"She was the most delicate girl in town,"
I put down my glass.
"Delicate?"
"You know, delicate" and he moved his hands as if to express the shape "Like a flower is or a painting. She had a softness. And it was hot down there all year pretty much so she was like all the other girls and wore the cotton dresses but she wore them differently. Just by herself, you know, I mean she wasn't trying."
"So you mean she was pretty."
"I mean delicate."
"And you never worked it out with her? This very...delicate girl?"
"Well I got...
"The McDonald's Arch Deluxe. Thee layers of disgusting terror."
The ad flashed by on the R31 bus, and I quickly completed it in my mind. Damn those people. As a vegan, I feel these ad execs should not be allowed to penetrate my air space.
Before I was strong-willed, such an attempt used to stand a chance at luring me from my modest, then-vegetarian diet.
Now, it had the chance of an earthworm in a swimming pool.
At loss of time and options, and very hungry for no apparent reason, however, I stepped into a nearby Burger King and ordered...
He was no more than a barely-significant piece of a gargantuan puzzle. His ambitions, he was told, shouldn't have been as high as they were.
But, anyway, who did they think they were to tell him that?
Their opinions weren't going to stop him. Who cared if someone told him it wasn't possible, he knew he'd make it, as all obstacles can be overcome with the right amount of will.
He had but one obstacle, the Russian feline who lived mere meters away from him, and wanted nothing other than having his taste buds touch his insides. Oh he'd get...
I was eating hot dogs on the dock. No problem, right? But this dude comes up and starts buggin' me, so I tell him to step off.
He Won't leave me alone, so I had no real choice but to grab the knife out of my jeans and stab the dude in the chest. Three times.
Police arrived soon thereafter and decided it would be much easier to just feed me to the sharks than put me through the system....
Lucky me
Silence. Stillness. That's all I wanted. The screaming, the yelling, dishes breaking, I had to get away from it all.
This was supposed to be a family vacation, we were supposed to take time away from the every day to get to know each other better, to 'talk about our problems'. Thanks, Dr. Freud, but I don't think that's going to solve any of our problems. This little cottage overlooking the lake isn't going to make us understand and love one another.
Nobody notices when I walk away - they're too busy arguing. I've always been the quiet one, they...
But I call it "swing theory." It's sort of an uneducated, improvised explanation of how everything clicks. How one digs the atom. Why one gets so coo-coo for photons. What hip event is on the horizon.
It's crazy, baby. Quantum bums.
It always did this. Time after time and time after time. Well, it was time. That was problem really. Dr Karz Flembold took his hand out of his pocket and poked it out of the temporal bubble; he saw a second immediately tick past on the clock face of his Casio.
He whipped his hand back in, feeling the sting of the present like a burn on the skin of his fingers. The watch immediately froze again. 15:04:21. It always was. But yet, he knew, time was still there. He had seen the world around him crumble and fall away,...
The city was empty. The day had swept by on the brush of a filthy broom, skittering over the edge of the world. We were happy.
But we'd always secretly reveled in disaster situations. When the status-quo was torn asunder, that's when we came alive. It was the status quo that we couldn't deal with.
The last bits of ash were falling out of the sky. The TV said that this might be the end of it. But they also said it might not. Storm clouds at night make the world all that much darker. So we lit our candles,...
"I won't," I said. And she turned and walked away. The generals and lower officers, in turn, followed.
I was alone in that room with the future. I'd only known vanishing past and pounding present. I didn't know what to do with myself. I started by counting my breaths and guessing how many I'd take in a minute. I tried thinking about tomorrow but couldn't. I could only picture a towering wall made of brain matter.
I thought, "Maybe I should've" and stalled again. I closed my eyes and thought about nothing, not knowing I'd sleep soon.
The sheep were at pasture.
It was 0300 and the troops were restless. They wanted action, not this placid chewing of grass. Every day was filled with nothing but chewing and the occasionally terrifying sheering.
The ones that came back from the shed came back wrong. Nude and shivering, wild looks in their eyes. Year after year. Jimmy couldn't take it anymore. When they came for him the last time, he ran for it. He chewed and bit and growled his sheep growl.
He didn't come back. That night they looked in when they saw the soft lights come on...