Fantasy › Urban fantasy

Ash

At sixteen, he walked out of a condemned house on Calloway Street and the world let him through. No knock, no cruiser, no reckoning. That was the punishment. Raised by a street that kept its door open, he's handed a second chance in a town where every lawn is wide and every kid is unmarked. He has a friend who adored him, a brother who understood him, a lease, a girl, a way out. And every time, he reaches past it for the only language he's ever been fluent in. Calloway is a raw, lyrical story about the cold you're born into, the warmth you can't quite trust, and the terrible luck of being le

Content warnings: Violence · Gore · Death · Abuse · Suicide · Addiction · Strong language

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How it begins My father left before I was a memory, so I never had to lose him the way you lose someone. He was just an absence shaped like a man — a gap in the doorway of every photograph, a name my mother spat when the rent came due. I used to think absence was the worst thing a father could be. Later I learned there were worse things to be present for.My mother loved me in the spaces between her needing something more. When the high was good she’d laugh and bake cookies with me and tell me I was going to be somebody, and I believed her because a child will believe anything said with that much teeth in the smile. When the high was bad, or gone, she was a stranger wearing her face, going through my pockets, selling the TV, the toaster, the little gold cross my grandmother left me. By the time I was eleven I had stopped keeping anything I couldn’t carry. By twelve I had stopped keeping anything at all. The block raised me where she couldn’t. That’s how it works in a place like that — the street doesn’t recruit you, it just keeps the door open and waits for the house to get cold enough. Marcus had the corner two doors down and a way of looking at you like he already knew what you’d do for him. He bought me food. Real food, sit-down food, the first hot plate I’d had in weeks that didn’t come from a gas station. He didn’t ask for anything that first time, and that’s the trick of it. You spend the next two years paying off a kindness that was always a loan. I ran packages first. Then I held things. Then I held things that could put me away. Every step felt like nothing on the day it happened and like a cliff edge when I looked back. They tell you the line between who you were and what you became is bright and clear, a thing you’d see coming. It isn’t. It’s a fog you’re already on the wrong side of by the time you smell smoke. His name was Reese. He’d been one of us until he wasn’t — talked to the wrong people, took money that flowed the wrong direction, the particulars never mattered as much as the verdict. The verdict came down to me because I was sixteen and hungry to be more than the kid who held things, and because Marcus knew that a boy who wants to belong will do what a man twice his age won’t. Keep reading →