Half naked and desperate, the child climbed the thin bars of the door, her cage, staring at the world outside. Her right leg crooked over the horizontal bar as she tilted her body, dark eyes staring longingly at the world.
"Get down from there!" her father snapped angrily. "You're gonna hurt yourself."
"When can I go out, Daddy?" she asked, turning to look at him imploringly. "I want to go out! You never let me do anything."
"You don't want to go out there, babygirl," the man said gruffly. "It's a dangerous world. There are mean people out there that...
"I'm having no part in this. I'm having nothing to do with any of it. Because it's wrong. You're wrong. This entire thing is...it's wrong. It's just...wrong."
"Have you always been good with words?" He sauntered closer, pale fingers tracing my cheek, my neck. "You're relying quite heavily on that word. Wrong. Have you thought about what it really means? How damning it truly is? I don't think you have."
I hated the feel of his fingers across my skin, hated the jolt that had run straight through me, hated the tingling, hated the - I hated it.
He was...
I was going to tell her the truth...honesty is always the best policy...right? But then I wasn't ready just yet. What would she think? How would she react? Would anything ever be the same?
"No. I can't tell her." I muttered quietly to myself. I hunched over another inch on my bar stool. I was alone although surrounded by patrons at the hotel called The Silent Sleeper's pub. The TV roared football overhead. I could hardley notice anything else in the room but the grain of the wood on the wooden bar counter in front of me, as I grew...
He had been happier when he was unhappy.
It was difficult to fully explain; his days of being an asocial shut-in were, upon reflection, paradoxically better than his life now. The words had flowed then, from his mind to his keyboard to the story, he could see and imagine vividly what he did not have.
Now, with a college degree, a good job, a new car, a girlfriend and a house in the hills, he was a markedly happier, and thus unhappier, man. He couldn't finish anything he set his mind to. His efforts were as half a page of...
General Hutchison stroked his jaw pensively. "So this - what do you call it?"
"SR-33, sir. The soldier robot, 33rd prototype."
"Took you 33 tries to get it right, huh?"
Mr. Raoul ignored the general's attempt at humor. "You'll find that it's just as capable of understanding and carrying out orders as one of your own men, sir, but its reflexes are faster, its senses are sharper, and it isn't afraid of death."
"Sounds like the perfect soldier, son," Hutchison remarked. "So this SR-33, have there been any of them programming glitches with it?"
"No sir, the operating system has...
Det kom en dag i hodet på meg. Og jeg så det aldri før enn da. Det var noe som hadde hengt over meg i lengre tid. Jeg visste det var på tide å snu. Jeg visste at jeg en dag ville jeg angre og en dag ville det hele virke meningsløst. Jeg så aldri tilbake. Men nå skulle jeg endelig snu. Det skulle bli min tur å være den gode, jeg er lei av å være den som alltid må gi - jeg trenger å få noe jeg også. Jeg trenger nærhet. Jeg trenger varme. Jeg trenger en som...
Water. That's what I always think of when I think of her. Cannon Creek, Lake Erie, the Atlantic, the Pacific, nothing too specific.
Water can be anything you need, want, fear, love, hate. It can be clear, it can be murky. It can be warm, cold, swallow, deep. All these things are what water naturally is.
In my memory, our love is an ocean. Oh, yes. We were in love. I'm not so hopelessly romantic that I would ever be involved in unreciprocated love. No, no. We were in love, and it was the ocean.
She swam in the clear...
She wanted to kill her. She wanted to murder the girl who got me fired. Why? I couldn't explain.
In hindsight, the solution was obvious. I'm not sure why I didn't see it at the time, but then again who does? I suppose that's why they say 'hindsight's always 20/20'. Perfect vision. I can't say that I've ever really had a knack for figuring things out on the spot, on the fly, with no real time to think about it. I'm a 'processer'. I like to process things, take my time, really think things through. Unfortunately, that doesn't always work to my advantage.
There are situations in life when you just have to come up with an answer, lightning...
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...