He looked into the surface and his heart stopped a beat, two beats then three at what stared back. His chest caved inwards as a slow smile stretched and rippled across a paler face than his own. The eyes were grim and long and dead and they beat him into submission with a starving stare before he kicked his own ankle and fell to the ground, dirt scraping pits into the palms of his hands. He licked his lips and looked above about him. The roof of the hut looked like the inside of a boat falling from the sky...
We almost died on the way to Guayaquil. I think we would have been more worried if there hadn't been a near-accident. Back in San Juan, we showed off our dismissive gazes and new fedoras to anyone who condescended to notice. We are the hip. We are the elite. Our Che shirts are the only ironic Che shirts south of Belize. We are sexy Ecuadorean hipsters. Fear us.
Vanquished. Again.
How many times is this going to happen, just in the course of one day? How many times can you suffer defeat at the hands of your enemy? Even if that enemy is your coworker, how can you really stomach it happening over and over?
It's such a small thing, really. Who will empty the trash doesn't seem like something that could cause so much strife, but you're not going to do, and he's not going to do it, and it's just not going to get done. You keep looking up over your desk to see if it's...
Water. Surrounded her from every direction on the huge cruise ship. She loved being out in the ocean, looking out as far as she could see and seeing nothing but water.
Her husband, on the other hand...
"Honey, please get up. Open your eyes and see!"
He shook his head, grasping tighter to his paper bag. "Shouldn't have allowed you to talk me into this...never should have listened to you."
She sighed, thinking her husband sounded so sickly and confused. Sad thing is he never threw up, loaded up on motion sickness meds weeks in advanced, and he barely felt...
I was an optimist. I thought that I, like Hemingway, could weave my influence between countries, live in the welcoming limbo between a government I believed in and one that spoke my language. I stopped trying to return to the United States thirty years ago. I am an airplane steward now. Sometimes I write in imperfect Spanish for a newspaper named after a boat named after a nameless elderly woman half a century dead. I believe every word I write. I am happy.
But the days I spent in the narrow land come back to me every day. They knew...
Lost, without a hand to hold. I imagine that's how some men feel in my position. As though everything they once had, all those they once knew, has gone forever. Because they were abandoned, or because they pushed it all away, who can say.
Yet it's weird, I've felt that way for so long, for so many years, I assumed that that would be how I felt at this moment. But somehow, staring at the noose before me, I've never felt more alive, and less alone.
I am guilty. I am innocent. I am a contradiction. And it doesn't matter....
Shattered.
She had always had a fondness for that word, the way it reflected the brokenness it supposedly defined, the way the consonants lined up, hard and jagged on the ears and soul. Maybe that was part of its appeal. She had always had a fondness for broken things...
She stared at the black screen before her, out of practice and rapidly running out of time as the timer quietly mocked her, accused her, with its silent countdown. Time was running out. Would she have time enough to mend the shattered peices of her soul? In the seconds that remained...
Creeping up again. That is what I thought as as I woke up in my nice but dull apartment. The life I had made for myself, without you, or her, or anyone really at least not anyone warm and willing...wet. Here i was sure, so sure this time that I had vanquished these feelings these ridiculous needs to share my life, my bed to feel your long fingers reaching in to hold me. Gah, too much whiskey not enough coffee or maybe the other way around. I needed to get up to take care of this go downtown and buy...
They would never stop.
She used to love the sight of birds on a rooftop, electric wires, even clotheslines. She used to feed them in the park, throwing crumbs and other leftover sandwich bits to the flock that would land on the concrete and nibble at her feet. But they were not content.
They wanted more.
Soon, she noticed the flock flying behind her car as she drove home from work, the store, the school. They would line up behind her like children behind the Pied Piper, only these children had coal black eyes and hearts to match. They were...
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...