Other stories for this prompt

"You been seeing the television?" the Guard said.

Huxton squinted, through the bleariness of sleep into the bleach of daylight, he only saw the form of the Guard, an outline of a man, faceless and without detail. Slowly, he sat up feeling as if his bones were brittle to snap. "What?"

He wished he could seem more heroic than a man who has been beaten and tied and imprisoned for days. He felt horrible with a dehydrated mouth that made sticky sounds each time he parted his lips.

"You been seeing the television? They say you is dead, man. They...

With fifteen minutes until the start of the hearing, a bagel stop was inadvisable. The queue for the espresso machine was exactly as long as usual, and the trainee behind the counter should have stuck with the chai order. His bladder screamed in that unmistakably shrill screech added urgency to an already pressing situation. "Ignored again! Be better if I was free trade, huh" When an onion bagel and a cafe con leche appear on the counter there is only one choice to be made. As he pays a skinny fallow skinned sidles up to him and opines, "You was...

I wanted to give him everything I had. He was my love, and I knew, at long last, what I wanted out of life.

I wanted him.

Foolishness, of course. We couldn't have been more different if we had been created that way. Still, I tried. Someone once told me that you should always reach for the stars. Whether you catch one or not, at least you will have risen above the mud for a while.

That's why I ran for Congress, because I thought that was where my destiny lay. When the corruption scandal was laid at my feet,...