Other stories for this prompt

I step back and look. It seems complete.
Ms. Johnson comes over and looks at it. She barely glances before saying, "Wonderful, wonderful. Fantastic job." She's forgotten my name again. I doubt she'll ever remember.
I leave it on an easel and walk out of the classroom. No one looks back at me. No one calls my name or asks me to meet them at their lockers. I keep walking. Soon I am beyond the reach of our cloistered middle school existence into worlds beyond. High schoolers pass by. None of them look at me either. They have their own...

He stared at his reflection in the water for a long moment. He studied his eyes (the same dark brown that they had always been), the breeze rustling his sandy blond hair, the chisled, strong shape of his face. As he stared, trying to make sense of who was really staring back at him out of those deep brown eyes, the face began to change. The water that moments before had acted as his mirror now rippled and swirled, captivating his attention. He watched as the water changed his reflection to appear not as a young man with brown eyes...

The world was so close to perfect, he hated having to point out the flaws to the designer. It was his least favorite part of the job; they always took it personally. Months to design each reality, thousands of hours of effort by the design teams, but it always came down to the lead designer to take responsibility for the deliverable.

Clients were, of course, unreasonable in their expectations of what kind of world they would live out the rest of their lives. They were clients, after all. The health and happiness of a hundred thousand subsequent generations would depend...

the colours were too bright and he couldn't make out what the picture was. Joe liked to go the the gallery on a Thursday night because they opened late and he could visit there after finishing his stint as a bike courier.He squinted at the painting in the modern art section and wondered if his bid to seem interesting by going to an art gallery would ever pay off. He spotted a sad- looking girl standing by the darkened window and debated what his opening gambit should be, most of the things he had tried on his previous visits had...

She stared down into the shallow pond from where she stood on the banks, and sighed. There was world just below the broken surface of the water, a world that she longed to understand. The lillypads floating on the surface seemed to hide their world from hers, but she knew better. The world below, it was alive and well. It was something that she could feel, from the tips of her fingers, up her arms and across her heart, and all throughout her entire body.

All she had to do was jump.

Though the pond was only a foot or...