My hand disappeared a week ago. I was rolling out a sheet of cookie dough for the kids. They come home around three and I like to have something warm baking for them. It makes me feel more useful and it's good that kids end their day with something sweet.
I was rolling the dough. Chocolate chip, I think it was. And my left hand just wasn't there anymore. The space where it was before was empty now. I didn't scream or cry. I'd gotten used to missing things. I figured this would be the same.
I had another hand...
I desire no pity, and I deserve no pity. This is my own personal Mark of Cain, and it is one I have brought to myself. There is always a price to such things, to knowledge and desire. His dark hand covers my face, and one day this mark will come to be paid. In the meantime, I am not without benefit. And I am not without resource.
I can seek out answer in library and archive. I may find none, and I would still have no regret when the great darkness at the very edge of human vision comes...
Write as you please,
In six minutes,
Like a breeze.
I fear that,
Without a prompt,
The words won't flow,
Compet-
ently.
So I'll leave you this poem,
With it's oddities and misrhymes,
Mismatched verse and rhythms,
Lines that run out of time.
Words that make no sense,
Lines that are too dense,
And of course you must remember,
In this chilly month of September,
That poetry doesn't have to rhyme.
As he felt the air spin around him, he stood up. He could no longer see anything except the pocket watch that he had been swinging above his head. It helped him relax, but he had not wound the old clock in several days, and it was getting slow. As he looked at it now, he realized the arms of the clock had melded into a number. Four numbers. 1264. He didn't know what they meant, nor what was happening, but he knew one thing. He was going to find out. He took a step foreword, and felt a million...
"why cross at all?" was the first thought. "why cross, or pass, or walk, or tread, or sprint or anything else of the sort?"
the sun was even lower than when the first thought started, oranges now completely red, soon black.
"or, why not." the next thought. "who am i to rethink, or revisit, or retry, or reimagine, or reexamine the path now before me?"
to my left, infinity. an unstoppable openness. to my right, the past, from whence i'd come. dust.
finally, twilight. but with my final choices, no regrets. only then could i step out in front of...
Taste was one of those things that was meant to be very personal, and yet everyone seemed to recognise bad taste.
The joke may have been ill-timed, but she maintained that it wasn't in "bad taste" - soon finding herself in the minority (one, in fact).
Fine. Fine, fine, fine - he would've laughed, if he'd been there. Then again, him not being there was the entire point.
He would've laughed at that, too.
It was a nice, warm day, and that was ridiculous - funerals were meant to be full of rain and the dark and thunder and the...
He hung his shirt up on the clothesline before he left. He told me he was going fishing, and I said okay, and gave a bucket with sandwiches wrapped in gingham cloth, and lemonade in a mason jar, and even two chocolate chip cookies. He had the bucket and his pole,and I saw him meet our neighbor down the road, watched them shake hands.
And then I went inside, and knitted another pair of baby booties, and refolded the stacks of little clothes in the dresser. Any day now.
But our neighbor came back later that day alone, and distraught....
Daring to be noticed for the first time in her life, she pushed her chair back and stood up. She knew every detail of his face: the way his nose arched in between his eyes, the way the left side of his lip always rose a little higher when he smirked as he walked by, and that freckle under his ear that she always imagined kissing.
They had worked in the same office for about six months now, and since he walked in she could not take her eyes off him. They would talk very casually, about the boring weekly...
The cut was more jagged than she would have liked, but the little bastards were always squirming while she decapitated them. Still, the look of terror in its wide, lifeless eyes was one of the best she'd seen yet.
She headed back to the cottage; she'd have to dip the head in tar and put it on top of a stake along with the rest on the perimeter of her garden. So far, the warning had done little to deter the pests from stealing her fruit and vegetables - food that she and her little brother needed to live comfortably...
Twisting, turning, bending, breaking. Well, I haven't broken yet, but I sure can't bend much further without snapping in a million pieces. I mean, how many lies can a person twist before they break? I've been living this life for so long that you'd think lying would just be part of the job by now. I mean, come on. I'm a spy. It shouldn't be this difficult anymore. At the beginning, sure but not now. They stand in front of me and I can see in their eyes that they aren't quite as clueless as before. Oh boy. The boss...