"I could never be a poet because I just can't seem to master the semicolon," I said.
"Not that hard to figure out, really," she replied. "Google it."
It wasn't that big of a deal to me. To be honest, I didn't even like poetry. Still, I Googled it anyway, and found out more than I ever wanted to know about the semicolon.
Later that night, I was hit by a semi; I had to have a section of my colon removed.
Uncanny, that was...
Josh ground his teeth in frustration. The other kids on the playground were really getting to be a nuisance.
He'd heard all of their excuses as to why his team always won the soccer games. He'd been held back a year, he was bigger and stronger, he'd been to some special training camp, he was a mutant, etc. They kept making excuses, saying that he wasn't playing fair, that he fouled, and so forth, even though he was always careful not to. They just couldn't deal with the fact that he was better than them.
But now it was really...
She wandered between the potbellies and the beer guts, the sharp-cornered purses and the waist-length hair that tickled her nose. She could smell the body odor of the teenagers, ripe and fertile. Popcorn in cardboard buckets passed under her nose, the butter shiny like gold.
She wasn't afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of. They were people. People everywhere. It wasn't like being lost in the woods, in an ocean, in a cave. Those places where she would be alone, those were scary places. Here she wasn't alone.
The carousel echoed its off-key melody and bounced off the carny...
Iridescent, the water moved silently over her head as her toes grazed the soft sand beneath her. In an equilibrium, almost floating but almost standing, she let the water raise her arms. This was limbo.
People always said it was best to keep your feet on the ground, so to speak. When the mind wanders, ideas get lost. Was that the way it really worked, the woman wondered, exhaling and releasing small bubbles of her life-breath into the water. The bubbles traveled upward to the surface, releasing her breath for her over her head. It was true, water made you...
Sarah sat down on the concrete bench and stared at the couple locked in an embrace.The city lights across the water blinked glowed and highlighted them against the dark sky.
The light also highlighted what Sarah lacked.
"Lousy tourists," she said fumbling through her purse for her pack of cigarettes.
She found the pack and pulled one loose and lit it.Hoping to get the bitter taste out of her mouth.
The couple hugged and kissed each other's cheeks foreheads and ears. They whispered softly and then laughed.
They stared out at the city skyline, they hands searching desperately for the...
She didn't look at him as she gingerly opened the sketchbook he had laid in front of her. Carefully schooling her face into it's most neutral expression, just in case she didn't like what she saw.
She needn't have worried.
For as she opened the book and began to gaze over the imagery, the concepts, the scribbled annotations that sounded like he had been talking to himself as he wrote them, she became lost in the world he was describing.
She could feel him tense next to her. She understood that, by being shown his work it was like she...
The birds had not come in last night and now they would be lost.
Common birds! She spat twirling a small gold spoon in her coffee clattering nervously on the edge of the doll like cup.
So long years of sorrow, so long back breaking toil. The training, the binding of tiny claws the midnight dropper feedings. All of it for nothing. Now they would peck at trash and pretend to get excited when they heard the fog horns of a garbage trawl.
Why do I bother? She picked a tiny scar at the corner of her mouth and drank...
Deluxe hotel, the brochure said. Apartment sized-rooms. You get your own little kitchen and living room and bedroom. A slightly smaller, more luxurious, home away from home.
The brochure didn't say anything about being woken up in the middle of the night by panicked pounding on the door.
I swung my feet over the side, and moved over the thick carpet to the door. I rubbed the sleep away from one eye and then put it to the spyhole. The pounding had stopped and I saw her, small and naked and covered in streaking blood. She slid slowly down the...
Wine. The God of the Sublime. Dionysian times cured the ill humored people by taking grapes, fermenting them, turning it all into a drinkable solution that would cure terrible moments in a life by twisting them slowly away with each sip of this smooth purple pulp.
I felt the first effects of wine when my friends and I would buy a cheap bottle of Yellow Tail, pop off the cork and take slow swigs as if this was our solution to boredom, happiness, sadness, and just life in general. We sipped as if wine was our blood, our fuel, our...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. She was the last surviving member of the Yoshi Crew, a band who had until recently been quite the rage amongst the in-crowd of Berlin. Her devil-may-care attitude and foul mouth had won her a place in the hearts and minds of Berlin's anti-establishment, anti-casual, anti-everything crowd. In Beijing, things had gone more than a little wrong. Mechmal, the under-fed, over-exaggerated singer had found them a gig at a nightclub in the centre of Beijing's equivalent of Soho as they worked their way around the world....