She stared down into the shallow pond from where she stood on the banks, and sighed. There was world just below the broken surface of the water, a world that she longed to understand. The lillypads floating on the surface seemed to hide their world from hers, but she knew better. The world below, it was alive and well. It was something that she could feel, from the tips of her fingers, up her arms and across her heart, and all throughout her entire body.
All she had to do was jump.
Though the pond was only a foot or...
The cool water soothed her. She had to get out of the stifling heat, and the stifling company. Why she had agreed to this trip she would never know, but he had insisted.
'It will be good for us,' he said.
No, it won't, she thought. It will be sheer torture, because we both know we're flogging this horse beyond it's natural lifespan. But she packed anyway, not realising that lying beside his sweaty body would be the final nail.
She floated for a while, staring at the stars. They were bright in the cobalt-blue sky, pin prinks of brightness...
The results were in. It was his back, that flimsy thing. And I mean that in more than one sense. His back had been giving him problems since we were married. Our wedding night? At the height of passion he suddenly started screaming in pain, as if marriage had injured him. Before that night, he'd never had issues before. And now it wasn't just his spine, it was his unwillingness to be strong and I would bear the brunt of his weakness. Just like I had when we were newly weds. That night I had gotten out of bed, made...
Monkey banged into the table leg. The box hesitantly tipped over, shortening its shadow. Small waves of wine sieved through the table cloth.
"That fucking dog."
We laughed, watching our evening sink into the carpet.
We were too high to be drinking anyway.
I couldn't sleep with her next to me.
It's one thing to want to be a bigger man. It's completely different to assume that you are.
My life thus far, untainted by ill temper, prejudice, greed, even religion, had ensconsed me, rolled me out to greet the world. I was the man who fought for the powerless, from the playground to the courtroom. I was the man on the covers of the local newspaper, the man who shocked the nation when my pale hand, wrapped in the dark grip of a powerless woman was held aloft.
I would die for...
She sat waiting in her normal spot overlooking the city. He said he'd return to her one day, and though it hadn't happened yet, she wouldn't give up hope. He'd always been a man of his word, and a measly thing like death wouldn't change that.
When the accident claimed his life, ripped him from her, she thought she'd find a way to join him in the afterlife. But one thing he said before passing for good gave her hope. "Wait for me." She knew what he meant; where he meant. And so she waited every day for the past...
Some people have never touched the snow, or swam in an ocean, or taken an elevator to a rooftop.
I once watched it snow on the ocean from a rooftop. I took the elevator to the lobby and walked out to the beach.
First I stood in a sandstorm. Then I ran in a snowstorm. Then I fell in the snow and the sand.
The snowflakes looked like stars falling from the night.
The gate closed behind them. Like a thunderous blast of insecurity they were shunned, abolished, removed from the society that their father so desperately tried to control. Sarah turned, taking hold of her younger sisters hand and began walking, but she wouldn't move.
"Damnit, c'mon Michelle! They've thrown us out, our dumbass father screwed up, and now we're the ones paying for it!"
"But daddy was trying so hard, he only wanted to help-"
Sarah slapped Michelle across the face, tears breaking fourth along side the ear shattering sound of flesh smashing into flesh.
"Dad messed up, he died, and...
Absent for years and then he shoes up and wants to pretend he was never gone anywhere. Catch up, he says, get back to how things used to be.
Used to be, I told him, we,d wake up at dawn and start working. Then the drought came and the animals starved and died and then Pa snapped his back falling down from the hayloft. And then Ma just about folded in on herself until she was just this little thing that the wind could have picked up and taken away, and then one day it did.
But you wouldn't know,...
Pointing skyward, his finger aflame.
"Can you come here a minute?"
Trying to catch the attention of surf but drawing only seagulls, which landed on his fingertip and looked around stupidly in the low sky of November.
My whole life is a finger on fire, and wrong things coming to help. A man wearing a hat. Some flotsam. A ship in the dead of night, a drunken captain