They were back again. The Crasoons. And this time she was ready. Ever since they'd laid waste to her town, reducing it to wilderness in a matter of weeks, carrying off the wreckage with their dreadful claws, she had been planning. The white noise in her headphones would drown out their hypnotizing cries. She wouldn't go on a killing spree, no matter what the benign-looking destroyers told her. She was here for one purpose, the purpose she'd been training for for a year and a half: The destruction of the Crasoons. Her red shirt would lure them. And once they...
Giving in wasn't an option anymore because I had given in too many times before.
I'd taken it time after time - too many times before, and this has me broken. I'm broken, broken from you.
You've simply abused me, in the finer way. The finer way where not all the cracks show, in the way that I can hold them in so that they are only something I know. In the way that only I will know when I see you again, and the cracks come stabbing on like a nightmare.
Now when you're feeling down, I won't risk...
"His eyes closed with a sinnister grin?" Rabbit said. "What does that even mean? His eyes were grinning? Or the grinning caused his eyes to close? I don't get it. The imagery just doesn't pop and imagery needs to pop, or at least not be this strange Cheshire cat thing."
"A what kind of cat?" Weasel said.
"Cheshire. A Cheshire cat, like in Alice in Wonderland."
"Oh, I've never seen that."
Rabbit looked at him, mouth open. "Regardless of having seen it or not, or even better, having read the book, since you are trying to be a writer, you...
The sun had been on her body for 6 days now. Beating down on her pale skin in the Pennsylvania field. Arnold was driving by and saw something strange, and of course it smelled awful; it was 85 degrees that July 4th and he was headed to Grandma Beth's for the pig roast. He pulled his white pickup to a halt, the dust flying behind him into the hot summer air.
He hopped out, put his handkerchief to his nose and mouth, and pulled his straw hat slightly over his eyes. Arnold walked but two steps when he started gagging...
One day, in the morning, not the afternoon, I was eating cheese. When I finished my block of cheese I noticed that there was an interesting amount of wind outside and I thought to myself, "Self, let us harness this power." So as I wrote down my many ideas of how to harness the power, one sprang out off of the paper and said "Use me!". It was my idea to harness wind with wind. I decided to blow up 6 balloons, 3 pink, 3 purple. I would travel the world, literally wherever the wind took me, because, if you...
"What's the worst thing you ever done in a Church, Sunshine?"
I looked at Beloved, I shrugged, although goosepimples and ice water prickled my body. "I killed a pigeon once."
"What?" Beloved laughed, his mouth pulled, his cheeks puffed and he pinched one lens of his glasses, pulling them up his face. "You're kidding."
"Nope," I said and I walked away from him, my arms clasped behind my back and I looked back and forth, up and down, and touched the smooth paint of the white-washed pews. "I killed it dead."
"WHY?" Beloved was still smiling, I did not have...
Cafes were a good enough way to pass the time. Human drama unfolding outside the window, watching everybody pass by, living out their lives, lost in themselves, acting as though they were unobserved. They gave away clues, hints, promises - she could learn enough about them to become them in the time it took her coffee to cool.
Or perhaps she created them, watching them pass by - that man there, he was meeting his lover, the new young man in his office. His brother (he lived with his brother, and a dog) didn't know, and he was terrified that...
Travel light, but take everything with you. They were father's last words to me before he took my mother and sister down the wooded trail opposite mine and my brother's.
The cossacks had burned our village to the ground an hour ago, and he told us we had to flee into the woods, where they would have more trouble finding us.
When I was young, we used to play in the forest, so I knew it well. I would take my young brother Sasha to a lake a few hours' hike from here, that the cossacks don't know about.
I...
Her pink shoes dragged on the wet pavement. To him, it felt like the sound of her heels thundered down the street, causing people to stop what they were doing and looking out their windows at him. He paused for a second and looked around. All the windows were empty, most were dark, the slight sound of shoes dragging on concrete not loud enough to be heard over the sond of rain and traffic. He got to the end of the alley and stopped again, shifting his load over to the other side so that he could reach his pocket...
One of my co-workers told me that one time, when he was living in New York City, he was at lunch with his wife at a deli. They were sitting near a window. As they chatted and ate, they looked out the window, and across the street, they saw a homeless man pull out a pizza box and take a dump in it, right in the middle of the sidewalk, while passers-by passed by and made a point of not looking at him while he did it.
It's one of those stories that made me laugh at first, but later...