At Dark, I Become Loathsome

by Eric LaRocca

I think people should remain protected when nighttime approaches, almost as if twilight were a cancer that could rot us away until we were threadbare, tattered, and broken things, never to be repaired again.

At night, I become guilty of crimes I haven’t committed, much less even contemplated. I become a caricature of my former self—a creature to be persecuted, loathed, reviled, detested. At nighttime, I’m something to be tortured until condemned—someone completely and forever misunderstood.

But though humanity doesn’t escape us when it’s dark out, I’ve learned that human decency only exists when it’s convenient.

That’s what I am—a secret to be kept, away from everyone, in a dark room.

She still hasn’t said a word, doesn’t seem capable of speech. She looks at me with a strange combination of bewilderment and delight that disturbs me.

watch as she unscrews the cap of the small bottle and shakes the contents over the open grave. The pills scatter into the open coffin like the gemstones of a necklace torn from the throat of a dowager empress—a woman who had seen all the wonders of hell and knew keenly of the nothingness, the oblivion, that waited for her there.

That’s when the little girl finally answered. “Heaven is a dark room,” she said. “There’s nothing for us there.”

Being gay in a small town is like being an endangered species in captivity, forced to procreate within a very small gene pool.

There is nothing exceptional about being alive.

The world is nothing more than a carnivorous plant that devours the things that are the softest and most delicate.

How great a disservice it is for me to convince this pathetic creature that life is a wondrous and splendid thing. There’s no way I believe such nonsense.