She was an adorable little fuzzball, all wriggly and scrappy. She loved truly and fiercely and without limit all that surrounded her: the soft green grass, the scent of flowers on the wind, the taste of chicken bits the small humans fed her when the tall ones weren’t looking, her brothers and sisters, and everything else besides. Mostly, though, she loved the humans. Some were big and tall. They came to bring food and water, and she ran up to them with a wagging tail and twined herself around their legs. She lived for their warm caressing and the praise they would give as they whispered, “Good girl!” Others were small and fast, like her. They would throw balls and bones, play tug-of-war with the rope, and race with her until they tumbled together down the sloping green hills all loose blades of grass and dirt and love. As she grew, her love grew also, but she found the world was not always kind. Sometimes the bright blue skies would turn gray and pour cold, driving rain upon her. T

 Author's Note: This short story is part of my dystopian anthology series called "Panicdemic." You can find another story from the anthology on  this post .  *** Her mommy and daddy loved her. That’s why they had decided to keep her safe. She was lucky, luckier than anyone else in the world, than anyone she saw on TV or News , than almost anyone she talked to online or on her phone. She was safe. That’s what they told her, what they had been teaching her since she could remember. At first, she learned this through the glass windows and from the large, Michelin man suits that called themselves her parents. Now that she was a big girl, she had her own phone and laptop, so she could log on and see her mommy and daddy’s faces for the first time. The suits did not allow for that, and it had been hard to make out their faces through the hazy blue lights from the purifiers near the windows. Mommy had explained to her that out there in the world there was something called “ge

 In a world bent on valuing only light, We create so much darkness By leaving anyone with any sort of difference, difficulty, or pain Alone, By causing shame and inauthenticity as we label certain people “Deviant,” By deciding certain expressions of humanity are more valuable than others   We all dream of better futures, But we judge and devalue those who make choices that are different than our own, Slander and malign those who, Through no fault of their own, Have lives that are less than our perfect ideal, And if anyone has been through anything at all, We force them to hide it because it might make us uncomfortable   We deem some worthy of our time and others unworthy of our effort Chasing happiness, light, life, and joy, We create so much sorrow, darkness, death, and agony Because of what we do not value, Who we do not embrace, And the overall message we send: You are not, as you are, worthy; you do not, as you are, matter   We create so much darkness when we convey these messages,

We sail in paper boats on the sea of human experience, To islands of hope and beauty Where the sunset kisses the purple sky with tinges of orange and pink And dolphins laugh as they play with us on the seas that lull us to sleep in the tranquility of their rhythmic waves, And places of sorrow and terror As tsunamis of agony threaten to overwhelm us in the storms of injustice and circumstance And we can, at any moment, be dashed upon the unseen rocks, Which are the choices of other people That appear out of nowhere in the darkest of nights   We do not know how fragile our ship is Until the first wave overwhelms us Or the first rock scrapes against the bow And we plunge, unexpected, into the ocean, Unsure if we even know how to swim   Once we know the fragility of our own existence, We work hard to chart paths for ourselves on cosmic maps, Hoping to find more islands of happiness than reefs of despair, And yet the engines in our paper boats can only do so much, For they cannot fight the

 I am the darkness nobody wants, The one you spend all your time avoiding, praying against, declaring goes away, I am the one you rebuke “in the name of Jesus” I am the risk that’s not worth taking, I am the pain you’d rather ignore, I am the inconvenience of suffering   I am the hurting child whose pain is scorned by adults who have too much to deal with and think my grievances petty, I am the grieving person who is no fun at parties, I am the unashamedly broken whose shards mirror your own so much that you must thrust me away from you lest you remember your own brokenness, I am the anger that threatens to roar at the injustice of systems and policies that oppress, but which must be quieted and tamed because of the fear of my intensity, I am the sadness of overwhelming loss, I am the horror that there is more suffering to come, I am every negative emotion that you labeled as “sinful” and “lacking faith,” And all of the coping mechanisms that are used

