Standing on the edge, my mind was white. No; it was clear. Nothing I had experienced in my 18 years was going through my head. Not my mother's voice, or the orange corduroy couch in my Aunt Lucy's basement.
And then I jumped. Rocks and crashing waves below this cliff in Martha's Vineyard, our family vacation spot. Rushing into my head were thoughts of my first kiss, first time, smoking pot under the high school bleachers... My dad's face when I learned to drive, my mom's when I crashed the minivan.
My white sneakers were about to get soaking wet,...
She'd have preferred the electric chair. Being in the San Francisco State Women's Penitentiary was, well, prison. The orange jumpsuits were tacky. And the food was simply disgusting. She could not believe that she had been jailed for Aren's crime. She'd witnessed, but Aren's lawyer daddy had pulled some strings and landed her in this disgusting hole. Aren should be wearing that jumpsuit. The murder had been gruesome. How could the judge think that a preppy, pretty girl like her would get her hands dirty with such a thing? As soon as her sentence was over (fortunately, the judge had...
I was going to tell her the truth...honesty is always the best policy...right? But then I wasn't ready just yet. What would she think? How would she react? Would anything ever be the same?
"No. I can't tell her." I muttered quietly to myself. I hunched over another inch on my bar stool. I was alone although surrounded by patrons at the hotel called The Silent Sleeper's pub. The TV roared football overhead. I could hardley notice anything else in the room but the grain of the wood on the wooden bar counter in front of me, as I grew...
I came upon the stone after walking my whole life. When I reached it, I was surprised at how big it was. I looked up at this giant head of stone and it looked down at me and spoke.
"Why did you come here." the stone asked.
"To change you."
The stone laughed at me. "I have been here since you've known how to know. The earth has fallen away and yet I rise up. I am fundamental. How is it that you intend to change me."
I held up my hand. In my hand was a piece of sandpaper....
her bedroom wall was a collage of every valentine's day card, folded secret note, doodles, drawings, things her friends had written before their father's got a job in another city and moved. Streamers, deflated balloons, pressed leaves, plastic flowers, candy wrappers, subway, bus and concert ticket stubs. Polaroid pictures and regular rectangle pictures and pretty much anything else a teenage girl might come across in her lifetime of movement.
The detective went over every piece thumb-tacked, taped or stuck to the wall, writing in his little notebook.
"Usually they just run away for a few days," he said. "Then they...
The library was dark, lights shutting off behind me but I continued to thumb through the book. They had lamps on the desks, the kind with telescopic arms so that you could adjust the height. I'd pushed the bulb close to the pages so it left half of the images in shadow, a charcoal mystery for the eyes. I slid the page beneath the warm glass to uncover the next page. Illuminated- a dog sitting on the wooden cap of a fence, his face towards the sea. The rest of the picture was hidden in black shadow, the dog was...
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...
I wonder, looking at the picture, who he was, to dream so... audaciously. Really. To even think he could surpass me-- us, I remember, looking over at her. Her belly is round and curved, like a ripe melon, and I smile. She does not reply; she is tinkering with some wires. I am sure in a few minutes she will have something ready that will sell for millions.
The man in the photo is looking off to the side at something else. He is wearing a bulky waistcoat. I should think he epitomizes the stereotypical inventor. Indeed, the fantastical creation...
"I know you're up there," she screamed against the roar of waves crashing on the rocks. "And I know you can hear me. We have to talk, please come down."
A tugboat groaned out in the bay, and the gulls squawked overhead.
"It's bright enough today, you don't need to be up there.Please come down."
The wind whistled.
"Fine. Be that way. Make me stand down here and yell. I don't care. Actually, this is the perfect metaphor for our relationship. Me down here trying to talk to you and you boarded up in your useless tower. You think you...
Marie wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans. Breathing heavily, she glanced impatiently at the bland, hospital door; its paint peeling around the edges; the hinges rusted. She knew that her sister was not in the hands of the most experienced doctors in town, but it was the closest hospital to home. Unsure of what to do with her hands, she interlaced her fingers, scrutinising the short, stumpy nails; a result of her anxious gnawing. Marie's mind wandered, as far as it could from the looming thought of her sister's fate. But within seconds, her thoughts were pulled right back...