Tuman / Robinson / Curry Love Soup

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-93-6617-010-7
Verlag: Free Spirit
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten

A Collection of Short Stories that is has the following prompts included as a multi author anthology. The prompts : Anodyne, Alter Ego, Getting Lucky, Smokinng A Cigarette, No go, Card Games, Advocacy, Myths Beliefs Omens and Scaredy Cat. 

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tuman, Jeremy

Robinson, Deborah

Curry, Doug

Grant, Alexandra

Hammer, Patrick

Edie, Kathryn

Leseproben

Getting Lucky

Growing Season

Lucy Pierson

Dallas, Texas - United States

“Could you come downstairs for a second?”

The words rose up the stairwell like steam, soft, patient, already resigned. I lay still for a breath, my tongue furred with last night, the room tilting a few degrees off true. I didn’t know what happened after the third bar, or the parking lot, or the ride home that came and went like a blink, but I knew what this was. I knew it the way a dog knows thunder. My third intervention.

“Yeah,” I said, too loudly. “One second. Let me get dressed.”

On the nightstand: a sweating bottle with just enough left to steady me. I cupped it in both hands and drank. The tequila slid down and lit a small fire under my ribs, the glow that made my edges soften, that told me I was still here and, for a blink, safe.

Downstairs, the circle waited. Friends. Family. Elbows pressed to knees. Hands clutching printed letters the way you’d clutch a guardrail on a swaying bridge. Their faces looked like they’d already been crying for hours in a room I hadn’t entered yet.

I hovered by the doorway.

Mom cleared her throat and stood. “We’re worried about you,” she began, her voice carrying the stale coffee and Kleenex of two previous attempts at saving me.

Lauren went next. Her paper shook. “I’m tired of finding you blacked out at one in the afternoon.”

My brother, the one who never cried, stared at the floor. “We’re scared you’re going to die.”

Different throats, same script. The edges of the room fuzzed.

I hate letting people down almost as much as I hate the word “promise.” Still, I lifted my chin and said the only line they could bear: “I’ll get sober.”

They exhaled like I’d opened a window.

I wanted to leave before they could close it again.

“I’m going to a meeting.”

I was greeted by a man at the door with soft eyes.

“Welcome,” he said, sounding practiced but kind.

I sat. They started the meeting by offering a desire chip: an outward symbol of wanting to stay sober for twenty-four hours. I stood to get one. My third desire chip . . . classy. Around the circle, people peeled back their wreckage: the pawned wedding ring, the job lost on a Monday, the kid who stopped answering texts. The words braided into one hum. I listened and thought, I’m not like these people. I still had my keys. I still went to class. I still had all my teeth.

The thought was so awful I almost laughed. The laugh bobbed up and went down again. Ten minutes. Fifteen. I watched the door like a lover. I started thinking, I already got my chip. I could leave early, drink in my car, and come back at the right time to make it seem like I stayed the whole time. So I did.

The bottle in my car was warm. The sun was sliding toward dinner when I pulled into our driveway. Mom sat at the kitchen table with her hands folded like she was holding it together. When I showed her the chip, her mouth shifted. Hope, relief, then something like fear’s cousin.

“I went,” I said, making my voice kind. “It was . . . good.” I rested the chip on my palm.

She nodded without looking at it. “Sit down,” she whispered.

“Mom—”

“Please.”

I sat on the edge of the chair. The air felt thick.

“Zane died,” she said, her voice steady. “He killed himself this morning.”

There’s a kind of silence so loud it erases everything it touches. In it you can hear a glass sweating two floors up, a car turning left five streets over, distant sirens that aren’t for you, yet. I stood without remembering my legs. I walked and the house let me pass. Keys, door, air.

The drive to Zane’s house is ten minutes when you’re counting breaths. The sun flashed between trees and fence slats. When I parked, his sister was on the porch, arms wrapped around herself as if she were the only thing keeping herself in.

“He used a shotgun,” she said. “A fucking shotgun.”

It was like the earth shifted a fraction. I sat on the steps because standing felt too advanced.

Grief doesn’t have hours; it has weather. The days before the funeral arrived as a single storm. I woke up thirsty and went to bed drowning. I sat on strangers’ sofas and drank from the wrong glasses. I slept on the kitchen floor because the tile was cool and certain. Texts arrived. People hugged me like I could break, and I wanted to tell them I already had.

