risk. The poem needed to stand inside specific rubble, not above it.

What survived the rewrite was my original impulse: the refusal to look away. What changed was the understanding that witness requires particulars. A shoe. A schoolbook. A child’s drawing of a horse with four good legs.

I don’t know what to do with that. I’m not sure poetry does either. But it keeps asking.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Upcoming…

• A poem about carving out space:

  JOY CONTAINER, 27 June 2026

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Refer a friend

One Hundred-Word Wonders is a writing challenge that highlights how stories can shine even when they’re very short. In the world of micro-fiction, writers create whole tales using only a handful of sentences.

These tiny stories prove how much can be said with very few words, surprising readers with the depth and feeling packed into just a hundred words. How can a story truly come alive in such a small space? Let’s dive in and find out.

Today’s prompt is:

MISERY

1. Write a story, poem, or creative non-fiction piece using exactly 100 words. The title doesn’t count toward the word limit. To make sure your work is exactly 100 words, you can use WordCounter or any writing software you prefer.

2. Copy and paste your 100-word piece, along with its title, into a comment below. If you want, feel free to share it on your own Substack site or Substack Notes, and include a link back to this page.

3. If a response touches you, don’t hesitate to tap the little hearts in the comment section.

4. There’s no deadline for these prompts.

5. You’ll find my own response below.

The Misery Job

Carlo had pulled off seventeen heists clean. The Picasso, the Van Gogh, a Fabergé egg some diplomat kept in his guest bath like it was decorative soap.

This one should have been easy. The Misery: an uncut sapphire, palm-sized, sitting in a glass case in a private collector’s parlor.

Except.

The collector was ninety-two. Home alone. She made tea without being asked and called Carlo by her late husband’s name.

He sat with her for nearly three hours.

Left the sapphire behind.

Took a photograph of her in 1964.

Carlo told himself he didn’t know why.

He knew exactly why.

Author's Note

• Look for a new One Hundred-Word Wonders prompt every third Wednesday of the month.

• The next prompt will drop 15 July 2026.

• Check out other writing prompts from: : Justin Deming’s Fifties by the Fire and : Prompt Station on Writer Pilgrim's Substack.

Upcoming…

• A poem that doesn't look away:

  BATTLEFIELDS, 20 June 2026

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

MOTE

This morning
     The sun
            Streamed, poured

In through
      My window
            Almost like

Something alive
      And liquid
            And golden

With motes
      Of dust
            Flying, startled

Swimming on
      The beams
            Going nowhere

My eyes
      Suddenly watering
            An eyelash

I thought
      But no
            Eyelashes were 

Lost amongst
      The tears
            Making tracks

My cheeks
      Wet, remembering 
            Her voice

Explaining words
      Like mote
            “Small particles

Of dust,”
      She said
            As my

Small hands
      Tried capturing
            The fairies

That danced
      And shimmered
            When I reached

My mother taught me words the way some people hand you something fragile—carefully, watching your face. I was small when she explained what a mote was, and I immediately forgot the definition and remembered the fairies. Years after she died, morning light came through a window and I stood there longer than I meant to. The poem wrote itself out of that standing still.

MID-SENTENCE

She laughed mid-story, every time,
just before the moral came.

Animals knew things. People stumbled.
The pig outsmarted the neighbor.
The dog had opinions.

She delivered the ending straight-faced
and we were useless.

She believed she was going somewhere
and she went without argument,
the way she told a story,
building toward what she already knew.

Her ashes found the sea.
Some of her is Cayman water now,
some is weather,
some is something
I breathe in
when I tell the same story
and hear her voice
finishing the sentence.

My mother died on June 11, and every year the date finds me. She was a storyteller in the oral tradition: animals with opinions, neighbors who stumbled, punchlines she delivered straight-faced while we fell apart.

She believed she was going somewhere and she went without argument, the way she did most things. Her ashes are in the sea off the Cayman Islands, where she was raised and where she always called home.

I didn’t expect to keep hearing her. But I’ll be telling a story and her voice comes in at the end, finishing it.

I’ve stopped being surprised.

Love and miss you, Mommy!

Upcoming…

• June’s writing prompt:

  One Hundred-Word Wonders, 17 June 2026

  This year, every prompt will come directly from movie titles.

