Thoura just wanted to enjoy herself, that's all. Was that too much to ask, summer here and all. The green already starting to burn out of the grass and the leaves. Everything getting that white-out feel when the sun gets too bright.
And that's when they come. Tramping and shouting, splashing in the pond out back. Her pond. Her fish. She and the other little ones had to eat and the tourists scaring dinner away. Made it hard to find stuff to eat. Made the days arduous. That's what mom would have said. But Mom was gone. Long gone. Just...
My mother loved colour. She spent the last weeks of her life in a hospital bed, with its monotone greys and whites. People gave her all kinds of gifts and cards. But her favourite one was a bright purple robe with pink stitching.
That gift was from me. Truth is, I'm more of a tactile person. Yet I knew this was what she craved most--her two favourite colours in the world.
At her funeral, we released balloons in pink and purple. Or, rather, everyone else did. I held onto mine. I wasn't ready to let her go yet.
Today, though,...
"It's like a huge, deformed penis sticking up out of the ground," she said. Red Gatorade sprayed her cheek. Nick wiped his mouth and capped the bottle.
"It what??"
"Look at it." She wiped her face with her sleeve. "It looks like a massive stone cock. Big ol' mushroom-tipped cock."
He shook his head, but grinned anyway. "Seriously, what is wrong with you? I thought men were supposed to be the ones seeing phallic imagery everywhere?"
"I can't help what I see. And I see a big cock. God, can you imagine..." She shuddered. "Though if I saw something that...
I jumped. I left the rope ladder up in the treehouse. I'm scared. Leaving it will stop me from not going to Mummy. I'm not crying. I am a big boy. I will go to Mummy, even if she is still mad, and walking like Daddy.
Maybe she will hit me like Daddy and I will tell people I fell downstairs and tomorrow she will buy me candy and Daddy will come home.
She is near Mr. Grant's shop. Most of the other angry people have given up looking for me, or where looking in other places, or have fallen...
Spinning. Thirteen years old and with my friends in some suburban backyard, spinning. Looking up at the nightime stars and spinning. Spinning until a single star became the axis around which the universe revolved. Spinning until everything made momentary sense and then dissolved away in fits of giggles and pratfalls on the grass.
Spinning, the car catching my rear bumper and turning me in a full circle so that the city became a blur.
Spinning in the pool, three somersaults in a row is what turned the pool into the ocean filled with the giant squid and the great white...
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...
You get so used to one set of reality that you don't really consider that another one could exist.
Which is a very pretentious way of saying that feelings change without us even noticing it.
It's only when I'm reminded of the intensity of feeling that I notice that I am simply not feeling it anymore. What once felt like lifeline and lifeblood is now just a passing memory. A potentially entertaining thought process, but not worth obsessing over. Barely worth my time.
It's simultaneously comforting and distressing, to know that such intensity can be felt one moment but in...
I'm with stupid remarked the t-shirt. Very appropriate I thought considering the look on his face as he and his friend harried the younger boy. I wanted to step in but I had always shied away from confrontation. "If it gets and worse I'll step in" I told myself, hoping it wouldn't. In my reverie I never noticed who pulled the knife not that that mattered much, the result was still the same. He must have been stupid to have carried it with him.
Marie Antoinette viewed the four candles on the cake. Four years. Had it really been so long?
She remembered the first time she saw the little girl selling flowers in the street. She had sent her servant to purchase a bunch, and the look of pure joy on the urchin's face had melted her heart. So much payment for such a small thing as money.
And yet she knew the importance. Marriages were made for money, Kingdoms were allied for gains in power and wealth. The day to day drudgery of the lower classes was all for the sake of...
The explosion knocked her off her feet and sent a ringing through her ears. She felt the world going black.
When she came to, she got up and looked around. the bathroom was in shambles. the spotted mirrors were shattered all around her on the floor. one of the stall doors had been blown off. She rose to her feet, brushed herself off, and started through the halls, looking for her friends. She walked through the ruins of her school for nearly an hour, finding nothing but the dead. She heard footsteps and ran for the source. She ran smack...