The morning of the funeral, I dressed in black, smelled like last night, and drove with a bottle between my knees. Five of us arrived early. Zane’s mom wanted those closest to him to say a final goodbye.

Before I walked in, I finished my drink.

The room of the dead is always flowers and carpet and hush. I went to the casket like it was pulling me. He was wearing a suit he would’ve hated. They had made a mouth from the pieces left. I stared at the seam where repair met reality. I thought of the last time I’d seen him and tried to find him inside what remained.

When I turned away, my legs did the old trick of “not in front of everyone,” keeping me upright until I collapsed into a pew.

After, life pinned itself back together.

I drank because there was a hole and the bottle was the only thing that ever filled anything. I drank because anger needed somewhere to go. I drank because sobriety sounded like a word meant for someone else.

Mom came and sat on my bed. She didn’t use my name; she said “honey” like she was searching through a crowd.

“Honey, you smell like liquor.”

“Of course I smell like liquor,” I said quietly. “Zane is fucking dead.”

Her breath hitched. “He wouldn’t want this,” she said.

“What would you know?” I said, and the words came out sharp.

She left the door open an inch. I stared at that strip of hallway until it blurred.

A month after the funeral, I found the courage to visit the cemetery. The grass over Zane’s grave was brittle. We were in a drought, and it looked like the grounds crew had watered everywhere except his section. Green lines elsewhere; nothing here. It felt personal.

“You could have called me,” I said to the heat. “I answered every damn time.”

I came back the next day. And the next. I stopped at the liquor store after school and the cemetery after that. In my bag: a brown envelope of clover seeds. I tore it open with my teeth and pinched seeds into the dirt. From the plastic jug I’d filled at home, I poured water until the ground darkened. It soaked in fast.

I watered and waited and spoke out loud because silence breeds fear. I told him about a dream where he came back and said nothing. I told him about trying to pray and forgetting how.

That night I decided to try again. I went to a meeting and stayed. I sat through the tight break of other people’s stories. A woman talked about washing grief from a child’s hair. A man admitted he could recite his own excuses. When it was my turn, I held the white chip and said my name. It tasted like tin. On the way out, the man at the door told me to come back tomorrow. He didn’t say “or else.”

I woke up to pouring rain. the first real storm in weeks. The sound filled the room. I started going to meetings because the rain made everything feel possible, a small weather that matched the small work I was willing to do: one sober day at a time. The rain didn’t stop; every morning I walked into the room wet and every night I left wet.

Two weeks passed . . . both nothing and a small half-built bridge. Even in the damp, my hands found the white chip and my voice found the line: “I’ll get sober.”

Today it was sunny, so I went to the cemetery. I brought the water jug out of habit.

At Zane’s plot, I braced for brown and instead saw green. Not grass, the crew still hadn’t touched this area, but clover. Dozens of small, shameless leaves, bright as new paint.

“I’m here,” I said.

I don’t believe in signs, except when I do. Standing there, wet, sober, knees aching, I let the rain stitch something back in me without asking what. Grief didn’t leave. It sat beside me. But it loosened its tie.

When I got home, Mom was at the sink, sleeves pushed up, suds at her wrists. She turned, startled.

She covered her mouth with her wet hand. The soap left a crescent on her cheek. I wiped it away with my thumb the way she’d done for me a hundred times.

We stood like that: two people in a kitchen that had held near-misses and interventions and one white chip sitting in a bowl with screws and rubber bands and paper clips.

“I went to see him,” I said.

She nodded.

“Did you . . . ?” she began, then shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.” She took a breath. “Do you want tea?”

I laughed. Ridiculous, grateful. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Tea.”

That night I went to a meeting. the same scorched coffee, the same folding chairs, the same circle of hands trying to stay steady. But this time the room felt like home. The hum of voices, the soft laughter, the nods when someone said something true. It was all familiar, like a language I’d known and was relearning.

I sat beside a woman with inked wrists and a braid tight as rope. When it was my turn, I stood. My palms were damp, but my voice didn’t shake. I said my name and told them about clover rooting in baked...