Simon Jimenez

Still, the offworlder smiled at him, the light caught on the curve of her soft lips, and his chest cracked open. Everything he had been holding in for the last fifteen years came tumbling onto the ground by her feet. A tangled mess of want.

Every week it seemed another friend was sprouting children of their own.

He wanted to warn these children that time was not their friend; that though today might seem special, there would be a tomorrow, and a day after that; that the best-case scenario of a well-spent life was the slow and steady unraveling of the heart’s knot. But he held his tongue.