"Dragonflies are good luck," his grandmother used to say. "They are fairies' horses. Their wings spread wishes and wonder."
He remembered that and not much else about her. They would sit in the grass by the shore of the lake. He used to spend three weeks every summer out at his grandparents house. They picked blueberries and chopped wood, made cookies and walked in the woods.
He was an adult now. They were long dead.
His daughter stood in front of him, frowning, hands onm hips. "That's not true, daddy. Dragonflies are dragonflies, not horses. And fairies don't exist."
He...
Wet asphalt sparkling under the white sky. There is a yawn of blue. Sometimes fall is brighter than summer, more alive with moisture and energy. Some things are dying, but many things end like fireworks.
We can be categorized in many ways. Let's divide us into the standing, the sitting and the reclining for the time being. Then let us separate into summer minds, winter minds, spring minds, fall minds.
You're going to yawn. You're going to stretch your eyes.
She screamed at me. I only rose my voice to make sure she heard me over her rant. She seemed to think that i was a wall that she could just yell at and i would'nt do anything. but she was wrong. i was wondering how our friendship got to this point. then, one day, it was my mother who gave me a revelation that clicked all the pieces together. the day we started getting choppy was also the day that 1) my newer, other friend stepped into our lives, and 2) she got chased up a tree by a...
I couldn't move. My legs felt like jelly and I had to sit. Everything in the hospital seemed to go blurry.
"Are you ok?" asked the doctor. No I was not ok. The love of my life just died and It was all because of me. Anything would be better than this hell. Even an electric chair. As long as Joseph was alive I would be fine but now he's gone and I will never be ok again.
Skipper was panting from the last half hour of running, in fact he was frothing at the mouth. Compared to the rest of his pack however, Skipper was doing quite well. In their eerily black and white world, one of their best friends had begun to experiment on the poor dogs, and now, their world had exploded inexplicably into a cosmos of strange and disconcerting qualities. The farmer had, much to Skipper and the other dogs' dismay, altered the K-9's to the point that they had been forced to trust their previously useless eyes more than their noses. What had...
The cannibals were behind bars strong enough to keep lions contained. They were the newest attraction at the zoo. You could hardly see past the sea of people to what was inside the enclosure.
Up! I demanded.
My father put me on his shoulders so I could see. There were four. A mother and a father and two children who were too small for me to tell if they were boys or girls.
The mother smiled at me in what I thought was a friendly way, exposing teeth that were sharp and wicked looking. Her face had two long streaks...
to My son before I die
Take me from this bed, your knuckled curtained hands the fear the dread, for I have none of that. Throw away the flowers, for I am not yet dead.
Take me out to lie again on the Earth
if there is any left
and let me paw the Earth like the Animal I am
here I lie, and She is warming to me.
Gigantic. Positively enormous. those were the words that first came to mind as she gazed up at the Statue of Liberty. She got into the helicopter and sighed as it shot upwards to the top of the enormous statue. her mind flicked back to Russia, looking up at The Motherland Calls. As she shrugged on her parachute and fixtured her helmet, she very simply jumped. she felt the wind ruffling her hair under the helmet and fusing her eyes shut. She pulled the cord, and drifted downwards, wondering whether she would hit pavement or water. She closed her eyes as...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. The doorway was not the kind of doorway best suited to huddling, and the gown appeared equally ill-designed for the purpose. Yet huddle she did. The rain dripped and sputtered from the sky, streaking her scarlet back as it fell.
After a time, she carefully unhuddled and picked up the bag that she had lain down beside her. She withdrew from it a small, glass orb, in which indistinct shapes and colours seemed to float. Lightning flashed briefly across the sky and as she held the...
"Tell me what she looks like," said the young man.
The young man had managed to find a box to sit on. He was resting with legs crossed at the ankles. He peered straight ahead, smiling slightly, like he was the only one in on the joke. But of course he couldn't see anything because he was blind. You could have told that just by looking at him, the way he was faking concentration on the scene before him with that sadly unfocused gaze.
The older man, who was much shorter, stood only a few steps away, with his hands...