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...
A heart is a beating machine. It's an organ, it's a force beyond all reckoning.
The doctor will now see you," said the nurse in all white.
I glared, knocked over my coffee and walked behind her, moving towards my fate. I would hear that my beating heart skipped beats-a heart murmur. Murmur echoing in my head. Mumu-a dress I wore in Hawaii as a young girl. My mother was in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked.
The doctor was in the room before I was. Is this a good sign. He's anxious to tell me my heart will explode....
He sat in the window of the coffee shop, letting his coffee go cold as he stared at the people passing on the street absentmindedly. His notebook lay open in his lap, forgotten. His new assignment at work completely failing to inspire him. His phone was faced down on the table so that he couldn't see it when it lit up as his girlfriend rang him to check up, berate him or otherwise just invade his bubble of solitude.
He wasn't sure whenhe had begun to feel just so, disatisfied, but the feeling had certainly settled upon him with a...
"You know," Clark said, in-between rising above the water to take breaths as he swam. "I really hate you."
John shrugged; or, at least, performed as much as a shrug as you can while swimming. "I don't see why."
"What do you mean, you don't see why?"
"We're doing what I said we'd do, right? Go for a swim together. You were all uppity about the whole thing, so I challenged you to do one length of the pool with me. Well, here we are, doing one length."
"Yes, but you didn't tell me that we were going to be...
The snow had hardened overnight and was crisp now. It wasn't what you would call a cold day and Fran had left her jacket unbuttoned. She was looking at the children off in the distance.
"I'd forgotten that it was today."
Alan was looking farther away.
"I wasn't looking forward to it or anything."
He reached in his pocket and found and empty packet of cigarettes.
"Dammit."
"When did they start doing it?"
"I don't know, maybe 3 or 4 years ago."
"Do you remember the first one?"
"No. It's just a thing that happens."
She felt very bad then...
It was white. That was something that was abnormal about the entire situation. What was not something that one thought of when being beaten.
He wondered if perhaps it was heaven trying to tell him that he was closer than he though. He hoped that it was finally the light at the end of the tunnel, but when the next blow from the stick hit him across the back, he knew he had no such luck.
A small well of blood slowly came up his throat. It almost felt like a terrible hiccup to him. One of those hiccups that...
The sheep were at pasture. The air was still and crisp, silent but for the rustle of leaves and the drift of a "baa" from the content grazers.
Restless, I turned my eyes to the mountains that were the backdrop of the field, letting my eyes rove over the gray craggy slopes up to the snowy white caps that scraped at the belly of the sky. I felt the chill creep up my spine.
Adventure stretched just beyond these fences. One day, I would become more than this, more than a humble shepard. One day, I would scale those mountains...
Vanquished.
Seriously, that's how it felt as I walked down the hall back to homeroom. My hands were in the front pockets of my jeans, my head was down. I felt as if all the wind had been taken from my sails. A strong breeze could have knocked me over and I would have just curled up in a fetal ball in front of the beige steel lockers. When the bell rang, people would just step around me as I tried to become more and more invisible.
Mr. Garsh said he was sympathetic. I think they tell him to say...
You can't be a hero if you can't move your arms. You can't get the girl with a stutter like that. What can you do in your condition? What did you expect? How can you live without the means to earn respect?
Well, mister President. Maybe I won't be a hero. Maybe I will show you how a villain gets respect. Maybe I will let you watch. Show me what a hero is, mister President.
I held it at arm's length, thinking that it could never get to me that way.
But as I sit here alone in this room night after rain soaked day. I have come to realize,with the full clarity of a reformed sinner; it was not that I was protecting me from it. It was that I was protecting it from me.
And it never wanted protection in the first place.