He heard two doors smash and with a loud screech and a blinding beam of light, the door to the back opened. He expected the three masked men to open, but found a woman instead. "Is your name Martin?" "Who are you?", he asked. "I'm no one, until you tell me your name." His eyes almost fully adapted to the brightness and he could now see her clearly. She was wearing all black, except for a jeans jacket. She seemed to shiver in the cold, and he couldn't help but notice, that she's kind of cute.
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...
I was an optimist. I thought that I, like Hemingway, could weave my influence between countries, live in the welcoming limbo between a government I believed in and one that spoke my language. I stopped trying to return to the United States thirty years ago. I am an airplane steward now. Sometimes I write in imperfect Spanish for a newspaper named after a boat named after a nameless elderly woman half a century dead. I believe every word I write. I am happy.
But the days I spent in the narrow land come back to me every day. They knew...
Leaving was the easiest decision to make, and the hardest action to take. That's what she kept telling herself as she drove through the beckoning water drops falling down both inside and out. She could hardly see but knew it was the right thing to do. There's no way she could stay, he hated her for what she was, what she had achieved. It wasn't her fault he resented her for wanting to do what was right.
Crash - and it all was over. Her last thought was her baby and how she would make a great mum, visions of...
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...
Running had always been an expression of freedom. That's how she had always seen it. The wind whipping through her hair, tugging at her clothes as her feet moved so fast that she felt like she was flying. AS though for just that moment, she was soaring above the ground, close enough to the clouds to touch them.
But then she began to notice the strings. The tiny threads, invisible against the light, that were attached to her clothes, hooked into her skin, threaded through to her soul.
When had that happen? When had she become the marionette? The freedom...
Thou wanted to enjoy his iced latte
Thou wanted to bring the mood down in this joint
Thou wanted these tourists to be gone
Be gone tourists!
Thou forsakes thee!
Tourists
Poseurs
Wanna bees
Beardos
Thou is the grumbly heart of your demise
Thou is real
Really real
So frightening
So fucking real
Thou is not on tourist maps
Pamphlets
Brochures
Thou will burn away all this fake tourist bullshit
Thou will bring the mood down
in
this
joint
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,...
"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...
Everyone was on board for the show. They had their fly gear and their hats. I, of course, forgot my sunglasses.
"No problem," mama said, "just squint!"
As we lined up, I squinted at the audience. It never ceased to amaze me that the entire population of a town would stop what it was doing to watch our show every week. But they did. All fifty-four of them, including the dogs.
I was getting antsy. This week, I was the leader! Never before had a child led the show! I wasn't nervous; there's no room for nerves in show-biz. However,...