  For those who want a head start, this month’s prompt is: MISERY. Write in exactly 100 words, a story, poem, or creative non-fiction in any genre, using the prompt. Pieces should be exactly 100 words, no more or less. The 100-word count does not include the title. Hold your piece until the 17th!

Thanks very much for reading, subscribing, and sharing the stories, poetry, and essays in this space. If you like a story, poem, or essay, please click on the heart. Also if you are so moved, please leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Refer a friend

MORNING STARTS THE same way it always does: I push through the plastic flap and the outside air hits my face and it’s already warm, late-May warm, the kind that arrives before breakfast and doesn’t apologize. I find my spot on the second shelf. I can see everything from there. The yard. The tree line thick now with leaves. The patio chair where the cushions got left out again.

I wait.

Ollie shows up before I hear him. That’s the thing about Ollie, one second the patio is empty and then it isn’t. He’s just there, sitting on the flagstone like he pays property taxes, grooming his ear with a paw. Dark gray in the morning light. He doesn’t look at me right away. He makes me wait. I hate that I find this interesting.

He comes to the mesh eventually. We do the thing where we press our noses almost to the same spot and breathe. He smells like outside, like cut grass and something dead in the neighbor’s yard, like a life I don’t have and honestly I’m not sure I want. He says something with a low growl that I don't catch and bats at the wire. I bat back. Neither of us catches anything. That’s not the point.

Nobby arrives later, slower, his three legs working through some private calculation the rest of us don’t need to make. He doesn’t do the nose thing. He just finds the lounge chair and settles. Sometimes I watch him sleep and think about the math of it; how he figured out a whole different way to land, to run, to sit. He’s been doing it so long it doesn’t look like a workaround anymore. It just looks like him.

Afternoon. The heat comes down hard through the screen roof and everything slows. Ollie stretches out on the same lounge chair, and Nobby shifts to give him room, and I’m up here on my shelf watching them breathe in and out together, their sides rising, and I think—I don’t know what I think. Something about how the wire is there and it’s fine. I have my shelves. I have my cat door. I go back inside where it’s cool and eat and come back out and they’re still there, just existing, and I sit with them through the mesh and we don’t talk, which is, I’ve found, the best kind of talking.

Evening pulls the light off the yard slowly, slower than it did in March, the sun taking its time. Birds go loud in the trees and then go quiet. Nobby leaves first without ceremony. Ollie stays until the porch light clicks on, then drops off the chair, sits and cleans his front paws and face, and disappears around the corner, into the thicket of butterfly weed. I stay a little longer. I look at where they were. The chair cushion still has the dent from Nobby’s hip. The flagstone holds the day’s heat where Ollie sat cleaning.

I go back inside. I’ll be here tomorrow.

Author’s Note

This one started with my phone camera and two cats who don’t belong to me.

Jake is our indoor cat. He goes outside only through a cat door into a wire-enclosed catio attached to the house—his own small kingdom of shelves and fresh air, safe from everything the yard might throw at him. Somewhere along the way, two neighborhood cats from the same household discovered him. Ollie, a gray tuxedo, and later, Nobby, an orange tabby, who gets around on three legs with a matter-of-factness that still stops me cold. Now they both come regularly, rain or shine, because the catio sits under our covered patio.

The prose poem is Jake’s—his vantage point, his second shelf, his version of what friendship looks like from behind a wire. I gave him a dry interior voice because that felt right. Cats don’t editorialize. They observe, they wait, they come back.

The season matters. Late May into early June, the yard full and warm, the light staying long into the evening; it changes the whole texture of a day.

That’s what I was after, anyway.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Upcoming…

• Two poems about love and memories:

  FLYING, STARTLED, 13 June 2026

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I lie still, thoughts twisting, refusing to settle,  
counting the spaces between heartbeats,  
night stretching wide, restless around me.  

Outside, rain starts—soft, steady,  
a quiet rhythm pressing on the window,  
each drop asking me to let go.  

In dreams, I walk into sheets of rain,  
water folding over skin,  
earth damp beneath bare feet,  
breath mixing with mist,  
a world rinsed clean and new.  

I awake, carrying echoes of dreams,  
rain brushing leaves gently,  
a calm pulse pulling sleep back,  
soft enough to hold my restless mind,  
a steady hum for a night that finally eased.  

Rain 
	keeps 
		falling,  
pulling quiet threads through dawn’s edges,  
each drop tracing the shape of waking.  

