Still Life in Gutter w/ Guitar
“Hello Rook. I’m Death.” The corner of beggar and artist just got busy.
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18–27 min read
Brother Rook — an upstanding addict with three jobs, a guitar, and a favorite corner — plays blues and hymns for beer money and secretly wants to save everyone. Then a tall, ancient man in a tattered black suit sits down beside him and introduces himself as Death. An afternoon of argument, dark comedy, and a verdict.
The Book of Rook
“Excuse me, officer. You’re standing on my books.” It went downhill from there.
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7–11 min read
Brother Rook sells rare books on a weekend corner, protected by the First Amendment — until a dozen cops arrive and one plants his boots on Rook’s two most precious volumes. Rook stays careful, polite, complying, and asks sweetly for the officer to move. What happens next leaves a scar he’ll carry for life.
Dragons in the Lunchroom
The dragons hoard all the gold. The boys have cheap weapons and an hour for lunch.
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27–41 min read
At a Manhattan arts high school, a weird Black kid claims the worst cafeteria table for the friends he hasn’t made yet — and finds them: a wizard, an armed thief, and a narrator built like a tank. Four years of Dungeons & Dragons, girls, and drugs, while Melvin’s contagious emotions pull the table apart.
Shine
She wrote “I love you” in chalk. He said, “You write fast.”
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10–15 min read
In a yellow house where plates shatter and his mother grieves, a rarely-held Black boy finds the only person who ever held him: Shine, the bird-flipping tomboy next door. She writes ‘I love you’ in chalk — and then the man who owns half the town breaks her family’s lease.
Squat Politics
He’s hunting a street prophet named Mel Rook. He finds a household about to break.
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23–35 min read
A confidential 1995 field report: an undercover officer embedded among Lower East Side crusties, hunting a mythic street prophet named Mel Rook. What he finds instead is a doomed household — two lovers coming apart by the hour, a jealous woman waving an unloaded gun like a prop — that he’s forbidden to save.
Teddy Beam
A battered boy, a war-weary teddy bear, and the day the boy first liked who he was.
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9–14 min read
Eight-year-old Melvin, built for a kinder century, survives a violent home and paddle-swinging nuns with help from his imagination and Theodore Melvin Beam, Esq. — a button-eyed teddy bear who counsels him like a general. Then a reckless choice leaves him with something the beatings never gave: certainty that he did nothing wrong.
The Birth of a Villain
Rejected by his mother at first breath, a boy finds warmth in a girl and a witch born into slavery.
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10–15 min read
Born howling into the summer of 1967 in a Jim Crow maternity ward — delivered by a doctor named Villain, his name refused by his own mother — a Black boy finds warmth elsewhere: a teenage girl’s first hug, and the kitchen of a hundred-year-old wiccan pastry chef born into slavery. An origin story of who shows up.
The Saint and the Psychic
A church saint and an addict psychic raise one neglected boy between heaven and the astral plane.
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11–16 min read
A neglected Chicago boy is raised between two warring great-aunts: Eleanor, who lives in church, slips him hundred-dollar bills, and teaches him to judge; and Josephine, who reads tarot, speaks for the dead, and quiets the voices with a needle. Between the tithe and the tarot, his hunger to be adored takes root.
Dirty Dozens in the Schoolyard
A bookworm, three bullies, and a knife at recess — but the blacktop never drew the blood that home did.
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10–15 min read
Eight-year-old Melvin, a grade-skipping bookworm, reads alone on a recess bench while the schoolyard sharpens its knives. Here the weapon is the dozens, and his three tormentors are closing in — one with a taped screwdriver. He survives on the only thing he’s got: words. But the blacktop never cut as deep as home.
How Genius is Rewarded When You’re Black
He scored a 98. The rich white boy scored a 95. They made the Black kid take it again.
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10–16 min read
Woodstock, 1977. Melvin, nine and the only Black child in his class, scores three points higher on a statewide test than the golden son of the man who owns half the county. By Thursday the school reopens, a helicopter lands, and his beloved teacher begs him to do the unthinkable.
Spades
An undercover cop hides in a 1990s men’s shelter, smoking the role too well, while a card game and its players slide toward a riot he can’t stop.
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23–35 min read
An undercover soldier-turned-cop, four months deep in a 1990s men’s shelter and sliding into his own addiction, watches a card game and its players unravel toward a riot that will test what little conscience he has left.
Blues for Mister Rook
An undercover agent posing as a junkie hunts a ghost through 1990s New York on guitar alone — never knowing the woman sheltering him already knows it all.
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21–32 min read
A seven-act stage play in which an undercover agent posing as a junkie hunts an elusive prophet through 1990s New York, his guitar his only voice, never guessing how much the woman sheltering him already knows.
A Portrait of the Addict as a Hopeless Romantic
Zip-tied in a motel by a strung-out captor, a man who makes others feel what he feels tells the story of his life to buy one more hour before death.
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21–31 min read
Zip-tied in a motel by a strung-out captor who wants one last story before he dies, a man with a dangerous gift for making others feel what he feels spins his life of love, addiction, and heartbreak into a stay of execution.
About M. Christopher Horton
M. Christopher Horton writes from experience that is not comfortable and does not ask to be. A survivor of childhood violence, homelessness, and addiction, he spent years as a transient across the United States, living in hotels, lacking stable housing, taking college writing courses between displacements. He is not a role model. He is a writer. His work is blunt, specific, and concerned with what it costs to be alive in a body that has been treated as expendable.
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