 Positive vibes only, Speak beautiful words, What you focus on, you create, Be more positive, Your thoughts are seeds, grow flowers not weeds   Any world built upon these concepts Is built upon a graveyard of suppressed fears, traumas, anger, and resentment, Which will eventually curse the beautiful city With the rottenness of duality and unexpressed emotion, Rising from the darkness, Anger will come and destroy the illustrious edifices Bitterness will waft noxious fumes over the parks and the houses, And the streets will run with the unshed tears of the child you were When first you learned That the world isn’t fair or loving or kind   Your world will be one of all of the horrors Perpetuated by the unprocessed traumas that were perpetrated upon you By those who were not allowed to process their own experiences, And so they turned to hurting others as they were hurt Because they, too, built their worlds upon the idea That pain is best kept hi

  Take me back to the days when I thought I knew everything, When I was certain that if I just followed the commandments and did the right things, Everything would work out eventually and God would bless me, When I knew that if I was going through hard times, It was only because I was doing what Yahweh willed of me And the enemy came strong against me because I was fighting him so, And eventually right would triumph over wrong, Good triumph over evil, And I would get everything I wanted no matter how long it took   These were the days I judged others, For they were not choosing God or they did not have enough faith, And if they just knew God as I knew Him, Their lives wouldn’t be such a mess, They would have made better choices, And their sorrows would not have increased   We are all Job’s friends until we are Job, For we do not understand what it means to face suffering, And nobody warned us That everyone must walk through the valley of the shad

 And after years of crying out, crying to no avail, Finally someone may come after so many you have failed, And when they come you are confused, for you’ve come to expect Naught but pure destruction, abuse, and sure neglect   There is cognitive dissonance whenever someone’s nice, Whenever someone’s kind to you or makes a sacrifice And though you inconvenience them, you know they do not hate, They do not look upon you as something that obligates   After years and years of misery, and in the present even still Most people clearly don’t love you and you know they never will, But one or two acts of kindness, they come as a surprise Can someone else truly love you? Can you trust they’re really kind?   The baby doesn’t ask for much, his brain’s fundamentally changed, He hoards his food and shrinks from touch, expecting only pain Though he has someone who now loves him and wants to make it right It will take years to heal him of the neglect of his early lif

 Babies who are neglected, left lying in their crib Crying out for help that they’re never going to get Eventually go silent, and from there they cease to cry Realizing there won’t ever be help for them in the night   Children who misbehave because they’re not sure what to say, Who want adults to help them, though they do not know the way To explain what their life is like or how it really hurts, Or to believe it’s even possible for something better to occur   Eventually stop caring, these children’s hearts become like ice, For they know that no one will rescue them or teach them to be nice, Giving up on any connection or a loving, helping hand, They look out only for themselves; everyone else be damned   Adults who reach out to others, telling them how their actions hurt, Who set boundaries and ask for people to stop treating them like dirt And get told that they are selfish for asking that their needs be met, They don’t deserve consideration and th

 I wish that I could see you and everything you are, That I could look upon your face and honor your beautiful heart, I wish that I could know you, and that we could connect, But all of this will have to wait until we have faces again   I want you to know I want you and I don’t think you’re a risk, I see you as a human being worthy of connecting with, I wish that we could smile and see each others’ expressions, But all of this will have to wait until we have faces again   The news shares faceless numbers and makes terrible projections, But every number has a face, a human attached to it, And each individual matters, should be seen and loved for who he is, But all of this will have to wait until we have faces again   Terror is running rampant across society, They take control of others because they fear a disease Choosing to offer some protection and some to sacrifice, Acting with great hypocrisy because they fear their own demise   Instead of see

 Transitions are so hard after trauma, Your body, already on hypervigilance from all that you’ve endured Takes the change as a sign that, once again, You are about to suffer and lose everything you hold dear, One small change in routine Can end up a nightmare As your body kicks you into flight or flight mode And the transition becomes a trigger   You try to stay afloat, Telling yourself that everything will be okay and that after the transition will come some sense of stability, You rehearse to yourself what it will be like after the transition, Remind yourself that you’re not really losing everything, Things are just changing, You think that if your mind has a stable place to land, your body will follow, But this year even if that were the case, There is no stability in front of you, And it’s not like that’s the case anyway, Because it takes a long time to teach your body that it is safe After it is has been through so much suffering   At the

