It was his job to paint portraits of people. They'd give him huge sums to paint them. Just look in the mirror, idiots! But it was his living, and he did it well. He lifted his brush to the canvas and glanced back at the young lady, who smiled. He smiled back weakly and started to paint. He loved the way the brush flowed over the canvas like ink out of a pen. It was beautiful. He painted slowly but surely, letting the paint take him where it needed to go. Soon the painting was finished. He showed the young...
It was the fall that surprised me the most. Three steps backward, and then that horrible feeling of stomach-in-throat, where time passes normally but feels like an eternity; seconds equaled hours as I prepared myself for the eventual landing; just as I thought I was ready, more time would pass.
All told, I was probably lacking contact with the ground for no longer than a fraction of a second, but just like in the movies, the fall felt like a slow-motion ordeal--it was as if the air were made of liquid and I was lighter than normal, but still heavy...
He wanted people to know he'd been there, so he left his shoes. There was nothing else he could leave. He trudged back up the hill towards camp. But the boots stayed. Years after, as groups of people ventured to the clear lake, they saw his shoes and left their own shoes. Without meaning to, he had started a tradition. Pairs of shoes after pairs of shoes were left by the lake, a little memento of the wearer there by the lake forever. Pairs of shoes after pairs of shoes after pairs of shoes.
The quality of the sex we were having in the wheat field is indescribable. It was better than any sex that I have had before. The sex would make the toes of a dead woman curl. It was great sex. I am quite certain you'd be jealous if I went into any lurid details about the sex that we were having in the wheat field, her legs up in the air, me doing things that you have only read about in books. The sex was great. It was not just great, it was amazing. This was amazing sex.
We were...
The bear was furious. He could no longer spot where the rabbit had gone. In the New World Order, this was something that rarely happened anymore.
"Aggghhhh!" he roared has he ripped the nearby tendril tree from it's root. The weasels would have to spend a day replanting the tree, but Ferfar didn't care. He would be in much deeper trouble for losing the Silver Velveteen rabbit. There were only 12 of them left in the rabbit warren out of hundreds of white Cottontails, which were the pride of this part of the Order anyway. Perhaps it was because they...
"Come on," Ricardo yelled, growing more frustrated by the second. "That guy is still trailing us. Step on it!"
"I don't know, Ricardo," Mark sympathized, "he looks homeless, and he probably needs help."
"Step on it!" Ricardo demanded. Mark obeyed.
Sam was just an average guy, at least he had been - but one day, he lost his job, his wife, and his two daughters at the same time. And he was cast into the streets. Sam tried to live his life, but it got harder every day, and he was in a state of severe depression. Sam had attempted...
A flash of red. A tiny girl huddled in a doorway, solace from the stinging wind. She was alone, completely alone, in a place that used to hold hundreds of thousands. Grey as far as the eye could see, except for that beautiful red dress. It was a gift from her mother. The result of much whining and pleading on her part, and saving and scrounging on the mother's. 3 days ago, on her birthday, she had opened the ornately wrapped package to discover it. She was so happy.
I don't like hats anymore. My friend from camp always wore a hat, and so did I. We would switch hats sometimes, wearing each other's hat for sometime. He let me wear his hat to Art one day. I drew it. I was so proud. That was in, oh I don't know, August? The end of summer. I lost that drawing. God, I miss him. I really do. I imagine him moving to my home town, him still wanting to be friends with me. Everything being ok. But that's never going to happen. I get the feeling sometimes like he's...
Potatoes. They were on my plate at dinner. I ate them. They tasted fine. After dinner I went to the bookstore and thought of you. I think of you there most, though we never shared our favorite books with each other. I don't know if you like Tolstoy or Camus, Kurt Vonnegut or George Orwell. But I think of you most often at the bookstore. Or the library. Anywhere with a million stories and possibilities between fresh and aging paper. I think of us that way, a million possibilities; a story waiting to be written or read. A story to...