He lies bleeding in her lap, and he says, Tell me a story, and she laughs through tears and says, I love you, and he says, No, a true story.
R. Gatwood (@iwantanewhead) tells many stories, mostly false ones.
I click “Ask me a different security question” because it still hurts too much to type your name.
R. Gatwood (@iwantanewhead) is the emergent consciousness of a spectacularly inefficient library shelving system.
You wake up in the hospital, having failed even at this.
R. Gatwood is concise.
I pretend your train is Einstein’s train and your face a beam of light—the two of us shining side by side in perfect sync—as I watch you go.
R. Gatwood is concise.
I wouldn’t want my baby raised by a family that would have me as a member.
R. Gatwood (@iwantanewhead) was born from the head of God and is now looking for someplace more comfortable.
Call me Victor. I don’t deserve the name of Frankenstein. My creature, my son—let him take that from me. I have given him nothing else.
R. Gatwood (@iwantanewhead) knows every monster by name, even yours.
Eve comes back to Adam again and again—not for love, not for children, but to try to suck that last bite of apple out of his selfish throat.
R. Gatwood is concise.
He gave his creature the pseudonym he was using when I met him. A little joke, that name. Men of our sort are always hiding.
I called him my angel once, and he shuddered. Later I understood that he counted me among the temptations of which he longed to be rid.
You ask if I saw him transform—I who saw him cross the street to avoid the eyes he had kissed the night before. No. Not in the way you mean.
Hyde came to me only once. Thank God I feared scandal less than I feared his odious person. I suspect he should have killed me afterward.
But Henry Jekyll loved me, and that monster, the vessel of his sins, did not. I submit that it was not made to hold a sinless thing.
R. Gatwood (@iwantanewhead) is a strange case.
We keep saying accident. We keep not saying suicide. Both words keep getting louder and louder.
R. Gatwood is concise.
For months, whenever you hear the word “boundaries,” your ears get hot (I’m not a stalker) and you try not to remember how nice she was.
R. Gatwood’s work has appeared in Wigleaf and Contrary Magazine.