Green cover holds me. Oak Tree stands guard behind me. Sun warms me. Stream sings me to sleep. Sleep meets with Dream and carries me into the depths of Imagination where everything is what nothing ever was or will be.
"Aim for the torch."
"I'm trying!"
"We're gonna miss it."
"I know! I said I'm trying!"
"Ok, forget the torch. Try to land on, uh, her shoulder or something."
"The wind's too strong."
"How about her feet? The balcony? The plaza? ...The field?"
"This isn't my fault. No matter what happens, this isn't my fault."
"We're going to end up in the ocean, aren't we?"
"Probably. No, wait! I could just... Hmm. Yep. We're gonna land in the ocean."
"I don't like the ocean. It's wet."
"Shut up and deal with it."
"Plus all the cash in my wallet is...
Fault.
Such a familiar word.
Im not sure what it means and what it looks like but i can feel it.
I feel it for a long time since i can't remember.
I feel it brings heavy and pain.
People see me, im nervous.
Their pain eyes.
Their sorry eyes.
Their cynical eyes.
Their fellow eyes.
I'm going home.
I look in the mirror to find what people saw in me.
I can't get anything.
Ok, im going to sleep.
...
I wake up.
Remembering that last night i dreamt of my Mom wrote my middle name; Lauft, for hundred...
Running, running from the people behind me. I don't have the time to look back. But I know they are after me. I flee along the soccer field once again. As I have done for so many days after school. There words are thrown at me , they hit me like the punch that knocks out the boxer. The though of boxer reminds me, I am not small any more, I have been running through this fields to training, to practice, to learn to fight back.
I turn around, I use my words to shield myself from there words, I...
It wasn't like that. It wasn't. She hadn't led him on. Or him her. It wasn't like she'd planned to have an affair. There, she'd finally said it. An affair. With her boss. Her married boss. Her dreamy, overworked, misunderstood boss, Tim. It wasn't like it was sordid, or wrong. It wasn't like they'd been indiscreet. It wasn't like any of her colleagues had known. It wasn't like she'd expected him to break it Off. It wasn't like he wasn't kind. The bastard.
"Tim, you bastard. Why do you care enough to want an end to spare your wife?"
It...
My father was born. The pressed leaves of Limerick brushed from the crib. A mirage shimmers over the pond. Ships and flags and trucks. Red brick stoops on analog streets. Lamps on the corners.
We move and it is 30 years later. Soon the crushed leaves of New York gather. The east coast bleeds in tides, rushing us over the Plains.
In the West, we dry in the momentary sun, then open our mouths for the never-ending rain.
"I hate him. He could get hit by a car randomly in the street, and it wouldn't matter to me. It would probably make my days better."
Anyway, it happened. It would. And so then the whole school was plunged into mourning of varying depths. Mourning of the grievous type, and mourning of the more celebratory kind.
Let's be honest. He made everyone's life miserable. He never bothered to even sit. His room was the hallway, not a desk.
The administrator who suspended him that day couldn't stop questioning himself: could I have done more? Should I have done it?...
"That's it. You've gone and gotten us lost!"
"Now, I haven't done any such thing. I simply need to reorient myself." He adjusted his thick spectacles and scanned the wide expanse of the coast before him.
"We've been wandering around this city for three hours and haven't seen another living soul. Now, that'd be what I'd call lost, huh?" The second man slung one hand into his pockets and took a long drag on a cigarette with the other. He exhaled a stream of smoke, in his anger reminding the glasses man of a fire breathing dragon. He relaxed a...
"Mallard duck," she said, just before she placed the binoculars back down on the car hood. "No doubt about it."
This was the third time she had drug my out to this place to observe ducks. Or, in her words, to "administer some duck justice."
"Do we really need to be here this early in the morning," I asked. "I didn't sleep very well."
"This is when they're most active," she told me. "This is when they feed most, and that's when they pick on him."
"Him" was a duck with, so she said, a clipped wing of some sort....
If money was the root of all evil, then wine must surely be a close second.
Jasper gazed through the rosy depths of the wine glass in his hand, observing the scene beyond with quiet detachment. Wine had always mellowed him, left him with a feeling a pleasurable distance from his surroundings, as though nothing that happened would effect him at all. He remembered his girlfriend's anger at his apparent coldness when she informed him of her condition, the way she had yelled and screamed and beat her fists against him as he silently took in her news, analysed the...