Lawrence Lease
Bio
Alaska born and bred, Washington DC is my home. I'm also a freelance writer. Love politics and history.
Achievements (1)
Stories (303)
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Everything You Need To Know About the Nancy Guthrie Disappearance
It began the way most evenings do — dinner with family, a ride home, a garage door rolling up, then down. Nothing dramatic. Nothing ominous. Just the quiet rhythm of an 84-year-old woman ending her night.
By Lawrence Lease15 days ago in Criminal
The Machinery of Care
The system is the appointment. More precisely, the modern healthcare appointment — the quiet choreography of portals, pre-authorizations, referrals, billing codes, intake forms, waiting rooms, follow-ups, and automated messages that feels like care but often operates like administration wearing a white coat.
By Lawrence Lease15 days ago in Humans
The Seventh-Floor Pause
The elevator in the Rookery Building was older than the people who rode it. The brass numbers above the door had dulled into the color of old pennies, and the mirror at the back held everyone’s face a second too long, like it was deciding whether to keep them.
By Lawrence Lease15 days ago in Fiction
The Compliance of Ordinary Things
The first time the ceiling began to drip, everyone looked up like it was weather. It wasn’t water. It was thick and pale and slow, the color of skim milk left out too long. It gathered in a soft bead, swelled, and fell with a quiet, wet punctuation onto the carpet beside Reception.
By Lawrence Lease20 days ago in Fiction
The Moment Before Yes
The first sign wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t come with a bang, or a phone call, or a knock at the door. It came as a pause in the hallway—Mara’s key hovering in the air, the teeth pointed toward the lock like a question she hadn’t decided to ask.
By Lawrence Lease20 days ago in Fiction
Something Has Already Begun (We Just Don’t Know What Yet)
They didn’t realize it had started until they were already standing inside of it. Not inside a room, not inside a decision — just inside a feeling, the way you sometimes find yourself already halfway down a hill before you remember choosing to walk.
By Lawrence Lease21 days ago in Fiction
The Disappearance of Nancy Guthrie: What We Know, What We Don’t, and What Comes Next
What began as a missing person case has evolved into something far more troubling. There are blood droplets at the front of the house. A Ring camera is gone. There are alleged ransom notes circulating. Helicopters have circled low overhead. Deputies have conducted grid searches through cactus-studded desert terrain. And yet, despite all of this activity, law enforcement maintains a clear position: there is currently no identified suspect or person of interest.
By Lawrence Lease22 days ago in Criminal
The Invisible Machine That Runs Our Minds
There is a system that hums in your pocket all day, every day, so quietly that you forget it is even there. It does not announce itself with rules or edicts. There are no posted hours of operation, no governing body you can confront, no clear center of authority. Yet it organizes behavior, distributes power, and promises a kind of order that feels both intimate and impersonal at the same time.
By Lawrence Lease22 days ago in Humans
Where the Water Moves One Way and the Truth Moves Another
The river had always flowed uphill, though no one in Bellmere ever said it that way. They said instead that the town was “cleverly engineered,” or that the water simply “knew where it needed to go.” Children were taught in school that Bellmere sat on a rare but perfectly respectable incline that confused outsiders more than locals. On field trip days, Mrs. Carrow would line the class up along the iron railing and point toward the water climbing, slow and patient, toward the distant hills.
By Lawrence Lease22 days ago in Fiction
