Vanquished. Again.
How many times is this going to happen, just in the course of one day? How many times can you suffer defeat at the hands of your enemy? Even if that enemy is your coworker, how can you really stomach it happening over and over?
It's such a small thing, really. Who will empty the trash doesn't seem like something that could cause so much strife, but you're not going to do, and he's not going to do it, and it's just not going to get done. You keep looking up over your desk to see if it's...
My sleep was disturbed. I hadn't eaten after a long day trekking across the desert. Weak and faint I lay down and fell into a troubled sleep where images of food flitted through my dreams.
I hungered to eat and in lucid cravings ate all that flew towards me. My hunger so intense now I turned upon myself. I can eat myself I thought, then I will live and tomorrow I can begin again.
I felt my hot breath on my head as my mouth turned upon myself...my wet tongue licked the side of my face as though anticipating...then in...
The fetid winds drifted heavily across the abandoned battlefield. Stench and Decay and the futility of it all. To our protagonists it was a bounty of untold riches. Coin and Cloth and untold amounts of scrap metal to be melted down. To the pickers and eaters of the dead this waste of life and treasure might feed thier kith and kin for many days. Wherever the Gods of War traveled, they were circling with unnatural patience.
The pidgeon man rolled off the sky-scraper. Thousands of birds flew with the updraft, gaining momentum as they hurled their bodies into his back. The crawling taxis below wailed insistently. Pedestrians opened their umbrellas, one by one. Sunset embalmed the towers in reflective flame.
The pidgeon man did not see what was beneath him. He only and always looked up.
His shadow grew on the pavement. He was seconds away from landing, yet the birds continued their sacrifice.
I don't like this piece at all. It is a depressing photo. :(
Read something else.
Leonard stumbled back. He almost fell. His heart raced and sweat stuck his shirt to his belly and back and armpits. He'd had patients worse off than Bea, patients with bloody ends, with pointless existances, tortured creatures that lived and died hooked to electricity and strapped to beds. None with the relative safety and comforts that he'd been treating Bea in, the comfort of home.
This was a scheduled meeting in the garden, she'd come from the trees, barefoot, bare arms, makeup garishly applied and with the gauzy veil over her face. His boy would laugh, he imagined, would point...
I am a visitor. That is the only rule that this thing between us has. That I am just visiting in your life. The briefest glance into a world of possibility. The portal to an alternate universe where lightsabers and superheroes exist is opened up for us in the single moment which we let ourselves have.
You have a girlfriend. I have a complication. But in those stolen moments, kisses, touches, dances, laughs, looks, jokes... each precious second taken from reality and given to us is the only victory that I am ever going to need. Because it is in...
Creeping up again. That is what I thought as as I woke up in my nice but dull apartment. The life I had made for myself, without you, or her, or anyone really at least not anyone warm and willing...wet. Here i was sure, so sure this time that I had vanquished these feelings these ridiculous needs to share my life, my bed to feel your long fingers reaching in to hold me. Gah, too much whiskey not enough coffee or maybe the other way around. I needed to get up to take care of this go downtown and buy...
They would never stop.
She used to love the sight of birds on a rooftop, electric wires, even clotheslines. She used to feed them in the park, throwing crumbs and other leftover sandwich bits to the flock that would land on the concrete and nibble at her feet. But they were not content.
They wanted more.
Soon, she noticed the flock flying behind her car as she drove home from work, the store, the school. They would line up behind her like children behind the Pied Piper, only these children had coal black eyes and hearts to match. They were...
Shattered.
She had always had a fondness for that word, the way it reflected the brokenness it supposedly defined, the way the consonants lined up, hard and jagged on the ears and soul. Maybe that was part of its appeal. She had always had a fondness for broken things...
She stared at the black screen before her, out of practice and rapidly running out of time as the timer quietly mocked her, accused her, with its silent countdown. Time was running out. Would she have time enough to mend the shattered peices of her soul? In the seconds that remained...
"Peasants," he thought, and stuck his pitchfork into a square of hay.
"What do they know about building a good, angry mob?"
He hoisted the bale onto a workbench and began teasing handfuls of straw out, putting them in neat piles.
He came from a family of mob organizers and leaders. Three generations of good, strong men who knew how to lead a group of frothing townsfolk up mountain passes, across fields and to the front gates of witches, evil doctors and foreign-born ne'r do-wells.
The secret to a good mob was in staying organized. Make sure everybody's got something...