Spent a while this week thinking about the things nobody explains to children — and how much of what we think we’ve grown out of is really just what we were never told.

He’s eighteen, he’s standing outside a hospital with his hands over his eyes, and the one thing he can’t stop thinking about is Martin: the mouse he found in the gutter when he was six and kept hidden in his sandwich box, in a house where his brother had gone to live with the doctors and nobody said anything about anything. It’s a short story about secrets, and what happens to the ones you keep from the people who love you. It carries a content advisory, for reasons you’ll understand by the end.

G. H. Schreiber

04/10/2026