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Title: Tears
Author: Harper Kingsley
Genre: drama, angst
Summary: There are times when she retreats to the solitude of her bedroom and cries.

There are times when she retreats to the solitude of her bedroom and cries. There’s something cleansing about tears, about cracking the hard shell of her emotions and letting all the hate, rage, and sadness out in one uninterrupted flood of tears. To cry until her eyes ached and her nose was red and sore.

And then she washed her face–flipping her eyelids back to release the trapped salt deposits to prevent swollen eyelids–and crawled into her bed. It let her paste the plastic smile on her face with the morning light and pretend that everything was good, she was happy and nothing was dying inside.

Being able to cry was the only thing that let her face the days of boredom and abuse. She was a loser, but she could pretend otherwise if she tried hard enough.

Title: Cake
Author: Harper Kingsley
Genre: contemporary fiction
Character: Dahlia Quinzant

During her break at work, Dahl wrote out a plan in her small memo book. She ignored the looks she received from other people moving in and out of the break room and focused on her task, her pink and white pill pen clenched in her hand.

Dahl felt good about the plan taking shape in front of her. She didn’t try to get creative and she kept things to what she could reasonably accomplish. She didn’t want to be like Sharon and her failed cabbage soup diet–she’d lost fifteen pounds, but gained back twenty, and that had been the end of that.

Title: Cake
Author: Harper Kingsley
Genre: contemporary fiction
Character: Dahlia Quinzant

They say that the first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge it. Dahl wished her problem wasn’t that she was fat, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Problems were what they were.

After a day at work where she self-consciously felt as if everyone was looking at her–judging her–she came home to begin doing some online research. She wanted to know the best way that she could lose weight and not completely blow her monthly budget.

1 comment on "Cake 01 [contemporary fiction]"

Title: Cake
Author: Harper Kingsley
Genre: contemporary fiction
Character: Dahlia Quinzant

CAKE 01-

One day, Dahl looked in the mirror and hated what she saw. The person looking back at her did not look like her, the person she was in her head.

She didn’t know when it had happened, but at some point she had stopped taking care of herself. She’d ceased grooming unless she was going somewhere, and her eyebrows had grown bushy and out of control. She could see the shadow of a mustache on her upper lip and there were even hairs bristling from her chin.

But what really got her attention was that somehow she had become fat. Not “pleasantly plump” as she’d always called herself, but unhealthily overweight. She didn’t know how she could have missed it happening, but there it was.

I make wishes on the stars all the time. It doesn't seem like a waste to me. Because in the forming of a wish--an idea--a concept of what can be is created. And until a wish is formulated, it's nothing but stardust and fantasy.