I rise slowly,
shadows of wet earth and cool air still with me,  
rain’s memory lingering on my skin,  
a secret held close.  

Light seeps in, pale, soft,  
clouds low and heavy,  
blurring the sharp edges of morning.  

Outside, rain hums a steady rhythm,  
a lullaby stretching past sleep; 
a promise of calm,  
moments held gently between breaths.

Author’s Note

This poem came from those nights when sleep just won’t come, and the mind won’t stop racing. I wanted to capture that restless feeling; how the dark feels too wide, thoughts tangled and loud.

Rain often shows up in those moments for me—not as a fix, but as something steady, a quiet presence that shifts the noise just enough. It’s less about falling asleep and more about finding a small peace inside the chaos.

The poem tries to hold that fragile space between wakefulness and rest, where the world feels both heavy and soft. The rain isn’t just weather here; it’s a kind of gentle company, a rhythm to lean into when the night stretches on too long.

Upcoming…

• A prose poem about what he sees:

  FROM THE SECOND SHELF, 06 June 2026

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Your grandmother’s cheekbones lived in her mother’s
and her mother’s before that;
all the way back to someone
with no name you’ll ever know,
only a posture,
a way of holding the jaw against wind.

The sky over Persepolis
is the same sky.

Words arrived in your mouth
already worn smooth by someone else’s tongue.
You inherited them the way you inherit
a coat too large,
the shape of another body
still pressed into the shoulders.

Somewhere a column stands
cracked at a clean angle,
the burning almost careful.
Three thousand years and the stone
still holds the outline of a hand
that worked it.

The hand means something different now.
Threat. Calculation. Target.

Pride drank first.
Then greed.
The ground hardened the way ground does
when nothing falls on it long enough—
a slow sealing over,
until the animals arrive at the trough
and stand there, stunned,
learning what they no longer have.

Love goes dry before hate arrives.
That’s the order of it.
One side went dry first,
the other answered,
answered,
answered;
and now both have forgotten
what the question was.

The same sky.
Over Persepolis. Over Tehran.
Over the face your face came from.
Over whatever precision
the generals are calling justice tonight.

Something lodges in the sternum;
grief without a name, or older than a name,
a city’s worth of knowing
pressing into bone.

Strangers, the news calls them.
The faces. The words
already in your mouth
before you understand them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author’s Note

“Same Sky” took me 82 days to write; 82 days of wrestling with words that kept evading me. Then I read something (two things, actually) that Alexander McCall Smith wrote. The first was his observation that wars begin as a failure of love—that hatred is what moves in when love runs dry. The second was his reminder that ancestry isn’t an abstraction: it lives in cheekbones, in words that arrive in your mouth already worn by other tongues, under a sky that has not changed.

Hüzün (pronounced hoo-zuhn), the Turkish concept of collective melancholy carried by a people and a place, gave those ideas an emotional home. Not personal grief but something older, heavier, shared; the specific weight of inheriting a history you didn’t choose and can’t put down. The poem lives in that concept.

Persia/Iran was already there. It threaded itself in naturally. Three thousand years of civilization, now reduced in the news cycle to a threat, a target, a calculation.

The current Iranian regime is a strict, military-influenced theocratic state that has brutally silenced its own people, thousands killed in the crackdown on protests that began in late 2025, sparked by a collapsing economy and decades of suffocation under clerical rule. The United States encouraged those protesters to rise up, to take back their country, promising that help was coming. Then the bombs fell. The old supreme leader died in the rubble. His son (harder, closer to the Revolutionary Guard, already sanctioned once before) now holds the seat.

What remains is a war that has shape-shifted into economics: sanctions tightening on Iran’s oil, the Strait of Hormuz closed, global energy markets seizing up, a ceasefire that everyone involved seems to distrust. The faces in the streets (the ones who believed the promise) are still there, somewhere underneath all of it.

That is what the poem is reaching toward: the distance between a hand carved in stone three thousand years ago and this, right now. The same sky. The same failure.

Upcoming…

• A poem about nature’s persistence:

  Rain, 30 May 2026

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One Hundred-Word Wonders is a writing challenge that highlights how stories can shine even when they’re very short. In the world of micro-fiction, writers create whole tales using only a handful of sentences.

These tiny stories prove how much can be said with very few words, surprising readers with the depth and feeling packed into just a hundred words. How can a story truly come alive in such a small space? Let’s dive in and find out.

