Prison is for mossy bricks, reinforced iron bars, decrepid toilets and savage guards beating on the door every morning. How can it be anything else?
And yet, within the confines of this framework, there is a nook as tangible as any cell; the walls are closing in on me, invisible monsters lurking in the dark, only — these are worse than any monster imaginable, for they do not breathe, do not reason. You can't reason with walls.
The post seemed like a good idea at the time, for who doesn't dream of directing such a large, historic enterprise if given...
She could tell I was faking it. Every time I cracked a smile or choked out a laugh. All of it a fabrication to please the people around me. An attempt to lie to everyone, especially myself, about how screwed up my life really was, about how everything around me truly was going to hell.
When you've lost everything, why shouldn't you laugh? The bitterness of it is cathartic.
Yet... She stays around. Keeps an eye on me, noting my dulled eyes and chronicling every irrational action. Hearing the broken glass edges of my voice, seeing the glint of tears...
If you really knew me, you'd find I hate cinnamon; the smell, the taste, everything about it. I've never tried a brussel sprout and I would say my favorite food are hot dogs, even though they aren't so good for you. If this were a book about my life, I could tell you I've lived in NY my whole life, and just recently I want to move; the winter used to be one of my favorite seasons, and now it's just too cold to bear. If we just met and you asked my favorite color, I would tell you pink...
I'm dead. Really dead. Not in the "there'll be a twist at the end and I'll be saved" kind of way. Just dead.
Yeah, wasn't that my typical luck? My day in and day out? Slipping in and out from the friggin' jaws of death like a suicidal mouse playing with a cat? If this was what the rest of my life, which, granted, didn't look like it was gonna be very long, was gonna be, I wasn't so sure I wanted part of it. It got damn old, damn quick.
I'd faced down a lot of things in my...
He exited the train at Buenos Aires. This place was so unfamiliar and so new. Nothing left for him to linger around for, just this new, foreign place, with everything ahead of him.
John's life was previously tragic; enough to leave a full apartment, to take one suitcase, buy a last-minute, super-expensive plane ticket, and leave St. Louis in the dust.
The sun was setting as he walked down the airplane stairs to the tarmac; no sense of time, or anything that was going on. John knew no one. John cared about no one. The tan faces and dark hair...
Reading the random prompt for today I felt a shiver of unease as though someone had been spying on me throughout my life. I am not who I appear to be. Not a rich suburban housewife whose main pleasure in life is secretly eating a tub of toffee icecream watching daytime tv as my millionnaire husband is working overtime and entertaining clients with champagne in a 5 star restaurant. I spend my life between two worlds, a medieval princess whose life is complicated by my uncle, a brooding bishop and a bastard brother who thinks he has a claim to...
The sheep were at pasture.
It was 0300 and the troops were restless. They wanted action, not this placid chewing of grass. Every day was filled with nothing but chewing and the occasionally terrifying sheering.
The ones that came back from the shed came back wrong. Nude and shivering, wild looks in their eyes. Year after year. Jimmy couldn't take it anymore. When they came for him the last time, he ran for it. He chewed and bit and growled his sheep growl.
He didn't come back. That night they looked in when they saw the soft lights come on...
I was eating hot dogs on the dock. No problem, right? But this dude comes up and starts buggin' me, so I tell him to step off.
He Won't leave me alone, so I had no real choice but to grab the knife out of my jeans and stab the dude in the chest. Three times.
Police arrived soon thereafter and decided it would be much easier to just feed me to the sharks than put me through the system....
Lucky me
Charles looked at the man across from him, poor man john, he had all the reason in the world to do it—homeless, no job, no family—he needed the money.
"Face it, John, we know you did it."
"No," John said, sweat beading on his brow, "I didn't, that old lady just can't admit she doesn't know where she put those Bonds."
"We have you on a security camera, you took the Bonds out of her car while she ate at the restaurant." Detective Cahrles said, "Where are they?"
"In the barn on timplton's property."
The radio program came back from commercial and the husky voiced woman continued talking about robots. Steve imagined her full lips moving closely to the microphone as she discussed how robots should and should not be used.
"Some people say it's unnatural to give the elderly a robot companion," she said. "But it gives them something to talk to, even if they never respond. Studies show that seniors who have pets are happier, and live longer. But a dog cannot answer either, so what's the opposition to robots?"
Steve thought that was a stretch of belief, but her thick whiskey...