What is that, Dad, I asked.
It's the tree, he said. A tree? I repeated. No, he said, it's THE tree. The tree of knowledge, the source of all wisdom and power. Once upon a time humans ate its fruit, and that's why we got smart. It's why we made all these clever machines, you see.
It doesn't look like much, I said after a minute.
Oh, well that's not the FIRST tree, he said. It was planted from a seed of that tree. The original tree is long gone, and this is its last descendant, which still has all...
I stepped into the bathroom, which was green. There was a tape player and it was playing Chinese gongs. There was a salami in the bathtub. The salami was wrapped in that white netting stuff that they wrap salamis in at the salami wrapping plant. There was a toilet too and the toilet was filled with pee and poo and used tampons.
I was still hungry though so I started eating the salami.
"Are you grossed out because of the pee and poo and tampons in the toilet?" one girl asked.
"Both of us are members of Greenpeace," said the...
She didn't look at him. Not today. Not ever. They'd shared the #15 bus every weekday for four years. Reliable as clockwork they glided through the streets together; alone. She with her Wall Street Journal, small frowns forming with the turn of each page. He with his headphones pumping out Led Zeppelin, eyes mostly closed.
Every few minutes he looked over at her, tried to catch her eye. Maybe today was the day. Maybe today she would put down the black and white pages of bad news and, only for a second, gaze at the man in the red jacket....
The conversation lasted two words: Why now? The blank stare that met Angela's question was all the answer she needed. The time didn't matter, it never mattered. All that he was concerned about now was getting to the engine room.
Without looking back, she spun swiftly on her heel and stormed across the deck to the lift, already standing open, waiting for her. This was the day they had been waiting for, and she would be damned if she would allow something so trivial as a fleeting moment of emotion overcome her and destroy all that she had trained for....
"Flash mob. 12 PM. Be there or be LAAAAAAAAAAAME."
I put my phone back in my pocket and smiled. This was it, I thought. This was my chance to be part of the group, for good. I wouldn't let them down this time. Not when they had finally started to accept me. I rushed to my computer and opened the video Jayna had sent me. It was time to learn this dance.
Jayna had never been the most popular girl at school, but she had always been the coolest. With her blue hair and her ever-present messenger bag, the other...
She hadn't felt like this since she was six years old. Once, at a circus, she had begged her father for a balloon, swearing that she would take the best care of it . She realized now that his protests weren't cruel-hearted, but frugal. That he didn't have the money. That when he begrudgingly gave in, it meant that the family would have to go without that week, so that she could feel the joy of holding that light, floating orb above her head by a string, feeling the gentle tug upwards that whispered of something more magical, more ethereal...
Punch Judy. What an interesting thought. Punching is an interesting action. If only I wasn't that familiar with it.
I could have danced all night. At least that's what I thought. Nobody told me that these shoes would be the bane of my existence - what 13 year old goes to a school dance in anything but flats? At least that's what I thought.
I will never forget my eighth grade school dance. I've never danced so hard. My feet never hurt so bad. I had never had so much fun in my life! The dancing, the singing, the laughing, and, oh man, the pictures. I still have them. Real pictures, unphotoshopped pictures, the kind you had to get...
"Go! Go! Go!" We pushed forward, trudging through the thick sticky mud and holding globs of the stuff in our fists. "Get down!" We flattened ourselves to the ground as mud balls flew at us from the enemy lines. The warning had come to late. As I army crawled through the mud, dodging the sticky mud bombs coming at me from every direction, I saw one, two of our men fall to the ground as the mud struck them with enough force to pin them to the ground. At this rate, we had no hope of winning this war. A...
" what do you want, more than anything int he world?" The woman asked me.
"I want my daughter back" I said.
She did not ask where she was or what had happened to her. She did not ask how old she was, or what her name was. She just nodded, opened her hand, and blew a handful of glitter over me. Glitter in my coffee, glitter in my hair.
I was suddenly angry. Stupid crazy woman. She didn't know me. She didn't know Cindy. She had no idea that my little girl was locked in a coma so deep...