Today’s prompt is:

UNFORGIVEN

1. Write a story, poem, or creative non-fiction piece using exactly 100 words. The title doesn’t count toward the word limit. To make sure your work is exactly 100 words, you can use WordCounter or any writing software you prefer.

2. Copy and paste your 100-word piece, along with its title, into a comment below. If you want, feel free to share it on your own Substack site or Substack Notes, and include a link back to this page.

3. If a response touches you, don’t hesitate to tap the little hearts in the comment section.

4. There’s no deadline for these prompts.

5. You’ll find my own response below.

Penance

She’d been going to confession for seven months. Same priest, same screen, same Saturday afternoon slot. She told him all of it: the man’s full name, the hotel room, the specific shame of wanting something she had no right to want.

Go in peace, the voice always said.

She was pulling her coat on near the vestibule door when someone said her name.

She turned around.

White collar. The same jaw she had once traced with a finger. That scar just above his collarbone, covered now.

“I requested this parish,” he said, “the week after you stopped returning my calls.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author's Note

• Look for a new One Hundred-Word Wonders prompt every third Wednesday of the month.

• The next prompt will drop 17 June 2026.

• Check out other writing prompts from: : Justin Deming’s Fifties by the Fire and : Prompt Station on Writer Pilgrim's Substack.

Upcoming…

• A poem about who we become:

  SAME SKY, 23 May 2026

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He kneels on a floor that knows his knees
too well by now, the grooves worn
into wood by decades of asking.
Outside: four wars. Maybe five,
depending on how you count
the ones that don’t make the front page anymore.
He doesn’t know how to hold all of it—
Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon, Iran, and the others
with their ordinary names
of streets and rivers and border crossings—
so he holds none of it.
Just opens his hands. Empty.
That’s the whole prayer.

His voice doesn’t rise.
It comes out the way old bread breaks,
without drama, just the crumb of a word
landing somewhere below his ribs
and staying.
Peace. He says it.
He says it again.
Even he doesn’t believe repetition will fix anything;
he’s read enough history for that.
But what else?
What else do you do
at five in the morning
when the news has already loaded
and the photographs are already
doing what photographs do?

Once he thought prayer was a bridge.
Now he thinks it’s more like breathing,
not because it changes anything out there,
but because you can’t stop doing it
without dying.
He says peace
and feels it dissolve
before it clears his teeth.
He says it again.

Somewhere a mother is standing
in rubble that used to be a kitchen.
She knows where the window was.
She knows what the light did
at certain hours.
He doesn’t pretend his kneeling reaches her.
He doesn’t pretend anything.
He just keeps saying the word;
worn down to almost nothing,
small and calcium-pale,
doing what a rib bone does:
holding the soft things in.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author’s Note

A Naomi Shihab Nye line made me pause: “Their prayers were weathered rib bones, small calcium words uttered in sequence.” From her poem “Different Ways to Pray.” I didn’t go looking for it. It found me the way certain lines do, at the wrong moment, which is usually the right one.

I kept turning it over. Calcium words. The idea that prayer could be skeletal—not luminous, not transcendent, just structural. Load-bearing. Something the body makes because it has to, not because it believes it will save anyone.

We are living in a time of multiple wars. I don’t think I need to list them again. Most of us are carrying them in some low-grade, helpless way: reading headlines before we’re fully awake, feeling the inadequacy of whatever we do next. Make coffee. Go to work. Say something, or say nothing.

The priest in this poem isn’t a figure of faith exactly. He’s a figure of persistence. He keeps saying the word peace knowing it dissolves, knowing his knees have worn grooves into the floor and the world hasn’t noticed. That felt true to me; truer than prayer as comfort, prayer as power, prayer as anything more than the stubborn, almost absurd act of not stopping.

Nye’s rib bone did the rest. Ribs hold soft things in. That’s the whole job.​

Upcoming…

• May’s writing prompt:

  One Hundred-Word Wonders, 20 May 2026

  This year, every prompt will come directly from movie titles.

  For those who want a head start, this month’s prompt is: UNFORGIVEN. Write in exactly 100 words, a story, poem, or creative non-fiction in any genre, using the prompt. Pieces should be exactly 100 words, no more or less. The 100-word count does not include the title. Hold your piece until the 20th!

