Da dum de dum, normal day- HOLY SH*T I'M FLOATING. WHAT THE HECK. I'M FLOATING. WAIT A MINUTE HOLD IT IS THAT A PINEAPPLE. WHY IS THERE A PINEAPPLE- oh hey Jenny. Guess what? WE'RE FLOATING. WE ARE FLOATING IN THE SKY. I AM SO CONFUSED. WHY ARE WE FLOATING. AND WHY ARE THERE RANDOM ALARM CLOCKS. THAT ARE ALSO FLOATING. I AM FLOATING. WE ARE ALL FLOATING. WHAT THE HECK.
I was trying to count them. The little bastards kept moving around, making me lose track, infuriating me to no end. I had been awake for almost thirty hours and sleep was no closer than it had been twenty-nine hours ago. Even my imagination wouldn't collaborate in sending me into unconsciousness. Goddamn sheep.
Sheep and sleep were two very similar words, I decided. I instantly sought to catalog all the words that rhymed with sleep. Bleep, steep, reap, peep, seep, weep, beep, keep, jeep. Meryl Streep.
The original verb still eluded me. It would be a long night (and day).
"You know what 'fuck' means?" said Dean, almost skipping. Behind porthole glasses, David couldn't avoid looking bewildered.
"Um-"
"It means you put your penis," gesture, "in a girls vagina," gesture, gesture. "And you go uh uh uh uh!" More gestures. David felt awkward, but had to laugh a little bit. Maybe middle school in England was different than it was in America, he wondered.
Dean cheerfully stepped along, singing the word "fuck" in just about every melodic interval he could think of. Maybe this was normal, David thought, and his conservative Christian upbringing hadn't prepared him for what life was...
It was an odd feeling. Looking at a family. He'd been away from his own family for so long that he felt like he'd never had one. Now look at him, alone, dirty, addicted, wandering the streets without a cent to his name. How could he even try? It was so close. He looked at his wallet. No money. No credit cards. No business cards. Just photo, wrinkly and turned over, of the family, the life he once had. As he looked at the family in central park, it almost made his heart yearn. He wanted to turn over the...
The lamp wouldn't turn on. He struggled with it for what seemed like half an hour, swearing under his breath, and then swearing out loud, loudly out loud, freaking out both of the cats in the apartment. He would apologize to them later. Anyway, they should be used to it by now.
And then once he got the damned thing on he couldn't turn it off.
He wasn't going to waste half an hour on this useless project, too. He wanted to go to bed. He simply unplugged the lamp. That turned it off. That worked. Now the apartment was...
I spent days in the field, hoping to see something bloom. The desert surrounded me like the ocean that surrounds an island. The farm was my island, but the desert seemed to stretch on forever. I could feel my spirits drop, the hope I previously had, burnt into wispy embers. Dark, black roots were sprawled all across the field and it only made my stomach droop as much as my hope. I heard my stomach grumble, and the craving biting into the edges of my abdomen. Desperation was my last resort. I searched one more time, holding onto the remnants...
Until now, she'd never thought of herself as pretty.
She'd never thought of herself as anything close to it. Too tall, too dark, too weird-looking in general, too much stomach fat and too small a face and too much that was just plain wrong.
Too little personality at first and then too weird a personality later. Too much for other people to deal with.
Too timid to speak up, too hinged on other people's expectations of her.
Too affected by what others said, too stupid to bring up her own ideas or her own thoughts.
And how that's changed.
Now...
"I'll be 69 this year."
I lifted my eyes from my book, struggling with my irritation. Across from me sat a woman, her eyes clouded with reflection as she stared over my shoulder. "Forty years I could have spent with someone who adored me if I hadn't have been so blind."
I blinked. I couldn't quite tell if she was actually speaking to me. I folded my book around my thumb and waited. The ache in her voice spoke to the same in mine and I refused to look at my phone that had hummed more than once, someone far...
"Mister Cloone?" said the sergeant as he sat down. "You know why we're holding you, right?"
Cloone shrugged and leaned back. "Fascism? Something something smokes?"
Sergeant Miller took off his own glasses. "We're stopping you here at the Richford/Quebec crossing because you were smuggling Cuban cigars into the country. Why would you do that? You didn't even try to hide them."
"It's the Hemingway in me. Cuba. And 'fuck the system'."
"You think that smuggling cigars makes you Hemingway?" asked Miller.
"I think it's a good start," replied Cloone.
"We have the boycott in place for a very good reason....
god finger-painted the sky in blue, and glued on layers of fluffed cotton for the feel of it. he carefully arranged macaroni noodles below it, forming the shapes of volcanoes, of funeral pyres. he was making a field. he imagined sun ripened workers tending his pasta land, sweating and itching, and he made it so. they did not have time to wonder who created them. god was thoughtful enough to give them mountains to look at. he was proud of that. he took his artwork home for his mother to see.