Valerie wasn’t sure how long her alarm had been going off. She’d gotten back to her apartment late Sunday afternoon- had lost most of the day- and was so drained and groggy that she collapsed into bed.

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Dana wasn’t sure whether the predator-prey connection she had with Valerie counted as the girl being her “enemy-” but she supposed it must, because her plan had just fallen apart completely.

The sliding glass door was easy for Dana to shim open; the simple slide lock was a polite suggestion of “do not enter” rather than any kind of real security. The empty wine glass perched halfway off the edge of a side table took her by surprise, however. She was nervous and less graceful than she knew she could be, and it was the slightest bump against the table that left her frozen in terror as the glass smashed to bits on the apartment’s polished concrete floor. She held her breath, expecting to see the bedroom light flick on- to see her cue to turn and run.

“Oat milk mocha,” Dana ordered tersely across the counter. She’d been coming to this café for a few weeks now, and she took her usual place next to the window. She the only customer this morning, partly due to how expensive and yet poor quality the coffee was, but mostly because she had arrived at open, while the sun still crawled its way up from the horizon.

Valerie sobbed behind the wheel as she drove home down the darkened highway. The sun had already set despite the long summer hours- she had worked late, again, and it hadn’t been a good day even before that. She felt scared, and, worse- hopeless.

The last few knots were always the hardest, pulling the ropes holding her to the back of the chair tight around her own chest.

This is a small site generated using Hugo, a lightweight framework for generating static websites (a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and content like image or video files; which does not require an active server to host). When I write new content, I run Hugo on my laptop to “compile” it (generate the static HTML etc.). The actual content is written in Markdown. For example, the first part of this page looks like: ...