A crappy painting of a girl in headphones standing on the crest of a mountain, surrounded by butterflies. This is what passes for art these days? Seriously, thought Darren, I've seen better finger paintings.
As he made his way from picture to picture, Darren realized that art wasn't really his thing. Eventually, he made his way back to the entrance of the labyrinthine museum and stepped back out into the practical, utilitarian world of the city in which he lived.
Still thinking about the butterfly painting, Darren wandered through the streets of the bustling, monochrome city, occasionally bumping elbows with...
It was the nipple that made Clara blush. The rest of the artwork was intricate and exquisite, the calligraphy simply sublime. But her eye kept creeping back to the nipple. The nipple belonged to a drawing of a girl, peeking around what appeared to be a silk curtain. On the opposite page was drawn a geisha in a beautiful red kimono. Unfortunately for the geisha, the girl opposite her stole all attention.
What was this strange little book? Ancient pornography? It didn't seem titillating enough for that. Despite the nudity, the images had an innocent undercurrent, taunting, but not provocative....
I lost my grip on te wheel. The snow on my windshield was blinding. The ice beneath my tires made my car skid into the guardrail in a sort of slow motion. I could see the front of my car hitting the railing and the hood folding back up toward me. The lights shattered and white and yellow fragments came flying up toward my windshield. The airbags inflated, slow motion, hitting my face, making my head turn sideways. My iPhone flew out of my hand and hit the passenger side window, then slammed to the floor. My dog, Erin, screeched...
The dapper man picked up a penny. He inspected it, rolling it over, back and forth in the palm of his hand. satisfied, he pocketed it and kept walking down the street, a whistle blowing through his thin lips.
He stopped at a newspaper stand and debated over the local or the national paper. He glanced from side to side down the street and asked the man working there if he had anything more adult.
The clerk gave him a knowing nod and reached under the counter. The dapper man pulled at the neck of his suddenly tight shirt. He...
Okay, I needed to think. If I went left I would definetly be caught. If I went right, I would also be caught. But if I went straight ahead... I would be an open target. I had no other choice. I looked to the left and to the right, readied myself, and took off. I sprinted as fast as I could acrossc the open field and up the hill to where the man was standing, waiting to collect my information. As I ran, I could hear shouts from behind me but, since the snipers could not recognize me, I was...
I've been taught to play it safe since I was a child. Everything always slipped out of my grasp. And I never seemed to mind. Then you managed to come into my life and make scars that, even decades later, will remind me of the love we had. Can you fathom how beautiful that is? I held onto you tightly because you were the only thing that mattered. Please don't say that my love was suffocating you. I couldn't imagine loving you any less. Maybe we were too young to understand what we had. Maybe I was too naive and...
Everybody slept at eight. You had to sleep by eight. The air grew still as the sun went down, such was the way of the savannah. By the time darkness had enveloped the world, the constant patter of feet heard throughout the day disappeared.
Once in a while, one of the goats would make a noise, otherwise, it was dead silence, like a drawn breath- the night was listening. Huddled inside their rooms praying were the superstitious, trying to ward of Dimka son of the soil, who it was said came for human sacrifice around this time.
Silence, the air...
Yumi had been drawn back to the beach. Inside her trembling frame her soul screamed in agony, her weakened legs barely held her up. It had been one year and eight months to the hour since hell rose up and sucked away her reason to live. On that frigid silent morning the black putrid ocean came over them and then forever kept coming. The shrieking banshee cry of the tsunami alarm vibrated through her bones as she ran with baby Akiko in her grasp. The impact of the wave smashed her legs and the baby tumbled from her tender grasp....
My best friend is a guy called Peter and he's incredible at talking to people. He has a vault of information in his head that he's gotten from all of his past conversations with people. When he meets someone new he merely tells them what he knows so far about their hometown and then lets them build upon it, this he'll take to the next person he meets from there and so on. I was with him the other day and we were talking to a guy from south africa, we live in australia, and the guy was used to...
I took a ball, and threw it against the brick wall, to have it bounce back. I threw it again and again, to have it come back, back into my hands. I thought about my decisions, about how I threw away my future, and my life. He told me to do it. I know he did. I blame myself, not him. I threw the ball again, and heard the loud crack of it bouncing of the wall. When I hurled it the next time, I threw it as hard as I could, and rocketed back to me, through my legs,...