Finally, my debut short story collection called "Club Hellhole: Stories of Horror and Weird Fiction" is due to come out on May 20th, 2025, and I'm beyond excited! The book will be available in paperback and ebook formats, and the pre-order is already up on Amazon. You can check it out on this link.

Until the release date comes, I wanted to share another short piece from the collection. Hope you'll enjoy it.

Love

It was more than a decade ago when the first one came, but I can still recall the feeling as if it happened yesterday. During that period of my life, I was completely mesmerised. She was intelligent, funny, highly confident, and so pretty. I wholeheartedly believed that she would be the one for me, but as it turned out, eventually, she wasn’t.

As time passed, we slowly began to argue more and more, even over small, insignificant everyday things. Bit by bit, we started to lose our common ground.

The day she left was a workday—Wednesday, I think. We were sitting at the kitchen table, as we’d usually do, having breakfast quietly. We didn’t really have anything to say to each other that morning. The silence was awkward and deafening, and it was apparent that now this speechlessness was the unnerving calm before the approaching storm of violence.

She had waited for me to finish with my food, and when she deemed the moment right, she didn’t hesitate to take action—she stood up, snatched up her fork from the table, stepped towards me, grabbed the back of my head with her left hand, and stabbed the fork in my left eye with her right. The suddenness of it caught me so off guard that my mouth wouldn’t open, and the painful scream I would have let out got tangled in my trembling, mute vocal cords. Following an audible pop, the fork ran through my eye without much resistance, like a pointy toothpick through a ripe grape, making the dense, bloody eye-grape fluid run down my face, staining the white office shirt I had planned to wear for the day.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she said, pulling the fork out of my skull and dropping it onto the floor hesitantly. “I never thought we would end up like this,” she told me sadly as she slumped back onto her chair and buried her face in his hands.

“No, it was my fault,” I replied while trying to cover the hole where my eye used to be with an egg yolk-stained tablecloth. “I’ll be fine. It’s nothing, really. I’ll just probably need some time to think things through, that’s all.”

In the afternoon, she packed all her things into bags and cardboard boxes. In the evening, she was gone.

I didn’t blame her. At the end of the day, it was my fault.

It took months for the pain to start to subside, and I lost my vision in my left eye, but looking back at it now, it could have been worse. One eye is really not the end of the world, I still have the other one to get by. It took some time to get used to it—or rather, the absence of it—but in the end, I learned to live with it.

There’s not much else to add. You scrape yourself off the floor, lick your wounds clean, assess the situation, learn the lesson—if any—and then you move on. I guess that’s what you do—or try to do, at least.

*

Time went on, as it does. Then out of nowhere came the second one.

I enjoyed staying out late with her, drinking one beer after another, getting increasingly tipsy and having dumb or sometimes profound conversations, talking openly about whatever topic came to mind. From pretty early on, we discussed basically everything. With her, I felt like I could freely be my uncensored self, which was liberating.

But unfortunately, this relationship had also come to an end. She did not stay. Not for long.

The night she left, we met at a little pub—the same one where we first laid eyes on each other. It was her pick. On the phone, she said she wanted to see me in person because she needed to tell me something, which was not at all a thing she would naturally say. Arriving at the place, I was very worried and nervous, but I tried my best to hide it. We sat down and ordered the same type of lager beer we always had.

“I’m very sorry about all of this, but I don’t think it’s going to work,” she said. “And before you say anything, don’t get me wrong, it’s not you. It’s me. I just can’t shake the feeling that, for now, I think I need something different in my life. I think I’m just not ready for this.”

Those were her last words to me before she stood up and kicked me off the chair. Paralysed, I fell on my back, letting out a painful groan as all the air rushed out of my lungs, then she crouched next to me, pulled up the bottom of my t-shirt to my chest, picked a surgical scalpel out of her handbag, then with a disgusted expression on her face she proceeded to hack my stomach open, slashing through layers of skin and fat and abdominal muscles, leaving my insides hanging out of my body in the end.

“I’m sorry,” she said when she was finished with her work, and tired, she slumped on the tiled floor. I could tell by the expression on her face that she meant it. She was a truly kind and caring person. “You deserve better,” she added. “Take care.” She stood up, grabbed her bag and coat, and left.

With the chaotic hurricane of thoughts raging inside my head and the oppressive pain of my mutilated stomach, I lay there for a while. At one point, I gathered the strength to get up, so I staggered to the bartender to pay for the bill and apologise for the mess we’d made, then dragged my guts through the pub and out to the nearest tram station. I spent the next hours wandering around the city, getting on and off buses and trams and subways without a clear physical destination in mind.

*

After that, onto the third one. The third one ended without even starting. Technically, she wasn’t even the third one, but she did leave her mark on me.

I knew I should have been more careful, but still, I couldn’t help but dive into the emotional turmoil headfirst as I’d always do. Right from the very start, it was a dead-end situation, but I tried anyway because it was better than living in uncertainty for the rest of my life. I had to give it a try. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

One night, we were sitting on a park bench in the city with a group of friends, drinking cheap wine, telling stupid stories, and listening to music on someone’s phone. When my blood alcohol level was appropriate, I decided to try my luck.

 When we two were alone, I gathered my courage and confessed to her that I liked her. In sudden confusion, she looked at me, then started gazing at the ground, speechless. Of course, right then, I knew I was lost. She took her time to respond. Maybe she could see it coming, I don’t know.

Finally, after a few long-stretched and oppressively awkward seconds, she told me that she liked me too, but not in the same way as I liked her—more like a friend, or a brother. Something along those lines. One is worse than the other.

The next moment, I went blind, lost my balance, and fell off the bench right into the black hole that had opened right below me. She helped me climb back out and sit back on the bench, but she didn’t have anything else to say. Silence.

Then straight out of nowhere, from silence came violence as she jumped at me to dig her pretty tiny hands into my chest, ripping through the skin and muscle fibres, breaking through several ribs, reaching for my heart, grabbing it with all her might and squeezing the life out of it like one would do with a huge piece of blood-red tomato, splattering the blood-red, lumpy tomato juice everywhere, colouring the trampled grass below us.

That was it. The best thing I could do was to say goodbye before our friends returned and walk four postcodes home.

*

After that, not much happened. Nothing of any importance. They came and they left almost immediately, sometimes in a matter of days. A slashed wrist here, some broken teeth there, maybe a crunched nose, but nothing truly serious.

*

It seemed unfortunate that when the last one came, I no longer had anything left to give, though in a very short time, it turned out, we were much alike.

When we first met at a local cafe, the first thing I noticed was her slit throat and an ugly third-degree burn mark on her right arm, oozing brownish liquid all over her clothes. Somehow, on her, it all seemed natural. We introduced ourselves, then sat down and started talking.

“Sometimes I think I ran out completely,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t feel much anymore. I just feel empty. It’s strange, but I’m getting used to it. It is what it is, I guess—Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m such a downer. You should’ve made me stop. I know it’s not the best topic for a first date.”

Usually, it’s not. But I assured her that out of all possible topics, it was undoubtedly the best topic for our first date.

Throughout that date, I couldn’t help but keep smiling at her with my swollen cheeks, revealing my horrible, toothless, broken grin.

In the end, she decided to stay.

***