Six minutes. You wouldn't think it a long enough span of time to affect anything. Anyone.
And yet.
It's time enough and more to change your life. My life.
We were given six minutes. The span between one time slot and the next.
Six minutes to explain.
Six minutes to speak.
And I couldn't. There was nothing I could say to erase what I did.
So.
I kissed her.
Again.
And this time she melted into my arms.
Wrapped hers around my neck.
And for six minutes it was perfect.
Bliss.
Until the buzzer rang. And someone rapped on the...
Photoshoot for bikinis in the middle of winter in a snow covered backdrop was usually my worst dread. Today, however, I was glad because word reached us that our studio blew up after a group of teenage boys decided to experiment with chemicals using a translated foreign magazine. Disaster!
That night huddled in the nearby bar, drinking mulled cider we all said thankful prayers for our good fortune. Jessica, normally the drama queen, shivered and hugged Milly the girl she most hated in the world, or so she had always thought. Today we all grew up.
Starving to be slim...
The thing about mermaids is, well, that they aren't.
You're thinking seashell bikinis and fish tails, but that isn't it. Not at all.
My cousin Marjorie, this is back in '30, mind you, and the turn for the worse had been taken by all of us. She kept her things, her jewels and her dresses. They became her scales, her fins.
She decided to become a mermaid in the same way that some of us choose to marry. It was deliberate, it took forethought. She knew that she would dive beneath the waves to never return. Perhaps she would give...
He told me to sit here.
So I wait. Waiting for what? I don't know.
The suspense is killing me. Wait. No it's not. That Mountain Dew I drank is killing me...and all the other GMOs that I consume because my brain tells me I need them. That's not important right now...why am I rambling? I'm in the middle of nature, waiting for him. I should be calm and peaceful. Solitude does that to people. Most people. But not me. I can't sit still. And. Do. Nothing. Maybe that's why he told me to wait here?
He told me to...
I had already been running for way too long. Over rocks and streams, around trees, it didn't seem to matter. The maze of the landscape seemed perfectly clear to me as I forced myself through the forest.
The only things I knew for sure were that I had to get away from this thing and that the only advantage I had was my familiarity of the land.
The beast was definitely faster than me. And hungry. Those two things together weren't making things look good at all.
Why did I have to go into its territory and steal food? Why...
Harold finally decided to turn his life around while he was standing in front of the elevator.
Even though his meeting was on the second floor he hit the up button, buzzing with excitement at the possibilities of where it could take him.
Kenya was the name of my doppelganger. I thought it a strange name, thought he might call himself Jim or John, both my names. I am James John Madison. But no, he told me he was Kenya that first time I spotted him in the bathroom at the hotel.
At first I thought I was hallucinating, but he was real. Not a ghost, but an actual man. He said it was amazing our paths had crossed this way although he always guessed there was a second version of him around.
We discussed urban legends, that seeing our other half could...
She stumbled blindly through the woods, images of every horror movie she'd ever seen flashing through her mind. Admittedly there were very few of them, but they all seemed to involve people getting lost in the woods and meeting an untimely end. The Blair Witch Project had been the most recent, and she hadn't been able to sleep for weeks after watching it. But this was only a game.
Only a game. She kept repeating the words under her breath, letting them calm her. Only a game. None of this was real. Her best friend, lying motionless on the ground...
They were listening. Their ears pressed up against the wall. She held her breath, the clock ticked. Her boyfriend huffed and rolled his eyes. She glared at him and held a finger to her mouth. He was about to speak when it started again.
The yelling, this time it was followed by a crash. Then the low voices. It was odd, it wasn't the usual commotion they heard from the neighbors. The man's voice was urgent, the woman's angry.
Straining, she shifted her weight so she could better press her ear against the wall and when that didn't work she...
My singing was awful. Didn't matter as the audience were drunk, I could see Lorna sticking her tongue down John's throat as the light swept over the audience. They didn't seem to care that anyone might notice and tell John's wife in a text during the interval. After my horrendous attempt at Billy Holiday I heard a voice in my ear, it was a child asking me to talk to someone called Betty who had red hair, an addiction to pickled eggs and had three cats called Tom, Dick and Harry.
She was sitting in the last row and only...