Short noir novellas about people who find out something true about themselves and can't put it back.
Everyone keeps a few rooms they don't go into. These books open them—one at a time, and stay longer than is comfortable.
Each starts with a single idea: a drug, a song, a fast, a ritual, a place that seems kinder than the world outside it. Then it follows a few characters far enough in to find out what it costs them. Ordinary settings, small casts, slow burn. No future, no dystopia, no rescue at the end.
A numbered series from Roya Publication. Read them in any order.
Author's Notes
I started writing these because I'd been carrying a few thoughts too long and had run out of people I could say them to without changing how they saw me.
Not shameful thoughts. The partly true ones—the kind that don't curdle because they're false. Everyone's carrying at least one. After enough years it starts asking for a body that isn't yours, so I give it one.
What I'm after is narrow: what comfort costs us, what the body knows that the mind can be argued out of, and how gently the line gets crossed between a place that keeps you safe and one that owns you.
Nothing here resolves. I'm suspicious of anyone whose does.
Bring your ugliest thought. There's a chair for it.
— Chew Z