You Are Fatally Invited

by Ande Pliego

Writing is a kind of beautiful madness. It is slitting yourself open, bleeding your soul onto the page in that paradoxical mask of vulnerability perhaps only a writer can achieve.

“Every one of us kills people for a living, remember?”

I couldn’t afford to catch anyone’s eye; this entire plan hinged on me being one with the wallpaper. Just a light fixture in the room.

what if the page wasn’t the only place we could control fate?

“Sometimes the art of fiction isn’t in how intellectual it is, but how well it makes you actually forget the world around you. Sometimes, binge reading to escape reality can save a person’s life.”

The man seemed to carry conflict with him like a security blanket, unsure who he was without it.

“That was two husbands ago. I like my men like my Kleenex: expensive, pliable, and disposable.”

Writing is a beautiful tool for confession, revealing one’s own darkest self. Only those who dare tamper with it realize—it’s the truth carefully placed and buried in the lie,

it’s an eye for an eye—a concept as old as time. We’ve just forgotten.

Our justice system is broken because humans are broken. You know they can’t be trusted;

“Sometimes wounds become scars, not because they’ve healed, but because they’re hiding what’s underneath from ourselves.”

Desperate people did desperate things, and it terrified me to think what people who made a living off of fear and death would do if they thought I was lying.

I could pretty much hear the crack of their eye contact breaking.

What must it be like, to have emotions grow dull with time, like a well-used kitchen knife? Mine only became sharper on the whetstone of memory. Primed to cut.

“you get an event that cuts everything in two. Like an axe splitting wood. And there becomes a before and an after.”

Walking through relationships had always been like walking through a bramble of thorns; no matter how careful I was, I always got cut.

expelling your stomach’s contents is actually a human survival instinct? The brain interprets something as repulsive because of its potential to make us ill. Thus, it attempts to purge us of it.”

“Which is why when you witness someone else’s vomit, you feel inclined to imitate them, in case you, too, have ingested something harmful.”

It’s always fascinated me how humans crave to read about fear from the comfort of their fireside armchairs, perhaps accompanied by a steaming cup of chamomile or a robust red wine.

The purpose of art is to evoke emotion—and what are the horror and thriller genres for, if not to incite feeling? Fear is an art.

Tonight’s game might be called Final Girls, but only one is ever left when the credits roll.

Maybe fear wasn’t something you fought. Maybe it was something you armed yourself with.

Apparently, desperation makes allies of enemies.

I highly recommend you keep a little anti-acknowledgments list, as it were, of people you’d love to thank for making life difficult. For making you who you are, whether by spite, defamation, negligence, or indiscretion.