All the Dangerous Things

"It's not a story," I had said. "It's my life."

But aren't all of our lives just stories we tell ourselves? Stories we try to craft so perfectly and cast out into the world? Stories that become so vivid, so real, that eventually we start to believe them, too?

After all, the violence always comes to us in ways we could never expected: quickly, quietly. Masked as something else.

But what they don't understand, what they can't understand, is that one day, they could wake up to find the violence crawling through their houses, their lives, like parasite senking in its fangs. Wriggling in deep, making itself comfortable.