She didn't look at him. She couldn't. "Look at me!" he shouted. She didn't. She couldn't.
She did.
Then she did again.
This went on for several hours.
"Stop looking at me!" he shouted. But she didn't not look at him. She couldn't not.
Then she didn't.
He was always looking at her. It was a condition called Iseezyaz, which causes the poor soul to stare at the person closest to them for all of infinite eternity. "It is perhaps the most unsettling, and boring disease known to mankind," Dr. Jesus Katmandu, discoverer of the disease had said upon the...
The children were not at school. The administrators voice continued to echo tinnily in her ear, but she wasn't listening any more. The children were not at school. Their backpacks still sat on the stairs near the landing by the front door. The morning sunlight poured in through the kitchen window as she let the phone slip from her grasp to dangle from its cord, banging slightly against the wall.
She had told them to go away, to leave her alone. She turned looking down the hallway towards the front door, looking at the backpacks sitting on the landing next...
"I-I can't reach it," she choked out.
The small girl had been lying at the base of a tree in the woods, to weak to move, but too motivated to give up. Running away was not easy, but worth it.
Her cheek was bloodied and so were her legs.
Her rabbit left abandoned in a gaping hole in the tree. She dropped it, and now she couldn't get it back.
She twisted around painfully and poked her head into the hole to find an assortment of bugs making a home of the hole and of her rabbit.
The tears she...
Silent minutes ticked by. Neither of them spoke.
The wind gusted and Eloise pulled her coat closed. Daphne closed her eyes and sighed.
"Do you have any cigarettes?" said Eloise.
Daphne shook her head.
The dress, the hats, the purse - such a pitiful display. Not even any shoes. Before the war, Mme. Rocharde would have been laughed out of Paris for such a thin broth as this.
Now, though, when even this little rag of a dress was eight weeks wages....
Their shift at the factory started soon, but the sisters spent a few more minutes looking in the...
She unwrapped her sandwich and fed it to the pigeons, just as she did every day. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered making them in the first place, when she knew that she wasn’t going to eat them. And then she remembered the birds. How they would come hopping towards her when she sat on the same old bench, the paint long gone and no one caring enough to give it a new coat, the splinters of greyed wood sticking to her clothes as they grabbed at any chance to be free of their prison.
She understood how they felt....
The blue sun gave off a cold light. The snow seemed to boil under its glare while the trees darkened at their core and whitened at their tips. In the distance I saw a small stall and it gave me pause. I looked over to my partner and he looked back at me, mirroring my confusion. As we drew closer I was convinced that hunger hallucinations had taken complete control. Nothing made sense but this stall made the least sense of all.
But at the first taste of that sweet aching cold I knew that this was real. Out in...
"Death to the tyrant!" Lorenzo shouted.
Within the crowd, there were many responses. Each one said the same words, "Death to the tyrant", but each man enunciated the words differently. In each utterance you could hear the word being ejected with their personal reasons.
Tremain, in his worldview, saw the king as symbol of the working class oppression that had haunted him his whole life. Why should his money support some overfeed pompous ass who hadn't worked a day in his life? The king does not decide the laws anymore, that is the parliament's job.
Lorenzo, in his wisdom, saw...
The dog told him to kill people. It wasn't like it was the first time either. Mr. Muffins had been telling Jim to kill people since he was but a pup.
At first it was the normal crazy things. Kill the president. Kill Madonna. Kill that guy who sells ice cream cones for 2 bucks down the street.
Really. Where was a 10 year old going to get 2 bucks for ice cream? The lemonade stand only earned him seventy five cents. And a bluegreen ball of yarn from Mrs. Patacki.
He managed to ignore the dog. Puppy voices were...
The gate closed behind them. The door opened in front of them. The ceiling opened above them. The floor opened beneath them. They all fell for what felt like hours, and when they landed, it wasn't with a concussive thump, but a soft, gentle bounce. They had landed in a huge pile of foam and packing material.
They took a moment to get their bearings. They were at least twenty feel below where they originally stood. They were trapped in a rectangular hole approximately ten by six feet. They didn't find any doors or openings.
They began to panic. They...
When I was 12, I went to sea. I went to sea to see the sea. I had yet to see the sea until I was 12. Then the sea I saw, and the sea, she saw me.
We hated each other.
I had romanticized the sea, reading stories and poetry and all the great paintings of roiling waves and citrus sunsets, and salty captains and scruffy sea dogs. It got so I could smell the sea without having smelled the sea. And I couldn't wait to see the sea. So I went.
The sea, she was not pleasant that...