The Story Maximalist

Part 1 — The Oil-Slick Photograph The first crash wasn’t a punch—it was the clatter of an aluminum walker snapping backward on concrete, followed by a small white square spinning through a rainbow sheen of spilled gas. The phone kept recording. The whole parking lot held its breath. I was in the back room of […]

Part 1 — When the Engines Surrounded the School Thirty-one engines rolled like thunder around Maple Ridge Elementary and the windows on my second-grade classroom trembled in their frames. Lights off. Blinds half-drawn. Twenty-three little chests holding their breath. My phone lit my palm with six words from an unknown number that used to be

Part 1 – Boots at 3 A.M., Oxygen Hissing At 2:59 a.m., boots crossed my hallway, my father’s oxygen hissed, and four helmets turned toward the baby monitor I use to check if he’s still breathing. I grabbed the baseball bat from behind my bedroom door and moved toward the living room, heart punching at

I hit upload on the video exposing my own dad—then watched a squad car roll up and the officer salute him like a flag. I’m sixteen. Our street is a quiet cul-de-sac where people complain about lawn heights and Halloween inflatables on the Nextdoor app. My dad’s motorcycle does not belong here, at least not

Part 1 — Don’t Kill the Engine The kid slammed his palm against my gas tank in 105° heat and whispered through a plastic tube, “If you rev it right now, my grandpa might live ten more minutes.” I’d pulled off at a Chevron outside Riverside Bend because my knee was barking and my tank

PART 1 — The Night the Engines Drowned Out the Alarms Sixty engines roared beneath the window as I pinched the sedation line and pulled it from Mr. Carter’s IV—right when the nursing home’s fall-risk alarms began shrieking like a fire drill. On my screen, the dashboard flashed the same soft blue lie it always

At 7:00 a.m. sharp, the old biker slammed his grease-black knuckles against the dead factory’s time clock—and thirty seconds later the bulldozer screamed as the ground spit out lunch pails. I was there for content. That’s the rotten truth. I’d filmed him before—the town legend everyone called Ghost, real name Caleb Harrigan—rolling up on a

Part 1 – Left on a VA Bench at 11:47 PM My son left me—an 85-year-old Vietnam veteran—on a metal bench outside a locked VA door at 11:47 p.m., my oxygen tank half-empty. The metal bled cold through my coat. The security light hummed, turning my breath into smoke. I had my DD-214 folded in

Part 1 – Boots in the Aisle, Sunflower High I heard the boots before I saw them—seven sets, heavy and certain, cutting straight down the aisle of our pinning ceremony—then the man in front lifted something small and impossible over his head: a child’s yellow motorcycle helmet painted with sunflowers, held like it could break

She pressed POLICE into my left glove and FIRE into my right.“Hold them, please—I’m busy keeping my hands from shaking.” The girl couldn’t have been more than six. Freckles across the bridge of her nose. A pink dress under a too-big black windbreaker with reflective strips. Her fingers were cold, though the July sun was