My feet ached, but it was well worth it. I absolutely HAD to make the weight requirment for my dance competition. I only had three more days to lose another five pounds. My legs burned, but I suppose that I should have expected that much after a three hour run, but I thought that I could do it effortlessly by now. After being in dance for five years, I've had to really push myself to stay within my weight limit. Sometimes it was really hard to keep from eating. I knew that if I couldn't make weight, the uniform wouldn't...
It started like any sunday morning, with coffee brewing and the literal show Sunday Morning on cbs when we decided to walk our 140-pound saint Brenard, and our smaller dog Casey down by the lake. We had Casey on the leash when Bella, our Saint Brenard, crashed through the brush and tumbled upon a deer that had bedded down. Casey fought her way off the leash and by the time we had found them the deer had gone into the water rather than to face bella. Our two excited dogs of course rushed right in after it
The Waves were...
All Sam had wanted was a ride.
He's grown up in the Mid West, eaten his breakfast from cereal cartons plastered with the faces of lost children, so he knew the dangers. Still, it was raining. The weather was crap, and out of the falling rain the white ambulance had come like an angel of mercy. It's flashing lights were off; only the fog lights cut through the gloom, shining on him like a halo.
"Want a ride?" called the driver over the water's roar.
Indeed, he did. His goal, simply to get from point A to B in relative...
The ocean, the land, the bridge. These are the metaphors of my life. I stand on sinking ground, toes curled against the tension of the the surf and sand, the give and take, the conquest and retreat. Submerge into eternity or hold my ground a while longer?
There is, of course, the bridge. The mediator. It arches over the rivals, dipping into one, clutching the hands of the other. It's base is mossy, cool, a fuzzed pillar for fish to dart around. It's back is hot, sunbaked.
The bridge is the holder of peace. It is the symbol of one....
Public Service Announcement (this has no relation to the prompt): When Hemingway (I think, but it doesn't really matter) said, "Write what you know," it was a critique of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had said, "Write what you don't know." In other words, it would be like me saying, "You are therefore you think." It may or may not be true, but it was a critique of an idea that had been set in stone and codified. Codifying that idea, in turn, defeats the purpose.
To be more succinct, When I hear, "Write what you know," I reach for my...
In a moment of clarity and inspiration, the second archivist suggested the following plan: track the social trends in our city; map them, finding the inevitable patterns; figure out the dependent and independent variables; create a mapping; and finally, inconspicuously, design public policy to tap into exactly those inputs, in just the right amounts. Prod the organism. Domesticate the animal. Soon, the stochastic trends would form into strands, then chains of strands, then threads. With time, the sum total of human knowledge be kept in the predictable social patterns of our race.
It was the ugliest building in the world, located in the festering pit of Birmingham. It was meant to be a shining beacon to all of the inhabitants; literally it was intended to reflect the sun into the slums and make the city a brighter place. The mutants that inhabited the cities ever-growing slums and shanty towns began to despise the monstrosity and watched those who frequented it with distrust, anger and jealously.
They had no idea what was inside its walls, and they would never find out.
The Duchess sipped her champagne slowly while the cameras flickered around her,...
She carefully set her can of Pepsi down on the grime smeared bench under the phone, not wanting to spill a drop of the liquid within. She'd used almost her last bit of money to buy it, making a choice between that and a bar of chocolate. She had tried to remember whether death came faster from thirst or hunger, and although at the time she was sure she had made the right choice, now she wasn't convinced. Her stomach shouted angrily at her, the ravenous wolf inside clawing and snarling, making her clutch her belly in pain.
It didn't...
The lunch bell rang. At 11:32 the wide wooden doors would open, letting out the throngs, the odor, the leaden feet. I stood against the wall, my heels pressed against the cinder block. There were the girls in braces and the boys with large pimples on their noses. There were skinny legs in miniskirts and protruding Adam's apples. I wrinkled my nose at the stench of body spray and scented lip gloss and listened to the crunch of paper bags.
I watched them, but they didn't notice me. They grouped around tables like lions around drinking holes, each one in...
Ridiculous. Absurd. Absolutely and beyond all normal standards of decency, indecent. That was how I looked in the mirror the morning that I discovered my first gray hair. Or was it my third. I was faced with the overwhelming reality of a head of lustrous, youth-infused auburnness marred by the upright and wiry soldier who insisted on taking up some precious real estate in my brain that could have been much better utilized by a sudoku puzzle or a cure for cancer. How were things now to possibly proceed in a direction other than graveward? What was the sense in...