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 have come to the conclusion that Jack suffers from a degenerative brain disorder. This may sound horrible coming from his own mother, but it's all I can think about these days. First off, he takes our only cow to the market and comes back with seeds when I specifically said we needed food. Sure, you can use the old fisherman analogy, but NOT when it involves an immediate need to fill our incredibly bare cupboards. I would have even accepted him butchering her for food. I really would have. But no, my son is a retard.
Magic beans? Really?...
As soon as Roger grabbed my wrist, I knew the spell was broken. Silence had been my way of being. Silence, yes, on the outside. But inside? Screaming. Screaming an Ella Fitzgerald glass shattering scream. But Roger's fat fist around my bloodless wrist created an outlet for me. Finally. THere was no way in hell he was going to take my sister's banana bike. I may not have spoken for the first 9 years of my grade school existence, but I wanted to make sure She WOULD.
I flipped out of the wrist hold with a Karate move my brother...
Spinning. The whole world was spinning.
And not the good kind either. The ground was pitching backward under my feet, making the sky wobble on its axis and vault over me as I hit my knees.
It was so hot... This's heat stroke?
The black asphalt, hotter still than the sun itself, scraped my skin as I went down, the color brightening and blurring across my vision into one massive kaleidescope of obnoxious rainbows, melting together. The sound buzzed unintelligibly in my ears, somehow feeling cold.
"Get out of the way! Move it!" I could vaguely hear the sound of...
They gathered in the woods. The darkness entwined itself around everything it touched. Filling every hole, every space it could claim.
It was not the darkness that was so frightening, it was that which hide inside. Using it as a clever camouflage.
Something hid, something stalked and watched and he could feel it. It was looking at him, watching and waiting. Its gaze crawling across his skin like tiny spiders.
He hid within himself not wanting to accept it. He built up the layers to keep the darkness out. He would not fear the thing in the dark. he would...
The daring were punished. They had been aware of the risks their actions might have, both to themselves and their loved ones.
Golem's Bridge over the Tankard River was never meant to be tread on by anything but golden-shoed royal feet.
The daring waited until the guard at the gate had dozed off. The four of them climbed over the iron bars, hauling their cigar-shaped package behind them. They reached the middle of the bridge and unfurled, freeing the drab fabric and coils of rope.
They worked quickly, tying ropes to each other's wrists and ankles, threading it through the...
It wasn’t a specific look, or anything she said exactly. It was the things she didn’t do that gave it away. The way that she didn’t automatically include me in the conversation, the way she didn’t look to me when something funny happened, the way she didn’t move up to get more space but stayed, leg pressed against mine, reminding me that she was there.
All the instincts we’d developed about one another over the many years we had been friends were now kicking into gear and compensating for all the things we couldn’t say, not with all these people...
Which watch are you watching?
Which way are you talking?
All the boys
And all the girls
Will never cease their marching.
Is waiting the answer?
Or being a dancer?
Twirling
And chasing
A garish romancer.
It's better to be
Alone in the forest
For there you can see
Who
I'm in love with a robot. She doesn't have a physical presence, she's not some pile of servos shipped from Japan. She's an AI, the product of decades of research and development -- using tens of millions of online conversations as a template for her personality.
I know people tell me that she just scours all my emails in an effort to become what I like, and I know people tell me that she's nothing more than a neural network backed by a huge database. But is that so different from a human brain?
The Moon would never be the same again. She'd never be able to look at it in the same way, never be able to go back.
Nothing would, actually. Nothing would go back to being the way it was. It had all changed, in ways she didn't fully understand - she never would understand, didn't expect to.
She'd presumed that some things in life were constant. That you could rely on them - tides, stars, earth, and her elder brother.
The tides were changing, sea levels rising. The stars had shifted without her noticing. The earth was meant to be...