She opened the envelope and screamed.
It wasn't a scream of happiness. It wasn't a scream of surprise. It wasn't the hoped for money that grandma had promised. It wasn't the test results; they wouldn't come for another week.
It was a finger. In the bottom of the envelope. Dry of blood. Shrivelled and pale and a stub, a nub.
She dropped the envelope and scuttled back into a corner, her fist jammed into her jaw. Her eyes wide, she stared at the finger, as it lolled out of the envelope.
She could smell smoke. It had to be a...
The city was empty. The skyscrapers during the day looked powerful and full of promise. At night, they just looked like pieces of art. The hustle and bustle of New York was beginning to bug me, for the first time ever. I was going to walk far, but I'd see someone. So I stayed in my quiet neighborhood, passing by restaurants and apartment buildings. "Being alone was possibly the worst thing that has ever happened to me." I thought to myself. From then on, that's all I could think about. That sentence rang in my head like a dinner bell....
She'd have preferred The Electric Chair to be the name of the band. But she was out voted by the drummer and the bassist who wanted The Hanged Man.
What, did they want to give the impression that they were unable to spell? She had asked on numerous occasions. But none have them had understood what she was saying.
Well, the guitarist had, but Jeff had wanted the band to be called The Rainbow Rogues so he didn't really count.
They had been a band for about six months and had yet to unanimously agree on anything.
They hadn't been...
Only four days were left until the end of camp, and he'd resigned himself to his fate. He wasn't going to talk to the girl with the ponytail. He had run through the reasons why she would never see anything in common with him, and could almost recite it like a creed of self-defeat.
He saw her at the ridge, looking out over the farms in the valley below. Her headphones were plugged into her walkman, and she seemed completely at peace.
The tape player clunked to a stop. She sighed, took off the headphones and looked around. He realized...
Ridiculous. I've tried to write to you probably 30 times since you moved away. I have unfinished letters, words stuck in my head, of a million different ways to say the same thing.
In April I wrote a letter to you in my head on the car ride home from the mountains. Then I went home and typed it up; deleted it, then pulled it out of the 'recycle bin' on my desktop.
Now it's January, the only thing I ever sent was an 'I Miss You' card with a dog on it that looked incredibly sad and I have...
Yumi had been drawn back to the beach. Inside her trembling frame her soul screamed in agony, her weakened legs barely held her up. It had been one year and eight months to the hour since hell rose up and sucked away her reason to live. On that frigid silent morning the black putrid ocean came over them and then forever kept coming. The shrieking banshee cry of the tsunami alarm vibrated through her bones as she ran with baby Akiko in her grasp. The impact of the wave smashed her legs and the baby tumbled from her tender grasp....
"Of course, no one can make a unicorn," Pareth said, in that tone of voice he used when lecturing his students, "but you can take one apart." He stood, and I groaned inwardly.
He took the lecturing posture. "Of course, early giants of the field certainly tried. They glued the horn of a rhino to a horse, as if the mere simulacra of the thing could summon the real thing. Superstitious nonsense.
"Others tried grafting, and in more recent years we have seen specialized breeding, and even genetic manipulation. All abject failures. One cannot make a unicorn."
He smiled. "At...
Gregor couldn't focus. The sample problems in his textbook grew more and more indiscernible as the noises from next door grew louder and louder.
His neighbor was the problem. When Gregor had first moved into the apartment he didn't have a neighbor. Until one day he was awoken by a construction crew. Gregor's distracted mind drifted back to that morning. He remembered asking the construction worker.
-Hey, what's the story, man?
-Some bass with a trust fund is moving in. He's paying to waterproof the apartment so he can move in.
-A Bass? As in the freshwater fish? That's crazy...
Once there was a beautiful kingdom with a wise ruler, a red wolf demon. He was cunning and strong, and loved long. During an especially daunting hunt, chasing a herd of water buffalo, he was joined by a pack of ordinary wolves, gray and black and brown. They all enjoyed the feast that hunting together had brought them, and in the celebrations, he met the most beautiful she-wolf he had ever laid eyes on. Her fur was gray, with that glossy sort of sheen you only see in the mornings of the reddest of sunrises, a color that rivaled his...
Think warm thoughts.
Everyone hears about the other problem. Spontaneous Human Combustion, like it's some mysterious force. Ninety percent of the time, it's just a smoker who nodded off in a polyester easy chair. As if it's some big mystery. The other ten percent, you have your idiots that accidentally got soaked in lighter fluid, people trying to fry things, and other morons. Investigators act like it's so mysterious, but that is just because they don't understand fire. How it works, how it feeds. It's a bunch of pseudo-science, like a medieval doctor trying to cure people through bloodletting and...