It was a brave day for navy blues men. And a sad day for pirate kind. The navy blues men had defeated the pirates at their own game, the blues. The pirates were especially bluesy that day, having been attacked by navy blues men. But the navy blues men were bluesier, there was no question about it.
"Ohhhh, we gots the blues," the navy blues man named Salut sang. "We gots more blues than yooooou!" It was stated; it was true. The pirates felt the sting of defeat. Ironically, they felt bluesier now than they had before. But it was...
The ghosts of her past continued to haunt her.
The parents she'd disappointed, the boy she'd left behind, even the teacher who had taken her under her wing in the hopes of helping her realize her full potential. She saw them all before her as clearly as the last time she'd seen them. Their frowns, knitted brows, and downcast eyes. She hated those expressions, the disillusionment of their ideals written across them like ink on paper.
How could any of them have known her true potential? And if they had, would they have been heartened or horrified? Knowing ignorance was...
Cuthbert was a fairly average Crocodile, with the expected number of teeth and glinting eyes like two marbles set in his swarthy head. He was not a particularly happy Crocodile though, as he was kept in a pen in a tourist attraction, where he was made to jump fifteen feet in the air to obtain his dinner, which was invariably a raw, plucked chicken on the end of a long pole. He found this predictable, boring and undignified.
So, one day, like any other. When the crowd gathered to watch his feat, cameras and phones poised to record him springing...
Peasants. Every last one of them, with their cheap hairspray and horrid distaste in bowties.
I stood at the edge of the sixty second annual GreatVac vacuum door-to-door salesmen conference in a state of disbelief. These people were my peers? My coworkers? My confidantes? Not a civilized, educated human being appeared to be in the room.
Barbarians. You would think that GreatVac, a company founded in 1904 on good American values would have a bit more poised and elegant populace.
And clearly the organizers of this event had very poor catering skills, as the punch was repugnant and the finger...
No shoes or socks in the snow, JaKK was only focused on finding the settlement. Escaping was the easy part, finding his family might be hard. Physical discomfort was not part of his programming, his body able to withstand any extremes of temperature.
The scientists had made them. Fed them. Studied them. Experimented on them. Killed them. Few were left.
After two days he was still beside the forest, the neverending trees.
He might be alone. Lost.
But for the first time in his existence.
He was free.
The clock had stopped.
The clock had stopped at two minutes past eleven, but whether that was eleven this morning, last night, or three weeks ago, he wasn't sure. He rarely looked at the clock - it was just something that was there, on the wall, taking up space. Something that he would, no doubt, miss were it ever to be gone, but, because of the sameness of it, because of the reliability of its general shape being where it always was, it went unnoticed.
It was only the fly that was buzzing annoyingly around the room that caused him,...
Words were labels that he had never paticularly enjoyed. Words were lazy, letting you lapse into not thinking about them. Once you had the label for it, you could move on, not bother thinking about the object itself.
"Weird" was a label. It was a sentence. It was a write-off. A decision that he wasn't worth worrying about, not worth bothering with. They tried to pretend it wasn't, or at least some of them did - at least the cruel ones were honest. They didn't pretend they wanted to understand him. As far as they were concerned they did; they...
Lost, without a hand to hold. That sounds about right. I never thought about it that way, though. To me it's more.. lost, without a sight to see? I don't usually think of people as guiding me. Especially in terms of being lost. Usually, it's my surroundings. This can be taken at face value - if I were lost somewhere in a city, I would be looking for landmarks to guide me. It has a double meaning though. If I feel lost, as in lost without a hand to hold, that means lost in life. To me. I suppose lost...
The audience stared open mouthed at me. The excitement of their shock rippled and fizzed through me as I beamed at them, arms spread wide.
I'd been acting in the same play for what felt like aeons and it had begun to wear on me. Each line felt like a chore and I had said so to a friend of mine over coffee.
"Do something new, then!" he'd said, "Do something exciting!"
I'd pondered this suggestion as I dragged myself into my costume. The most wondeful idea hit me and acted my part better than I ever had before, buzzing...
Kelsey was afraid to go out at night. Afraid of big, bad Bromley. When she told people she met online that she left in Kent, they always said she was lucky to live in such a nice, leafy Home County, nestled away in the undergarments of England's green and pleasant land.
But Kent had a dark, nasty side. That side was called Bromley. Yet another drive-by? Really? People didn't associate Kent with gun crime, or compare it to the LA ghettos, but Kelsey did.
Her friend Marie had also had enough of it. But Marie wasn't so scared.
"Kelsey, let's...