Edition 12 - March 2026
The Bloom Edition
Hi Story Lovers,
Not everything that blooms does so gently. Some blooms are violent ruptures — a daughter bursting from a sack, an inner voice breaking through humiliation, a truth finally acknowledged after years of pretence. Others bloom quietly, in the space between what was lost and what might still be recovered. This edition gathers stories that understand bloom as both promise and risk, as the moment when something dormant pushes toward light, regardless of the cost.
Taria Karillion’s Travels with a Sixiang Shu -or- The ‘Thinking of Home’ Bush and Sally Curtis’s There are many reasons the blossom becomes blighted both find their way to Asia, to standing bars and painted cherry blossoms, to the ache of waiting for someone who disappeared. Curtis’s title reminds us that not all blooms survive but her story asks what happens when they return anyway.
Mark Connolly’s Green Carnation captures a high school student’s flawless tribute to Oscar Wilde, performed once and never repeated. The teacher watching understands she’s witnessing something unrepeatable, a bloom that exists that can never be reproduced.
John Barrett Lee’s Before the Rush brings us to Café Marrone, where Rosa has built a life from her grandfather’s recipes and her mother’s legacy. When a man from her past arrives we learn what it means to reclaim not just a name but an identity, to bloom into the person you were always meant to be.
Ian Griffiths’s The Awakening is the darkest bloom here: the moment a boy realises his friends are not his friends, that he’s been the object of their cruelty. His awakening is a voice that tells him how to survive, how to walk away with dignity intact. A brutal but necessary blooming into self-knowledge.
And James Mason’s Esther gives us myth and transformation: a procession of naked bodies, a sack that splits open, a daughter who brings forth flowers and light. This is bloom as rupture, as revelation, as the moment the ordinary world cracks open and shows you what it’s been hiding all along.
I hope you enjoy these stories. Please give the authors some love in the comments below their stories.
With love,
Amanda 💙
