V. M. Straka

Author of Ship of Theseus and at least 18 other works.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

His head spins. He holds himself still, not so much standing as letting the barrel and the wall hold him in place. This is not what he wants to do.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

There's a spiritual connection between flame and narrative.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

It must be difficult at a time like this to have no connections of which you're aware.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

Isn't the point of scenes like this that the two people - two bodies, two souls - come together?

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

We are grateful for your service.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

She will not abide by a crooked sign…

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

There is a powerful human need to locate evil—that is, to contain it by assigning it a specific, bounded place in some cases, a particular person)—even though this is impossible. The boundaries of evil are blurry and porous…if they can be said to exist at all.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

A Hundred Aprils in Amritsar

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

48.8888°N 11.4444°E

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

Perhaps his mind had projected expressions of welcome on their doomy visages.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

S. sees thin, dark threads crisscrossing his lips and ending in a tiny knot at one corner. Tiny pink spots mark where the stitches enter and exit the skin. S. gasps audibly, and the crewmen’s lips stretch to the side, straining the threads and turning the pink spots blood-red.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

S. stares at the bloody honeycomb of wounds in the man’s neck, transfixed. He feels his own blood pumping inside him. He feels feral, unstoppable. The pen is slick, his forearm dark and wet, and he is breathing heavily with the loosened derangement of violence.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

The shiver that runs down S’s back has nothing to do with the gust of cold wind that now rushes through this late-October night.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

He is swimming in a mountain lake, and she is waiting for him on the far bank. They are at high elevations: the flora consists solely of twisted krummholz formations, and the moon, fat and gold, takes up an eight of the night sky.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

The K—— were obsessive chroniclers of events, covering the walls of the caves with pictures, and maybe even words, describing the story of everything they knew or believed.

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

His story must be heard

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

Beginnings and endings are the preoccupation of every serious storyteller…

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

The building itself tells the story

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

How much of his life has been lost on this errand?

[V. M. Straka @VMStraka]

Can you ever make another person fully understand the choices you’ve made?