She began a cigarette.
She thought about the beginning, when both of them wrestled with being simultaneously addicted to and afraid of each other. The fear was its own pleasure: they both noticed that the adrenaline of their hours apart was worth infinite foreplay.
She watched the first part of the logo turn orange and then grey. The image lasted in the ash for a second before mixing in with the image of the paper.
Later, she began to notice a strange emotional trajectory in their evenings together: the impulse, the sex, and then sadness, or disappointment. The sweat turned...
It was the fall that surprised me the most. The push I think I kind of expected. I knew there would be some repercussions of me speaking out of term the way I did. I knew that he would push me, I did not expect the fall.
It was that stomach rising to your throat kind of feeling, where you suddenly realise what is happening and you cannot stop it. The fear that runs through you so quickly that it makes every part of you feel cold.
It passed in as quicker time as it had begun, yet I was...
He sighed. It was an all-too-frequent result. Women never noticed him (here he paused to chastise himself for thinking that without providing any statistical evidence, and to suggest to himself that perhaps he had an availability bias), and he was lonely.
Why shouldn't he be able to give and receive love, like every other member of the human race (here, he noted that it was unethical to assume that any individual deserves the respect or love of another without earning it, and that he should avoid thinking of a romantic partner as an object that one acquires)?
It just wasn't...
I lost my grip on the wheel. Well, not really. In reality, I lost my grip on everything. In that moment, nothing else mattered. The world around me became a blur of distant activity and the noise around me sounded like a conversation floating through walls from the other end of a house. The world both started in motion and went completely still in the very same second. In that moment, walking past him in the hallway, I forgot my name. All I could remember was the image of him walking to his locker that burned itself into my mind....
Elisha, let me tell you, I love being out here. Hearing the ocean roar like it do, by golly, it's like the glorious music of the spheres.
Drowns out the screaming of our victims, too. Why they have to scream like that, Elisha? Don't they know we're just helping them reincarnate into the next evolution of the species? Damn ungrateful, ain't it.
Whats the matter, Elisha? You don't look so chipper all of a sudden. Are we out of fishing line? We need the lines to be thick and taut, so we can hang them upside down until the blood...
She glanced demurely across the two-foot circle of a table at him. What a catch. His work shirt was only slightly ill-fitting, his hair feigned casualness. He couldn't stop looking at her. It may have been the needless extra half-inch of cleavage she had allowed.
There really wasn't any need to try. His work-weary eyes and somewhat hunched shoulders showed that he could use some fun. His seemingly lackadaisical approach, charming smile and the comfortable way he asked her out meant that he'd taken girls here before. The Portland City Grill, 30 floors up in the highest building in Portland....
The children were not at school. Where were they? Unkown. I am an English teacher at a high school near Houston and, like any other weekday between late August and early June, I was expected a classroom of childen in front on me. Not on this day. The bells rangm yet I heard niothing. I saw nothng. Heck, I didn;t even smell anything! I walked out into the hallway and talked with the other teachers. Nobody had any students in their rooms. I then saw all the princiapls talking with angry words and loud voices. They didn;t seem to know...
To push a button. Such a simple thing. But where would it take me?
Down.
But what will be waiting for me there? Is it a place I want to go?
I thought I had hit rock bottom, but when there seemed no lower place to go, the answer is this elevator.
Down
But maybe Down is Up. The raised letters under my fingers promised escape and newness. In a life where everything is the same and without hope, any change can be good, right? Hope as a byproduct of fear.
Nothing to lose.
Down.
The children were not at school. They were in the phone booth. Both of them - Kit and Lemuel. They just couldn't keep out of that phone booth, located on the corner of Samuel and Lane Street. Lord knew why. Maybe it was because of the peanuts.
Kit was 8 and Lem was 7 and they were both s'posed to be at Lincoln Elementary. But that phone booth called to them.
"Who should we call today?" asked Kit.
"Let's choose a name out of the phone booth at random," says Lem.
So they open up the white pages and Lem...
I can taste the tingle on my tongue the second it touches. I can smell the sweet/sour, crisp, smell. The food is amazing here. They have things I have never seen before. All of the yellows, oranges, blues and reds. The rainbow of food. The tastes of everything is new and refreshing. None of it makes sense. How can a place like this, make such beautiful flavors? The new discoveries of flavors and smells fills my mind. What new things can they even make? Find? The question lingers in my mind.