It was the last day.
General Richards was tired. Very tired. He had been walking for a long time, and there was still nothing in sight. No city of glass. Not even the path of golden bricks. They were nowhere to be seen.
He sat down in the dirt, even though none of the others were sitting, even though Eliza still had the energy to dance with her nurse. Of course she had the energy; she was the one they had all been giving all their food and water to. She was only a child. She held the future in...
Absent for years and then he shoes up and wants to pretend he was never gone anywhere. Catch up, he says, get back to how things used to be.
Used to be, I told him, we,d wake up at dawn and start working. Then the drought came and the animals starved and died and then Pa snapped his back falling down from the hayloft. And then Ma just about folded in on herself until she was just this little thing that the wind could have picked up and taken away, and then one day it did.
But you wouldn't know,...
The children were not at school. The administrators voice continued to echo tinnily in her ear, but she wasn't listening any more. The children were not at school. Their backpacks still sat on the stairs near the landing by the front door. The morning sunlight poured in through the kitchen window as she let the phone slip from her grasp to dangle from its cord, banging slightly against the wall.
She had told them to go away, to leave her alone. She turned looking down the hallway towards the front door, looking at the backpacks sitting on the landing next...
Lola. When I think of her my heart doesn't beat right. It doesn't go bathumpbathump like on television. It goes beep beep beep because I'm a robot.
Wait. It's more like a clock than a heart. They've placed me in front of the Barking Burger. I'm supposed to bark every hour. Tell people about the specials and deals and what delicious meat we have. Come taste our barky patties.
Instead every hour I call out Lola. Lola. She walks by the window and cocks her head as though she can hear me.
They talk about me being defective. A chip...
“We were thrown overboard, casted onto the waters left to our demise! They captured us, tortured our very souls mercilessly with wicked demands! ”
“No, I saw you guys, you had parachutes, and falling in the water were totally your own fault.”
“But we were held hostage, left in a God-forsaken tower all tied up with (mostly) nothing to eat or drink! Only when rays of the forgotten sun poked through the crevices of the sturdy wooden door, were we forcefully fed with the remains of frogs and sour wine!”
“Oh, you mean the balcony? Isn’t access to the torch...
The key couldn't break.
Forged by the hand of fate
In the fires of adversity
Her love would mold
The white-hot metal
Into the shape it was meant to take
Then
Cooled by her touch
Quenched with desire
It would unlock
Anything
The gate closed behind them. Jeremiah and his little sister Kari glanced back to where the shimmering portal had been, only to see a green expanse behind them leading towards a large mountain chain.
"I guess we're not in Kansas anymore," Jeremiah quipped. His blue eyes crinkled as he smiled and Kari shook her head.
"Lame Jerry," she said in her high voice. "Very lame. Couldn't you come up with anything more original than that?" Jeremiah shrugged, his face flushed, and they started walking down the white path in front of them. "Do you think we'll find it here?" Kari...
He saw everything for the first time. Spread out before him, yes, the world was his oyster. He reached forth his hand, but unseen, as he should have known, was the wall. He could touch it, if he could just touch it. Everything he needed, the love, the comfort, the possessions, the knowledge.
The frustration didn't set in until later, but not much later. He took the time to soak it up, to breathe it in, to become accustomed to his surroundings. It was a relief. He would do things the way he remembered. He wouldn't be concerned.
There was...
i held it at arms length. my best friend told me it wasn't going to bite, that i should try it on. i responded by dropping it disgustedly on my dresser and hiding it under an old gum wrapper. "But it's jewelry!" she protested. i didn't care. it was from him. that lying, cheating snake of a guy who had once told me i was the only one. that was before i discovered that he'd told her that too. i opened it, then jumped back like a viper was going to leap out of it. all i saw was the...
I shot my butler. His name was Greg. I shot him because I don't think butlers should be called Greg. They should be called things like Alfred or Jeeves or Cadbury or Pennyworth. Not Greg, who was from New Jersey. He didn't have a British accent. He lisped. And he was a dwarf. And his armpits stank. And he insisted on working naked. That wouldn't have been so bad if his scrotum hadn't been seven feet long so that it dragged behind him when he walked. True, it helped keep the marble floors a little more polished, but grandma kept...