 Triggers are extreme reactions to snapshots of disaster you’ve lived through before, As if you’re walking through a dense jungle, It’s a long journey, and you are Enjoying the scenery of the exotic plants and the beauty of nature, Feeling the intense humidity of the air around you, Hearing the chirping of cicadas from the trees and the calling of strange birds, And smelling the sweet, pure scent of jasmine on the breeze, When suddenly the branches part in front of you and you are a witness to a massacre, Your eyes behold countless dead bodies, gore, terror, And then Somebody starts shooting at you, Your body kicks into survival mode, And you have to run run run run run   You survive, But barely, And your entire being is now aware That you almost died, And how fragile your life really is. It is now imprinted into the wiring of your brain And into every single cell of your body   Also imprinted is everything that led up to that moment of the m

We are the throwaway people, The ones who don’t fit in or conform to societal norms, The ones who are told every day they are not worth the inconvenience of getting to know Because it’s too hard to try to understand someone whose intuition is so outside the norm And for whom “common sense” is counterintuitive, We are Jesus and Galileo and Siddhartha and Einstein, Martin King and Tesla and Zoroaster and Moses, The ones who will move society forward because we cannot be complacent in a world designed to kill us, Or we are the countless others who died without names alone in a hole in the dark because the world around us was designed to kill us, And every day we get the message that society is better off without us, And maybe it is, for society doesn’t want to change, doesn’t want to be moved forward, It wants to stay the same, But the individuals in society will miss us, for they will be stuck in complacency without us, And they will not know what they’re mi

Go die in a hole for the sake of society, What? No! Omg you’re so selfish! Yeah, because I haven’t spent my whole life helping people, and even though I am barely surviving, it doesn’t still give me a little thrill when I can make someone’s life better. You’re unwilling to stop the spread of coronavirus! I can’t believe you want a million people to die! What? Nobody wants a million people to die. I wish the virus weren’t here, but I can’t lock myself away from  people for an indeterminate amount of time. I don’t even have the coronavirus! You could! You never know! Maybe you’re asymptomatic! I can acknowledge the possibility, but that’s very unlikely. I am doing everything I can to prevent the spread  of the virus. I wash my hands and use hand sanitizer, I haven’t been exposed to anyone who has tested positive,  I have no symptoms. The WHO says asymptomatic carriers are not the biggest cause of viral spread anyway. But you *could* spread the virus if you’re asym

When you were young, they taught you to share, To give freely to others from what you had, They taught you not to hit, Because hurting others was wrong, And that you could always go to an adult for help If you could not solve the problem for yourself If they neglected to teach you how to give to yourself, And that hurting yourself is wrong and should never be done, And that sometimes nobody else can help you, So you must learn to stand up for yourself, It was only because of the false view of humanity That decries human beings as inherently selfish And assumes we already know how to love ourselves well Clearly, it’s working out so well for our society to keep building on this assumption, As we attempt to force people to love others that aren’t like them, But keep ignoring the fact that nobody knows how to love themselves Because from the moment they were born, They were taught That they, being human, Were inherently selfish and evil: Whethe

America was founded on the idea of freedom, Though our history is littered with terrible violations of this idea, And those who started our country had such limiting worldviews that They did not extend this freedom to everyone   They were born into a very stratified society where even people of the same race and gender Were categorized into classes, And you might work as hard as you can and as long as you can, But no matter what you did, You would never be noble, And all power in that society came from birth, They believed In the “divine right of kings” And the idea that God chose some to be “vessels of honor” Ennobled, and given all the power While others were “vessels of clay” And they were literally born to be less than   They overthrew that yoke and oppression, Coming to a new land and carving out opportunities away from the stratification of European society, Where even your accent belied your low birth And no matter what your education l

Hearing of another innocent black man dying because of racism, I stopped and wondered Why? Why are some people more afraid of a strange man who is black than a strange man who is white? And I thought maybe it’s because they live in an insular world without diversity, Because we only fear what we don’t know, right? And maybe it’s because they don’t know. I am blessed to work with children of various races from various nations, so I know And I will tell you They are not scary! They are beautiful! Nobody laughs like the Marshallese, These kids smile so much, And they randomly burst into song, And I can’t tell you how many times they’ve brought a ukelele to class randomly, And I’ve had to set it on my desk until the lesson ends, And nobody can braid hair like the Marshallese ladies; I wish I could do as well I love speaking Spanish because I have never once been told by a Hispanic student That their language is only for them, That I’m doing it wrong, That I can’t understa