i thought we were best friends, eternal companions, trustworthy confidants. warriors on a mission, one for all and all for one. little did i realize just how wrong i was. you set yourself up for attention, while i slip away into the shadows. you possess the ability to break things, while i possess the ability to clean up the mess. i stand up and defend you when others prey upon you, but you simply stand back and watch as they prey upon me. i fight your battles as well as my own, a lone warrior. but today is the day...
The corridor was dark. He could hardly tell where he was going. All James could do now was grope around in the dark dusky cellar. Searching for it in this decrepit old place seemed to be a good idea at first before. James just wanted to find that locket and get out of this place. He can feel the cold stagnant air in the cellar creeping down the back of his ratty old shirt. Finally he could make out what seemed to be a door just in front of him. James reached his hand out into the surrounding darkness to...
sitting on the I see my family crumbling before my eyes. I have achieved my goal, revenge for what they have done to me in my childhood. They took all my friends and everything I was passionate about all away from me, so now I am returning the favor. There they are, my parents kneeling down as they are being beaten to the ground and watching everything they love fade away. this is the way things work now. I am the dominant one and they will suffer at my feet. They have brought this on themselves and I will never...
I held it at arm's length, thinking that it could never get to me that way.
But as I sit here alone in this room night after rain soaked day. I have come to realize,with the full clarity of a reformed sinner; it was not that I was protecting me from it. It was that I was protecting it from me.
And it never wanted protection in the first place.
He searched through the records, long dusky fingers flipping rapidly through file after file in the Archives. He kept going, past James, past Jenkins, past....there it was!
Private Justice Jernigan, 61st Georgia Infantry, Co. A. His hands fairly trembled as he pulled out the pension record, gazed at it, read it voraciously. There it was. Private Justice Jernigan, listed as "man servant" for William Jernigan. It was also noted that he was a confirmed soldier, having fought at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville before being crippled by a wound in his right knee. That confirmed the stories handed down by his parents...
He was coming. Footsteps down the hall.
And, of course, he was alone. Nobody else inhabitated this old house - his wife had disappeared, a long time ago now. He can't blame her, it's impossible to blame her, after that - after their son (their son, their child, their baby) was born, she had retreated into herself.
Of course their son chased her, raged at her, destroyed her. Mothers hating their children is meant to be post-natal depression, but does that count if the child is goading her, forcing her to hate?
She has been gone for a while now....
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. She looked over her shoulder to peer at the mouth of the alley. Seeing no one, she ducked out of the doorway and ran towards the seeming dead end. Stepping onto the large crates piled at the end, she looked up at the rope that was starting to dangle down from the roof, 5 stories above her. Taking a firm hold of the rope, she hoisted herself up, hand over hand, until she made her way up to the roof.
"I have the key," she says...
It was the fall that surprised me the most. The fact that it took so long that I could actually be afraid of the action of falling. The wind was stinging my face and making my eyes water, I was screaming but the noise of the explosion had taken out my hearing. The people strapped in around me were mere shadows, forms with fuzzy outlines and indiscernible features, mouths open in silent noise.
I forced my head back round, my throat filling with bile as the ground suddenly rushed up to meet us, my fingers twisting in the belt around...
The lamp wouldn't turn on. Stupid thing, thought Lisa as she slammed her fist against it. That's what you get for buying cheap tat, though. She was a sucker for a bargain, or anything she perceived to be a bargain. There was of course, a vast difference. One time she had bought three crates of dog food from a clearance store.
'But you haven't got a dog!' her boyfriend had cexclaimed.
'Yes, but it was so cheap!' she had countered. This logic making perfect sense to her.
She tapped the lamp again, absent mindedly. Nothing. Not even a flicker. Zilch....
Wine. The one I was forced to drink tasted sour. I could imagine what it was doing to my insides. The bottle forced between my teeth was going to shatter any moment, I knew it.
Waking up in hospital days later, I wasn't surprised to see lacerations on my face from the glass. The doctors tried to stop me from taking a look and wanted the bandages to stay on, but I always preferred to face reality rather than avoid it.
A psychologist was brought in, and I went through the motions. I didn't need anyone to soften the blow...