Jesse Teller

Category: Teardrop Road

  • Confession

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    by

    jesseteller
    in

    “If you’re awake, don’t let me know,” I said. The room had fallen quiet about fifteen minutes ago. Before that, the four of us had talked in the dark of Ty’s basement for about an hour. It was five in the morning. My mother wanted me home by noon. But tonight, I needed to talk.…

  • Writers Club

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    by

    jesseteller
    in ,

    “Is she going to be there?” I asked Chanel as I walked through the halls. She looked up at me and smiled. “She will be. Jammy will be there. They will all be there, even the ones that haven’t met you before. Writers Club will be a full house.” She hugged me and walked away.…

  • The Man in the Dark

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    by

    jesseteller
    in

    Job had come home early and found me drunk and weeping. The phone calls had been going all night, and when all was said and done, the whole of the body had passed out except him. When Job walked into the house, the man in the dark bedroom slipped his hand under the blankets and…

  • Daddy’s Christmas

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    by

    jesseteller
    in

    My eight-year-old mind knew there was something wrong with the way my grandfather’s hand rested on my aunt’s ass at the Christmas table. I walked out of the dining room and into the kitchen. The dining room was where the party was. All my dad’s family had shown up. Uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents had…

  • Walleye

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    jesseteller
    in ,

    When Teddy walked out of my life, it sent me into shock. I was 17, still in high school and on the fringe. Teddy had been the coolest person I knew. He legitimized me as a person worth knowing, and with him gone, I was lost. He had walked up to me in the hall,…

  • Beautiful Monster

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    by

    jesseteller
    in

    I was young, probably 12 or 13. I was troubled by a past, violent and horrid, filled with abuse that I had largely shoved away into dark caverns within the pocks of my mind. Tunnels to horrors too mind-numbing to handle had been sealed up with bricks of denial and mortar of hate. I walked…

  • Creature in the Wastes, Part 2

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    by

    jesseteller
    in

    Sunshine filled the room. Adam stood in its light basking in the warmth and the happiness it brought. He turned to his Lincoln Logs sitting in the corner, to the small black and white television sitting in the other and the soft bed, made with pressed sheets and gentle blankets, and he giggled. “I want…

  • Creature in the Wastes

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    by

    jesseteller
    in

    Now, I know how this is going to sound. This one is not possible, if you think of things in a certain way. But I have not stumbled off the path of truth. There is an explanation to this story that I can’t get into right now. It was not a dream. I know that…

  • Smilin’ Jack, Part 4

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    by

    jesseteller
    in

    Darkness and Job’s couch. I was asleep, and though lightning and rain raged out beyond the door, I was safe. Safe from homelessness, safe from starvation. But barely. Job had opened his house to me, had lent me succor from the streets. But I could not work. I was too far gone for that. I…

  • Smilin’ Jack, Part 3

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    by

    jesseteller
    in ,

    He never left my mind. Between the first and second time I saw him, I had let him drip away into vague memory. But this time was not like that. I waited for him every time I closed my eyes, looked for him everywhere I went. The idea that this demon might just walk up…