Until now, she'd never thought of herself as pretty.
She'd never thought of herself as anything close to it. Too tall, too dark, too weird-looking in general, too much stomach fat and too small a face and too much that was just plain wrong.
Too little personality at first and then too weird a personality later. Too much for other people to deal with.
Too timid to speak up, too hinged on other people's expectations of her.
Too affected by what others said, too stupid to bring up her own ideas or her own thoughts.
And how that's changed.
Now...
The waves were bigger than she'd ever seen before. They were not waves tonight. They were destructive bombs, pulverizing everything in sight.
The ship groaned and twisted. Her efforts and those of the crew around here proved futile.
She gasped as a larger wave loomed in front of her. She braced for impact as the icy cold water plunged her into nothingness.
Deeper and deeper she went, her lungs gasping for air. She held fast the rope around her waist.
Then nothing.
She opened her eyes to a bright light. So bright. Where was she? Shielding her eyes she saw...
The water was clear. What? Sorry! The helicopter… the heli… ok?… can you hear me now?
No… I checked all the buildings… Personally. There's no sign… Yes, they're here now. Some are sweeping the island…
… the Coast guard were…er… surprised when I explained why we were all here…
No, they finally got what we were doing. I even managed to hand out a few brochures… Yeah, assuming we don't get bad press from today you might have a fe…
Sorry. Yes. Not the time… No, everything went according to the script. People slowly "disappearing" into the hidden room… No,...
Whatever made me want to be here? The thump, thump, thump kept repeating, as one song blended into another.
"This isn't music." I muttered to myself. Then I turned to glance across the bar and realized the "music" didn't matter.
There she was. She smiled at me, and I felt alive again. As she wandered my way pushing through the packed disco, I felt a nervous excitement begin to grow in side my stomach. I wished I'd had fewer Millers that night; I didn't want to sound wasted when we began talking.
"Hey there," I began.
Capriciously, I repudiated the sky and all its lighting and thunder, snow and rain, and changing colors.
The paradigm wasn't there. Or was it?
Well, if it wasn't and if it were grounded by gravity, then so many Big Things are just frivolous.
Like love.
And losing a lover.
And even being born here, gasping for breath at first, and fighting through a mob just to climb some ranks and "make it." And those were the Big Things, too.
The paradigm here can't hold such Big Things if it was made to only hold such small, ambiguous entities like eating,...
He was a great runner. Clare ambled along at the back, jogging along, lost in a daydream as usual. He steamed ahead, focused on the finishing line. He had lapped her once already; she had felt the wind pick up, the footsteps thumping on the ground, then he'd passed her in a blur. The other girls were right behind him, wanting to be the first ones to be with him when he finished.
There, he'd finished, she saw. The girls were surrounding him, praising him. One even dared to reach out and push back a stray lock of hair. Clare...
Golden skin glowed in the afternoon sun, revealing a fine tracery of pale blue at the inside of the wrist. Lips, lush lips, parted to accept the ripe perfection of the strawberry I offered. A low sound of appreciation trickled out. I watched Circ eat with a simple joy and relish of the experience that I had never witnessed before.
Had humanity strayed so far away from its own innate abilities?
The robot blinked and met my eyes, smiling. I watched the fine structure of her irises flex.
"Like that?" She nodded at my question and I offered the next...
She had made her bed and she now had to lie in it: that was what her mother had told her and what she now believed. So she was lying in it, like a good little girl – meek and mild, silent and compliant: behaviour that had got her to where she was now – unhappy, stuck, unravelling. Because old habits die hard, you see, and it is difficult to change. How does one forget three decades of learned behaviour? How does one peel off and discard the labels people attach? They don’t, that’s how, because they can’t – not...
She opened the envelope and screamed. This luxury was purely due to the rough edge of the foil having cut into her thumb before she'd completely broken the electrical contacts just inside the ripped flap. The Army man who'd come within minutes of that first scream, had peered over her shoulder down inside the folded card and taken in the plastic, the wires and the detonator. To his credit, though he was clearly Protestant, he had paid her more attention than any man in her rather drab existence. Everyone else had vacated, but finally she was the centre of attention....
"Wait, let me send a pic...." Darren closed one eye as he aimed his phone and snapped a picture, capturing the female figure in three quarter view, just before the turning stage she stood on spun her slowly away.
He gazed at the picture, ran his thumb over the screen, before attaching it to the a text and sending it. The female figure had turned back around and he gnawed on his lips as he briefly met eyes with her. They were glossier than one would be used to, the whites would glitter, something in the plastic, or enamel or...