When Martin woke up, he was still in the back of the van. He didn't know, how long he was unconscious. He couldn't see anything but darkness, but he heard and felt, that the van was still driving. After a while, his eyes started to make out some details in the dark, when he spotted a tine hole in the van, through which a little light came in. He pressed his face onto the aluminum wall and tried his best to make out some details about his whereabouts. At first, all he could see was white, but then he spotted...
The results were in, and the guy she voted for came second. She wasn't one bit surprised. Kate was never the lucky one.
At school, her younger sister was the academic one, and of course this was the attention grabbing trait where their father was concerned. Acheivements, medals, gold stars, good grades. These were the things that made a child great.
Kate was bestowed with other virtues. Naturally blonde hair, a pert, rosebud mouth and breasts at fourteen. Her male attention had come from another place altogether, usually behind the science block under the watchful gaze of Gary Spivey and...
His back leaned against a wall while his dust ridden face peered down at the ground. His eyes darted from one cigarette butt to the next, and finally, made a triangle with a crushed beer can. Counting the butts and the cans, he slowly peeled his foot off the wall and languidly marched down the street.
"Spare chang'?" he mumbled to a passerby, reluctantly looking into their eyes. No verbal answer came except for the heavy footsteps gaining speed as the man in a white collar shirt passed him.
"Spare chang'?" he grunted again to a group of young twenty-somethings...
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...
It was the fall that surprised me the most. We worked together for years on the 82nd floor of Tower two, and when I knew we couldn't get to the bottom I knew he'd want to go to the top. I agreed immediately even though I knew he had a plan, he always had a plan. I was too busy not thinking clearly to think clearly, about what this plan would would to do us, how it would end, how we could survive.
For the last minute of his life, the terror was gone. His smile didn't surprise me, I...
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,...
Sal knew his time was running out, a runaway train heading straight for him but he had nowhere else to go.
"So... will you?" he pleaded, kneeling before the woman of his dreams, heart- quite literally- in his hands. Ever since they had met at the runaway shelter, they had spent every waking moment together.
Lucy gazed, not at the engagement ring with the heart-shaped diamond, but rather at the train hurtling toward them both, it's lights illuminating her would-be fiancé like a spotlight.
"What, are you crazy?" she hissed, pulling at her boyfriend's arms, leaning back with all her...
When I was 12, I went to sea. I went to sea to see the sea. I had yet to see the sea until I was 12. Then the sea I saw, and the sea, she saw me.
We hated each other.
I had romanticized the sea, reading stories and poetry and all the great paintings of roiling waves and citrus sunsets, and salty captains and scruffy sea dogs. It got so I could smell the sea without having smelled the sea. And I couldn't wait to see the sea. So I went.
The sea, she was not pleasant that...
"But do you love me?"
Love? What is love? Love is a social construct. Love is an excuse to screw someone you think is hot. Love is a joke, a trap, an illusion. Love is what you wish for when you don't know how the world really works.
I see your skin and I think of you naked, wish for you to fall into my arms so I can possess you. Part of me wants you now, part of me wants you always.
There's only a limited extent to which these parts overlap.
Lust after you, to be sure. Like...
'Where the bloody hell are you?' asked Colin as I picked up the phone. 'I've been calling all day. I'm with John and Sarah at the pub, we're waiting for you.'
'Don't you dare speak to me like that Col, I'm fed up of it. Why do you think I'm not answering.' Then I let him have it. Months of frustration at his obsessive calls, controlling nature and his habit of always turning up wherever or whoever I was with. On a first date....that didn't put Col off. He'd try and sit down with us. Making love early in the...