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...
In the harsh twilight, he knelt and dug.
In the bottom of the phoenix-grave, he spread the spores that would feed on and support the beginnings 0f all life.
In the sharp, glassy soil, he placed the seeds of a new planet.
In the unmeasured, empty space of an hour, he changed the course of the universe.
In the flat gray expanse of weathered silicates, three thousand potatoes rested.
In the dead methane-carbon dioxide atmosphere, the harsh actinic sun slanted down, undimmed by ozone.
In the cool, moist air of his time machine, he left the dawn of the world,...
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...
We had been the best of friends all though high school. It was summer after senior year and we would soon be off to our respective colleges. This was going to be one last slumber party; one last tribute to the way we had spent most weekends throughout the last four years.
Mindy had brought the tequilla, which was a recent development. I mean, slumber parties as freshmen didn't include booze. I furnished the barn, or rather my parents did. The night was soft and warm and the air was sweet with mown grass, and if you didn't mind the...
She'd always come running when I called. I could have called her to come get a splinter out of my hand, to help me with my homework, to get me out from the tree in my backyard, or just so I could see her smiling face for hours as we talked. I was so use to this that the idea that some day she wouldn't come running when I called never even crossed my mind. I loved her with every single particle that made up my body.
At this exact moment though the only thought I could think was that...
Giving in wasn't an option, but there was little else she could do.
"Ok, ok," she told the young galant with the sharp blade, "take whatever you want. Just don't hurt me."
The rascal had a look in his eye so sharp it could cut glass. "What I want, my lady," he said, drawing the space out between words to give them import, "is you."
The young woman's eyes widened, her ruby lips opened, but words failed her.
Reaching down, he made himself ready for his reward; then laid his hands upon-
her chastity belt.
Freed of the constraints of...
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,...
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...
"Everyday has promise."
"Everyday?"
"Yes, everyday."
"Well it seems that the first day of the year has more promise then the rest."
"I suppose but I will certainly take it as a good sign that you are at leasting embracing the possibility of promise."
"I am sorry for so much, life as usual, for far too long." She looked at him then. It had been so long since she heard something deeper in his words then the surface of day to day. He didn't see her looking of course. His eyes were on the news so she turned back...
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...