Tom said my neck tasted of honey. When I told Jasper he laughed hysterically, dropping the crystal glass of champagne onto the thick white carpet. Snorting like a horse, slapping his black Parisian jeans, contorting his face like a fairground mirror image. I didn't think it was so funny but didn't say anything. I laughed too.
One thing that Jasper would never know about me is how lonely and disgusted I feel with myself when I tell him about Tom.
When I walked away from the car, turned back and waved at Tom who had wiped the condensation from the...
Bocci. Bocci ball. Bowling on a lawn. That's what I was doing in that old photo. But strange. Usually you bowl with other people. Usually there's markings on the ground, a target ball to shoot from. In the photo, I'm just standing there in the middle of the lawn, facing the house. My house? God, I don't know whose house that is. It could be a field house, or a club house, and I'm playing bocci, a game I don't know how to play, have never, as far as I'm aware, ever played before in my life, and I'm hunched...
Crap, the cafeteria was full again, so full that every table hosted several people sporting laptops and folders busting with papers that spilled out onto each plastic tabletop. Jenny held her tray of food in both hands and sighed heavily. Not a single goddamned place to sit and eat her lunch in peace.
Briefly, she contemplated going to the park bench outside, but the thought of November's chill made her reconsider. The smell of fresh sweet potato fries tickled her nose and made her mouth water. Annoyed but starving, she swallowed her pride and sat cross-legged on the floor against...
Boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes.
Buried beneath more boxes and found deep below
even more boxes. We've built our lives around such
boxes. Filling them with such weighty things, keeping
them around because we're afraid to toss them and
who knows if we'll need their contents again
sometime in the future? We've built castles with these
boxes, making them larger and stronger fortresses
each day, stacking them on top of each other, careful
to not knock anyone else over. I, on the other hand,
don't like to keep boxes. They're too square and uncomfortable.
They remind me of...
" Pow pow pow, shit!"
Silence has taken over. The ahots fired have stopped and a thud is heard above. Ten minutes later there is a knock at the door. His knock is more of a sequence knock like a code. "Julie?" The woman behind the peep hole is covered in muck breathing he okay and wiping sweat from her brow. Finally the door is opened. " I told you this is a secret knock you don't call my name you knock back in the same sequence! Idiot!" Julie and Hannah have been stranded in their grandfathers complex for days....
I was at home with my wife when we heard the noise start. At first just quiet thumps. Then louder and louder. I had her hide in her room, the door locked.
I grabbed my axe. By then I could smell something off. Something rancid and foul. I shouted, warning the intruder. This was my home and no robber or murder was going to violate it like this.
I tore through the house, screaming for him. No sign of him. And the noise had stopped. The kitchen was empty. The hall was empty. I ran back to our bedroom. The...
100 feet away. She had only been 100 feet away.
I could have caught up with her, stopped her maybe, but my feet were rooted to the one spot, and hers were just about to float out over the edge.
She turned and smiled and waved just a little, her hand moving from side to side, like we saw the Queen do once on television.
Then she jumped.
Then my feet decided they were free to move as I wanted them to and I ran to the edge. I looked out and saw her head break the surface of the...
I had been running for just over an hour, almost breathless. Whose idea was it to train for this marathon anyways? I've always liked running, but never really enjoyed it, you know? There are only so many routes you can take. This time, I decided to say screw the concrete jungle, I'm going to take this somewhere different. So I took to the hills, as they say. Not gonna lie, it was much more interesting than running on pavement. The damp grass under my shoes, the crunching of the twigs, all that good stuff. I stopped at the top of...
Her toes struggled to grip onto the slimy rocks. Slippers were not the right sort of footwear for this kind of thing, but she hadn't had much of a choice.
She's spotted him through the net curtains, hovering on the doorstep, ready to knock.
Not today, she muttered.
She scurried out of the back door. Leapt the fence. Hadn't realised she could still manage it, but then adrenaline did that to you. She heard the knocking as she dropped over the other side of the fence and into the woods beyond.
RAP RAP RAP.
She scaled the rocks down towards...
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...