Cotton Nails

‘Cotton Nails is a raw, gut-punch of a story about what happens when men are told to stay tough, stay quiet — and slowly come undone.

Riley is a firefighter — steady, dependable, the kind of guy who shows up when everything’s on fire. But inside, things are burning too. He’s battling PTSD, locker-room bravado that belongs in a museum, and the creeping fear that things are about to get worse. Much worse.

The job’s not what’s killing him. It’s the silence. The pretending. The toxic culture that tells men like him to suck it up and smile. As Riley edges closer to the breaking point, the mask begins to slip — and what’s underneath might be the most dangerous thing of all.

Cotton Nails is part fiction, part anthropologic and part psychological. It paints a picture of one man struggling to survive in a hypermasculine world.’