Leaving was the easiest decision to make, and the hardest action to take.
Clearly, it was better not to have to work for such a person. But on the other hand, if he left, he'd be leaving his co-workers to face her incompetence and maltemper himself.
What was he supposed to do? He had "Assistant Manager" on his resume now, it'd be easy for him to find other work. But over the past 6 months, he'd become good friends with a lot of his employees, who were all fun, smart people.
But, but he looked for another job. And he...
They were trapped for seven days. God's work was able to be done in freedom: the dividing line between earth and sky, earth and ocean, the fecund fields with animals and birds, the oceans teeming with fish and monsters, the two legged animals - human beings - created to carry God's hope.
But the forces of chaos, of tohu and bohu, were chained for those seven days; trapped and kept away from the great work of creation.
There was order at work: chaos was trapped. There was fertility abounding: destruction was stayed. There was ingenuity in creation: blankness was put...
She didn't look at him. She couldn't. "Look at me!" he shouted. She didn't. She couldn't.
She did.
Then she did again.
This went on for several hours.
"Stop looking at me!" he shouted. But she didn't not look at him. She couldn't not.
Then she didn't.
He was always looking at her. It was a condition called Iseezyaz, which causes the poor soul to stare at the person closest to them for all of infinite eternity. "It is perhaps the most unsettling, and boring disease known to mankind," Dr. Jesus Katmandu, discoverer of the disease had said upon the...
Gigantic. It's not a word you use to describe a penis. It's too bulky. Women want softer words. More exotic words. Words that whisper and moan.
Never start with sex either. You start in the middle of things and the audience has nowhere to go. I recommend a bus stop. You get a conversation going. Maybe about how yellow the daisies are lately or why the bees are dying.
Of course you'll think the audience will get impatient. Get to the hard core sex already! But they won't. Anticipation and all. I once wrote a story that had fourteen pages...
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 sheep were at pasture and he tried not to disturb them as he jumped over the fence and darted across the field. He had to keep moving, if he stopped they would catch him, if they caught him they would kill him. It was a game, he was the odd one out, he'd been playing along, thought he was include but no, they'd kept him out, always kept him separate so they could use him. When the moment was right, when the moment had come, they had pounced. One had circled around him while the others continued to dance....
I read a story today, a true one, about a young man who hung himself at the age of twenty-three.
His story was horrific. The abuse he received as a child ruined him both physically and mentally and, apparently, emotionally.
It is so sad to hear about loss of young, talented people; even more so when it's the result of unspeakable evil done to them by pieces of shit that deserve a hell that Dante couldn't possibly imagine.
Hug your kids.
Listen to your friends.
Be kind. Always be kind. There is help out there, but you might not think...
They were listening. Their ears pressed up against the wall. She held her breath, the clock ticked. Her boyfriend huffed and rolled his eyes. She glared at him and held a finger to her mouth. He was about to speak when it started again.
The yelling, this time it was followed by a crash. Then the low voices. It was odd, it wasn't the usual commotion they heard from the neighbors. The man's voice was urgent, the woman's angry.
Straining, she shifted her weight so she could better press her ear against the wall and when that didn't work she...
All I could do was stare down at the text book and pretend that I was listening to the class going on around me. I just wanted to be free again. I flicked between the pages and the past documented in the battered book. I wonder if when those sailors set out that they even thought for a glimmer of a second that their whole adventure would be covered by a short paragraph in a 10th grade history book and a photo that barely even grasped what their lives were like and how tragic that journey was. I knew that...
He’d always thought of Malory as a cat person. She referred to cats in conversation energetically and often, so when he visited her apartment he expected to meet a few. Malory set him straight. She was two when her parents gave Bo and Greco away. Mama and Dad, three children under four, an ailing dog and two cats were too much. They could not all be borne. Rip was on meds for anxiety, his pee pooling in the old floorboards. The cats threw his kibble at him and shed disdainful tufts. When Rip and the baby both stopped sleeping through...