In these parts, they could not afford trains. Instead, they strapped the Jews and leftists and gypsies and cripples and social undesirables onto sleds on the back of a Volkswagen and hauled them to the camp, which was really a slapdash cardboard affair. The guards were lazy and disinterested. They really didn't see a point in the whole thing, but they did their jobs nevertheless, smoking cigarettes with the more gregarious prisoners. They resented the prisoners and beat them - After all, they thought, why should I have to waste my life standing around guarding these people that the Reich...
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 results were in, she said. And he ran and ran and ran and ran, disregarding the shouts of teachers behind him, just running and running and running till he reached the office. It was up on the bulletin board, sandwiched between changes in the lunch menu and posters for bake sales. He stopped for a moment, breathless, eager. Slowly he let himself look at it. The names were up. He scanned through them: Joe Malone. Hendrick Smith. Jerry Pandrip. Jonathan Sinker. Hetty Carbuncle.... so many names. He knew most of them: they had been his companions during the test,...
The disco ball was turning. But only in my head. I began to dance around again, like always when it started to spin. I looked in vain for a way out but they just laughed. It was like Hell but only worse because not only was the disco ball only in my head, so were the songs.
I didn't dislike Donna Summer but you can only take so much disco. The Bee Gees were better. They had a vast catalog of the beat. But the Xanadu soundtrack was the killer.
The straps tightened and the camera narrowed it's focus on...
"Travel light."
"But take everything with you."
A murmur of confusion ran across the gathered crowd.
"That will only slow us down!" The young man who had been such a cool head through all of their troubles spoke firmly, with an authority far greater than his age would normally have allowed.
"We can't allow them to find anything which they could use against us." The town drunk retaliated. Or at least, that was all he had been, until the shadow began to cross the land and the war drums had begun to beat once more, since then, he had been...
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...
You can count me out. You really think I'm going to use that thing? that dangerous, weapon-like thing? You really think I'm going to lug around four pounds of dead animal flesh? Think again. Don't even get me started on the sphere of death as I like to call it. Have you noticed how it comes toward its victim, hurling itself through space at a hundred and seventy-five miles per hour, no conscious, just aim and fire. It's not for me. I'm not saying I'm a wimp, I'm not saying you're crazy. I'm saying I have no wish to die....
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...
"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...
I was staring. I could feel myself doing to but I couldn't stop. I was transfixed.
We had met only three days ago and already I just knew that she had made an impression. Although until this moment, I had no idea just how much.
Her skin was flawless marble. Her frame slender and perfectly proportioned. Her hair long, thick and silky.
She was perfect.
Even now, as took off her clothes and showed me her secret.
The giant red scar cutting into her side.
She wasn't ready to tell me where it had come from, but I was okay...