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I STAND AT the window holding a cup of coffee, eyes catching the slow light climbing over the horizon, a soft, steady burn that spills into the sky.

Outside, the crows gather, raucous voices slicing through the quiet, their sharp beaks snatching seeds, jostling each other with feathers and noise, a rough authority of the everyday.

Squirrels bound in, bold and swift, muscling through the chaos, pushing past the crows, claiming their place with flicks of tails and quick feet; no room for arguing here.

Nearby, woodpeckers hammer the suet feeder, their strikes echoing like distant drumming, each one staking a claim, a noisy duel played out in bursts of pecks and calls.

I watch all this—the small battles, the everyday claims to space—then reach for my phone, news breaking through the morning calm, a word that cracks my surface: WAR.

The light shifts, the birds fall silent in my ears, the room feels colder, and the day stretches out, fractured, uncertain, no longer the same morning.

Author’s Note

I wanted to capture a morning that starts with the usual, familiar sounds—the way nature goes on with its small struggles and routines, completely unaware of what’s coming. There’s a messy, noisy life happening just outside the window.

Then the news breaks in, sudden and harsh, pulling me (and anyone in that moment) out of the quiet into something much heavier. It’s about how quickly things can change, how even the most ordinary mornings can be upended by the weight of the world. I tried to hold that tension between normalcy and chaos, without smoothing it over or making it neat.

Upcoming…

• A poem about invoking peace:

  Holding Soft Things, 16 May 2026

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CHARLES LEANED BACK against the rock face; just chillin in a hot spring, up to his chin in clear hot water, buck-naked, legs stretched out.

He released a breath of air, looking up through pristine air at the big pines close at hand and the hardy, gnarly specimens at tree line. The smell of pine and high-country flowering meadow hung in the air. The ridge line of granite peaks and cloudless powder blue skies spread out above.

He felt he had come to terms with the happenings of the past two years. The nighttime tossing and turning and questions with no answers faded away.

He and his wife of three years had divorced and five months later, he lost his job.

He got over the job loss easier than he got over his wife.

At thirty-three, he was on his way up the ladder in an investment firm. He was in sales. He wasn’t crazy about his job; but he was making good money and the company was growing.

He could plan for a family and their future.

His job was time-consuming. It cost him his wife.

Something had changed. They drifted apart. She divorced him. He was crushed. He dove into his work. It helped him deal with it.

He scored on a couple of deals that brought him a substantial commission.

A larger firm bought the company; new management changed things around, and he liked the job even less. He took a generous severance package.

He didn’t know what he would do. But whatever it was, it didn’t need to be in a hurry. With a close eye on things, he could live comfortably for a long time.

With a cool breeze on his face from the snowmelt stream that runs alongside and into the hot spring, he felt free from the past.

The past was gone but not forgotten.

He got things done at his own pace.

At first, he traveled. Time to do it while he could, he thought. He went to Hawaii; beautiful, he could live there. And Alaska, beautiful, would in no way live there by choice. He was always cold.

He started camping again, something his family did when he was younger. A forgotten joy remembered.

Now he was camped in a meadow next to Berry Hill Lake at about 6000’ on a spur trail just off the Pacific Crest Trail. Near Markleeville, south of Lake Tahoe.

Up on the ridgeline coming in, half a mile back, the Sierra Mountains stretch out north and south, down to the long central valley on one side, and to the high plains arid desert on the other.

Entering his second night, he had seen no one. Not surprising. This was a little-known hot spring in an area of many.

He thought about doing extended trips on the PCT. Hikers do the whole thing, Mexico to Canada. It can take months.

He’d kept in touch with his friends and previous contacts.

A couple of his business friends wanted him to join them. They sold partnerships and stock shares for a company called Thorium NRG. It made Thorium-based modular nuclear power stations sized to run small businesses up to industrial complexes. Expandable as needed.

Opinions of and regulations for the use of these reactors were changing. The future needs more energy. AI, by itself, demands huge amounts of energy. These modules would do the trick. Thorium is cheaper and less toxic.

It was just a matter of time. Get in, he thought.

He joined up and was to start on Monday. He’d work out of his place in South Lake Tahoe. They were in San Francisco and L.A.

He knew he wanted to find “her” and to have a family, but that day was in the future. Something pleasant to think about, always in the back of his mind.

For now, he’d go with the opportunity at hand.

