"Write," she instructed.
So he did. He wrote. He wrote of many things, and when he was done, he presented the neatly bound typewritten pages to her. She didn't even look at them.
"Write more."
He wrote more. He wrote of how he felt when the sun in the afternoon cast dappled lines across the floor. He wrote about prison bars and he wrote about prison food. He wrote about her, and how her dark hair was short and clipped above her ears. He wrote about how her brown eyes pierced his soul and tore him apart and all he...
Drudgery of the everyday. There's really nothing else to explain it. Banality of sadism. John, standing at the dump, Alka Seltzer pill wrapped in a piece of bologna for the birds. Has he ever thought what a bird might feel while its innards explode? That's not really the point. He wants to know if it can work. If he can leave a wake of destruction with nothing but everyday objects.
He watches the bird gulp down the bologna and retake flight. He sees it hesitate, and pop, it falls from the air, guts hanging out of its mouth.
Adam, working...
I couldn't sleep with her next to me. Her gentle snoring, calming to almost anyone else, was absolutely maddening to me. It was nails being dragged down a chalkboard, squealing and begging for everyone for miles to be quiet long enough for the mouse dragging its nails to be heard.
I wasn't in love with her. I didn't even love her, not for even the briefest of moments. A marriage of convenience? Who was this marriage convenient for? I knew that she slept with other men behind my back and, conversely, I knew that I slept with other men behind...
It was an early morning on Wavelike Island. The water was crystal clear and the sky was grey. The water washed up against the shore, creating soothing sounds that echoed all around the Island. The rocks around the island grew more mouldy by the minute from the water crashing up against them. The trees in the distance swayed gently while the sky rumbled with the noise of an oncoming storm.
It started to rain, and a shape appeared in the sky, resembling a bird of some type. People from far away looked at the Island and saw the bird-like shape...
"The water was clear," he kept insisting.
We all had been there. There were pictures, and a video somewhere posted on youtube. The water had been far from clear. Anything but clear. It was thick almost to the point of gummy with chocolate brown sediment, and tiny detritus the likes of which I didn't want to contemplate.
"I saw it," he said. "Perfectly clear. Purified. He was standing in the middle of it, and he made it clean by his presence. I tell you I saw him!"
We all said we believed him. Some even went further than that.
"Yes,...
I awoke, bleary eyed to an explosion of noise outside my room. I lay there still, playing the situation through my mind, wondering what on earth could be happening. It was cold, my face especially so. Suddenly I felt a wetness there and lifted my head so that I could look down at where my head had been resting. There was blood on my pillow. The smell of it hit me with some force and I almost fainted. I touched my cheek where it had rested and felt the blood there on my face. Was it mine?
The noises outside...
Goodnight…
The cracks of light from the dusty attic had faded. Even through the lid of this chest, it seemed obvious that evening had fallen. Why had the young master not returned? Why was I so thirsty?
I'd not wanted to play the young master's silly game of Hide and Seek. He'd insisted. Just after his gentry friends had laughed at him, when they'd spotted the way he looked distractedly at me cleaning the grate. His high and mighty friends had laughed and joked the way the Butcher's apprentices did at market day.
The young master seemed upset and shot...
It was raining. It seems like it was always raining these days. What with the movements of this air flow pattern and that air flow pattern, Chicago had been caught in the middle of a vortex. And all the moisture and condensation of the Earth seemed to dump here.
So, I waded through the puddles and small rivers forming in the streets. Cars were uncomfortably close to being a little too deep in trenches of the alleyways.
I crossed this street and that road. On my way to meet a friend, someone that I use to know. Back when the...
Matilda was the first woman he'd ever dated that had been a cat before surgery. She told him at the end of the third outing, to the Italian restaurant, a night of sexual tension, sweaty waiters, mixed up menus and his clumsiness knocking over the carafe of white wine over her lap. She smiled, pink lipstick still intact after a meal of coiled pasta and mince. No leaping up off the chair in horror, running to the bathroom, telling him to F O and never call again.
Matilda held his arm as they left the restaurant and stood looking over...
Drip. Drip. Drip. The blood plopped to the concrete floor like a leaky faucet. He contemplated about the throbbing pain he felt with every plop.
He enjoyed that feeling. Concentrating so much on one pain over and over again. The first time he asked his boyfriend to blindfold him and punch in him the face - his boyfriend thought he was being dirty.
"You like it rough..." he had coyly responded.
The problem was it stopped being about the pleasure and more about the pain. He wanted to feel the warm liquid glop from his mouth and puddle to his...