I knew it would be two foggy to see the dock from the top of Crescent Hill but Grandfather had insisted, and so we went. It took nearly an hour by carriage but we had a grand old time. Millicent Hedgegrove was with us. I knew that she had been sweet on Grandfather but never really wanted to admit it. Mother and Father took turns laughing at the antics of Celeste and I and fussing at us for being too silly.
The carriage could only take us so far and then we had to climb the half mile up...
I wanted to give him everything I had. He was my love, and I knew, at long last, what I wanted out of life.
I wanted him.
Foolishness, of course. We couldn't have been more different if we had been created that way. Still, I tried. Someone once told me that you should always reach for the stars. Whether you catch one or not, at least you will have risen above the mud for a while.
That's why I ran for Congress, because I thought that was where my destiny lay. When the corruption scandal was laid at my feet,...
"Who are you?" Gene didn't want to know the answer, but hurled at the woman sitting across the cafe table regardless. It was because of her that he was alone, it was her fault his wife no longer slept at his side.
She sucked at her cigarette, delivering her answer on a ribbon of viscous blue smoke. "Heather. Who're you?"
Gene, ever the copywriter, bit his tongue as his mind snatched the apostrophe from her words. 'Whore' he wanted to scream at the girl who shared the bed of the only woman he'd ever fucked.
'Liar,' the little voice in...
One scoop chocolate, one scoop strawberry, it was amazing they hadn't seen each other for twenty five years but he could recall her favorite ice cream tastes. Wow she though,t he really did remember everything about them, maybe he was sincere, maybe he did love her, and never forgot about their deep, close, tender relationship.
"When I saw you again just now my heart really skipped a beat" he said softly, "I mean look at you, you have hardly changed at all, you are beautiful,l you look just the same, you look,well radiant" He was gushing with compliments, surely he...
Tears dripped down her cheeks. She was alone. Finally, sadly, happily alone.
Her husband was searching for her. She prayed that he would not find her. She had managed to escape her home while he searched for weapons to use against her. When he stomped towards the kitchen, dripping angry sweat and hurling abuse, she thought of the knives.
She didn't remember how she got between her home and the doorway. All she knew was that she was safe, for the time being.
Where next? She had no family. Her friends were his friends or the wives of his friends....
It was the fall that surprised me the most.
I had been running, running so hard so fast that, when I finally stopped behind the closed fire door, I could feel my lungs burning from the cold air filling them with each harsh breath that I took. Placing a hand against the cold metal door I leaned over and peered down the dirty stairwell, the only sound that I could hear was the sound of my own panting until a door several floors down flew open, echoing loudly as it hit the brick and mortar wall.
I hadn't said a...
(To read Part 2, follow this link: http://sixminutestory.com/stories/somewhere-better-part-2.)
Gigantic.
The voice was gigantic, though how such powerful sound came out of such a small creature was beyond her.
The furry animal was sitting back on its haunches in the tall emerald grass, looking up at her as if anticipating something.
She shifted uneasily. "You said you call yourself Someone Good?" she said. "What kind of a name is that?"
"We name ourselves by our attributes," said the creature, in its gigantic voice, which seemed to be full of every meaningful thing. "We are good," it continued. And from behind her,...
It seemed a good idea to tell the kids to hide behind the bars when the boy went berserk. Glue sniffing was the first suspicion but when we found the numbers appearing all over his skin, a priest was summoned. 666 isn't the kind of thing you normally expect to see on young skin, measles, chicken pox, blackheads, sunburn is a yes. But numbers? That was plain weird.
The exorcist prayed, sprinkled holy water and blessed the boy by putting his hand on his forehead. 666 kept appearing until there wasn't a millimetre of untouched skin.
Then, just to confuse...
Norman was a doctor. He was a doctor because he was good at fixing things, and at some point in his life he determined that the most important things that needed fixing were human beings. So he became a doctor.
He looked rather doctor-ish, in his trenchcoat, his traveling case of medical supplies and his pattern baldness. He was friendly, having the bedside manner that everyone expected of a good doctor.
The day that the sun became sick, people all over the world panicked. Some rioted, looted, killed one another, for in a world that was nearing its end, one...
Pleasure. Burn. They're the only two words on the whole page - in the whole book if he was honest - that he had read and actually remembered. The rest was a jumble of names, bad descriptions, inplausible mixes of action and consequence.
Pleasure, the word just rolled off the tongue, almost like a cat unfurling itself and stretching lazily, purring as it spots some new distraction.
Burn, more akin to an explosion, though with the same purring quality, it flooded into his ears a lot more passionately than pleasure did, filled his mind with images, tortorous landscapes with dark...