He followed a jet and its contrail across the sky as it tracked eastward. It disappeared beyond the ridge right where the trail begins its descent down the mountain slope to the lake.

Someone wearing a lime green jacket was coming down the trail.

A female wearing a backpack.

A hundred yards out, she stopped and gave a wave. He waved back and watched as she wove her way down the talus and boulders.

She walked along the shoreline and selected a place to camp.

She set things up with ease.

She was shapely.

Pulling a towel out of her pack, she angled over to the creek and made her way up the short distance to the spring.

Only then did he think about being naked, and it was too late anyway.

He was only a little self-conscious.

She was pretty.

He could only smile as she came up to the spring. She eyed him, looked around, and saw his clothes laid out on the rock shelf.

She smiled.

“I hope I haven’t intruded on you,” she said.

“No, no. I’m surprised that’s all. Not many people know about this spot.

“You know you aren’t on the PCT now, right? There’s no through trail here.”

“Oh, I know,” she said. “We used to come here as kids.”

Looking into the spring, she said, “Someone stacked the river rock into a nice tub. Real nice.”

“Um, that would be me. I’ve been working on it.”

“I’m Maria. You don’t mind if I get in, do you?”

She began stripping down.

Somewhat surprised and stumbling over his words he answered her, “Hi, Maria, - I’m Charles, - - Nice to see you, I mean meet you. - Uh, no, sure, of course. Come on in. The water’s fine.”

The back of his mind spoke up. - “Charles. Meet your future.”

Heat rises the way relief does—
slow, then all at once.
	You can lose two years
to the same ceiling.
	You can lose a woman
to the particular silence
that grows between people
who stopped saying the hard thing.

	Out here, granite doesn’t care.
	Pine doesn’t care.
Sky, least of all.
	That’s the whole point.

He built something with his hands
for no reason,
which is the only good reason.

Then the mountain
sent someone down.
	It does that sometimes—
	waits until you’ve quit asking
and tosses you
an answer
in a lime green jacket.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Author’s Note

The story came first—Charles, a hot spring, a lime green jacket appearing on the trail at exactly the right moment. It’s a quiet piece, more interested in the interior weather of a man sorting himself out than in plot, and it earns its ending without forcing it.

The poem wasn’t meant to retell any of that. I wanted to write something complementary, which turned out to mean feeling rather than mirroring—the emotional current running beneath the story’s surface, pulled up and held to the light on its own terms. Solitude as chosen, not merely suffered. The strange logic of building something for no reason. The way clarity tends to arrive only after you’ve stopped chasing it.

Two forms, one set of truths. The story shows you, Charles. My poem tries to show you what it feels like to be him.​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Upcoming…

• A prose poem about an ordinary morning:

  Morning Breaks, 09 May 2026

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Today, try writing your own poem that discusses a real or mythical being or profession (demons, firefighters, demonic firefighters) with the same sort of musing yet dispassionate tone.

My first instinct was a unicorn. Then a mermaid. Both felt too familiar—creatures so often reimagined they’ve lost whatever strangeness they started with. So I went looking for something less common and found the qilin, a creature from Chinese mythology that appears only at the birth or death of a great sage or ruler. I learned that because it exists only in relation to greatness, and greatness has grown scarce, the qilin is rarely seen anymore (not extinct, exactly) just waiting for an occasion that keeps failing to arrive. That felt like the right creature for this challenge.

They appear only for the great men, which is to say
rarely now. The last confirmed sighting
was four or five centuries ago, give or take.

They do not bend grass. Whether the grass
cares about this is not known.

Their scales are probably green, or gold;
it depends on the dynasty.
The horn is sometimes there and sometimes not.
The scholars do not agree,
but they agree about very little.

They eat nothing living. Perhaps nothing at all.
Perhaps they are simply not hungry.

When a sage is born, a qilin comes.
When one dies, it comes again.
Between these occasions it is somewhere
unrecorded.

. . . Their sound is like bells
in a room you have just left.
No one is in that room anymore.

Here is a video with more information about this mythical creature.

Prompt Inspiration

Via NaPoWriMo

In his poem, “Angels,” Russell Edson speaks of these spiritual warrior-messenger-guardians as if they were a type of endangered animal. Brief as it is, the poem is disorienting in its use of flattened diction, odd similes, and elliptical statements.

Upcoming…

• A story by James Ron with a complementary poem:

  IN A HOT SPRING, 2 May 2026

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