Travel light, but take everything with you. Take your ambitions, your hopes, your dreams. Take with you all of those memories of when we were kids; that time you got so mad at me that you punched out one of my baby teeth.
When you're cleaning out that dusty suitcase under your bed, set aside that sea shell we found on the shore on our parents' fifteenth anniversary. Set it on a shelf somewhere that you will notice it. Not every day, but once in a while, when you least expect it. Think of how we had our first heart-to-heart...
"Where am I?" asked Jolene, as she took some hesitant steps toward the elevator. "Am I on the moon?"
"You are not on the moon," was the response. The voice seemed to come from all around her. "You are on a spacecraft. The Earth as you know it is uninhabitable."
"What? Why? What happened?"
"You will find out later," it said. "Take the elevator to the highest floor."
Jolene entered the small enclosure and pressed the button marked '35'. There was no 36.
"God will ask you a series of questions," the voice continued. "If the answers are incorrect, he...
What is that, Dad, I asked.
It's the tree, he said. A tree? I repeated. No, he said, it's THE tree. The tree of knowledge, the source of all wisdom and power. Once upon a time humans ate its fruit, and that's why we got smart. It's why we made all these clever machines, you see.
It doesn't look like much, I said after a minute.
Oh, well that's not the FIRST tree, he said. It was planted from a seed of that tree. The original tree is long gone, and this is its last descendant, which still has all...
The storm had blown over, but not before it had blown over his ship, along with all of his crew. The captain always went down with the ship, but by the time he woke up from a plank smacking him upside the head, he found himself drifting alone on a plank of wood in the middle of the ocean, no one else in sight. Too late to sacrifice himself to the sea gods now.
As he drifted, he knew shore was near. There were too many birds flying about for it not to be. He just had to hope the...
She could tell I was faking it. Every time I cracked a smile or choked out a laugh. All of it a fabrication to please the people around me. An attempt to lie to everyone, especially myself, about how screwed up my life really was, about how everything around me truly was going to hell.
When you've lost everything, why shouldn't you laugh? The bitterness of it is cathartic.
Yet... She stays around. Keeps an eye on me, noting my dulled eyes and chronicling every irrational action. Hearing the broken glass edges of my voice, seeing the glint of tears...
The year was 1986. She was five and happy. But she did not want to be six. There was something about six that scared her, put her on edge, made her think of grown up things like losing teeth and moving up to the next class with the mean teacher who didn’t allow her pupils to laugh during lessons.
So she came up with a plan to hide. She took her favourite toys (she was five, after all) and a little food and a carton of juice and crawled into the loft where no one ever went. There was nothing...
Until now, she'd never thought of herself as pretty. She'd always known she was a woman, but pretty was a word that had never crossed her mind.
Shortly after she had reached the level of confidence where she didn't have to be paranoid about a little bit of stubble showing, or somebody noticing her hips weren't quite the right shape -- she suddenly became a little more confident.
All it took was sitting down in her favorite coffee shop with a smile on her face. That was it. That was when she met Sam. Her heart started pounding when he...
The world has changed. We have all become compeditors in someone else's game. 6 Minute Story has changed for the worse. One night, a woman jumped from 23 stories in New York. She landed safely in a dumpster full of pillows. We had coffee the next day, and she explained that she was suffering from a mild case of "I don't care". I found that a reasonable excude and bought her a cruller. She was happy, but pulled a gun out of her purse and shot hersself in the head. Damn. Now I have to get the tip. Good coffe,...
I stepped into the bathroom, which was green. There was a tape player and it was playing Chinese gongs. There was a salami in the bathtub. The salami was wrapped in that white netting stuff that they wrap salamis in at the salami wrapping plant. There was a toilet too and the toilet was filled with pee and poo and used tampons.
I was still hungry though so I started eating the salami.
"Are you grossed out because of the pee and poo and tampons in the toilet?" one girl asked.
"Both of us are members of Greenpeace," said the...
In the event that you perchance upon a mythological entity, and said entity or, dare I say, entities, have desired coconuts, the directions for capturing said coconuts is as follows:
Step 1: Determine if entity — say, your brother — is malicious in intent, or simply a selfish flesh-eating neanderthal.
Step 2: Break his ankles, or perhaps if you feel lucky, both pinky toes.
Step 3: Steal said coconut, bash open with rock and/or machete.
This of course can only work in aforementioned mythical kingdoms. If your brother is Pelops, and you are Tantalus, then you are fully fucked. Perhaps...