Paywall Mercy
How We've Equated Access to Kindness
We have put kindness behind glass,
fingerprint-smudged and price-tagged,
like cigarettes and razors–
dangerous in the wrong hands.
...
You can see it,
but you cannot touch it
without currency.
...
Not dollars, always–
sometimes it is beauty,
or usefulness,
or how well you bleed without staining the carpet.
...
Sometimes kindness is given to the symmetrical
like free samples,
pressed into their palms
with teeth-white smiles.
...
But the rest of us
stand outside ourselves,
watching.
...
We learn the exchange rate early.
...
Trade silence for safety.
Trade compliance for warmth.
Trade your jagged edges
for the illusion of being held.
...
Be easy.
Be quiet.
Be consumable.
...
Or starve.
...
I have watched people
curl inward like burned paper,
their softness evaporating
because no one could afford them.
...
I have watched men turn to gravel,
women turn to locked doors,
children turn to ghosts
still breathing out of habit.
...
Kindness was never supposed to be scarce.
...
It was supposed to move like water–
finding every hollow,
filling every fracture.
...
But we dammed it.
...
We rationed it.
...
We sold it back to each toher
in small, suffocating portions.
...
And now we are dying of thirst
with our mouths
full of coins.
About the Creator
E.S.Flint
I’m an Indigenous storyteller using poetry and short fiction to explore identity, love, loss and all the spaces we return to.
What I can't say, I write. Because feeling it all is the point.
Follow me on Instgram: es.flint
from death into life
Young Aldin of Wiloh had never contemplated death. It was almost strange — so many around him had the tendency to obsess over it, to clamor and claw almost desperately at their own perceptions of the end to know death as much as they could: when it would come, why it would come, where it would take them when it did.
By angela hepworth5 days ago in Fiction
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