Ridiculous.
How much love a heart can hold.
Amazing.
To watch your life unfold.
Uncanny.
How your presence fills the sky.
Unbelievable.
How much is spoken in your sigh
How on earth did you come to me?
Maybe Earth had nothing to do with it.
But a conspiracy of stars
Fuelled by an awe inspiring universe.
My miracle.
He sat down at his designated desk, amongst the 45 other students in the room and used his #2 pencil to tear the the prompt book open along it's perforated edges once the clock started. The first thing he noticed was the first page of blank lined notebook paper that had been supplied, on which he was expected to write, according to whatever prompt the state board of education decided appropriate that year to judge a person's worth in two and a half hours.
He looked on the opposite page for the prompt which would decide his future. Nothing. Another...
"And when I get older, I'm going to be a fairy!" little Leslie exclaimed. On their second playdate, she and her new pre-school friends were already discussing their life goals. As the only girls in their new class, they quickly bonded and had to stick together.
As they grew, their friendship did as well. They squabbled over birthday party themes, which high-school to attend and not infrequently, boys. As two went off to college, Leslie chose a different route. She became known on the music festival circuit as the best-damn flowered headband maker... it wasn't long before she had her...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. She leaned on the door frame, getting support from the wood that she no longer got from her feat. The binding had just begun and already she has trouble balancing herself.
Her mother told her that this was tradition. That to go before the matchmaker she needed to be beautiful. To achieve the perfection of beauty she needed to sway in the wind like the willow tree.
The girl had no desire to sway in the wind, she wanted to be the wind. To go where...
It approached. The first day of writing a 6 minute story. "Excuse me? A story about a story? That's so meta", I whispered to myself. The truth is, the story is really about life, and life is both the story and the story teller.
Four minutes. Really, it took two just to write that paragraph? "It's been so long since I've written creatively", I thought to myself. It's true. It's been years. Nowadays, most of my words are shaped in the form of technical documents, twitter updates, and code.
Three minutes. Time is ticking down. I look to my right,...
Once there was a beautiful kingdom with a wise ruler, a red wolf demon. He was cunning and strong, and loved long. During an especially daunting hunt, chasing a herd of water buffalo, he was joined by a pack of ordinary wolves, gray and black and brown. They all enjoyed the feast that hunting together had brought them, and in the celebrations, he met the most beautiful she-wolf he had ever laid eyes on. Her fur was gray, with that glossy sort of sheen you only see in the mornings of the reddest of sunrises, a color that rivaled his...
Knives. Where were the knives? she thought to herself, getting more aggravated by the second. There were plenty of forks. If she needed a fork, or even a spoon, there were loads. The drawer was overflowing with cutlery of all kinds, excpet for knives.
She could hardly cut the ham with a spoon, gouging chunks out of it. Sighing, she tried to count to ten, calmly. This is what her therapist talked her through. Stand still, breath deeply and count. One...two...three...But, where were all the knives?
They had been there at some point. The cutlery had been bought in a...
She slept in the open air, in the windy hills, on a soft pillow. She was covered in the blankets of her mother's mother. She sang God's songs. When she played music, her hands made the strings talk and her voice accompanied. From atop her hill no one could hear her. The would hear her one day. She spoke God's words. When finally she slept, she would always dream. New songs would be woven in her head, on that soft pillow. Her message was the word of God and when she came down off this mountain she would save her...
There was blood on my pillow. Along with a few small feathers. And upon closer inspection, there was also a long white whisker, and what I could only guess was a foot. I could be absolutely certain by just picking it up, but getting home from work ready to crash from a nap that was now being delayed did not lend itself to doing anything other than being infuriated.
Where the hell had Sebastian managed to catch a bird when I had all the windows and doors closed and locked?
"AAAAUGH! SEBASTIAN!" I whirled out of the room, shouting at...
I was nearly there. The red top of the lighthouse was within my grasp. Just a few more steps and I would be in a place my father had talked about during many a bedtime story.
Pride emanated from him as he used to whisper to me about the foreign vessels that he was witness to on the shore.
I remember shivers radiating through my skin as he once described the stolen ship that had been taken over by the French pirates. Shaving so close to the rocks had caused much of the treasure to fall overboard into the sea...