He hated the color green, he hated it with all the enamel in his big front teeth. Since he was a tiny woodchuck he was teased mercilessly by his peers because well, he wasn't colorblind like all the rest. He could see the color green...everywhere, everywhere! The anger grew within him against this gift that he called a curse. He just wanted to be like all the other woodchucks living in their happy, ignorant, colorless little worlds. He could never sleep during the day with visions of sugar green fairies dancing in his head. He began taking walks, destroying all...
A steady rain poured outside to her left. On her right, the family had gathered for a special dinner. They sat quietly, watching the girl make the biggest decision of her life. Would she stay with them and eat, or run headlong into the wet streets of the city?
She had one reason to remain, and one reason to leave.
Both compelled her greatly.
Her father had been sick for a year. This dinner was to celebrate his good health. He always called her his little red devil, for she was mischievous and always wore something red, every day.
She...
Hugging her knees, Tanya stifled another sob. Her face felt swollen and sore, yet numb from the pain. Sitting in the pitch black, the only light coming from the oven which was still humming beside her. The lasagna she had been making for tea splashed across the floor and up the walls.
She could hear Tim banging upstairs, the slamming of cabinets in the bathroom as he got changed. He couldn't go to the pub with blood on his shirt, could he?
Tanya knew she would have to clear up the mess at some point, but for now she was...
"Is it me, or are getting text messages tinier and tinier?" Without her glasses, Jen was practically blind. She searched her purse, but they weren't there, when suddendly her phone rang. "Great. I can't even see who's calling me. Hello?!" The voice on the other line was distortet, heavily breathing, and uttered: "Looking for something?" "Who is this?" The voice let out a quite and diabolical laugh. "That is for you to find out. At the desk right across from your's sits Jim. He knows everything. If you ask him, you will never see again... Because I will break you're...
Looking out my thirteenth floor office window, I marveled at how dark, gritty and simply dirty the air looked. It was so hazy, it looked like dusk even though I knew it was only two pm. I decided to give my brief a break and go eat some lunch, this was the first time in four hours I had looked up, and I noticed the stiffness in my back, the hunger gnawing at me.
"God, look how dark it is! It's like we live in Gotham City!" I said to the secretary. She didn't grin, like I had expected.
"What?"...
The stories rarely stop when the party does.
He was not tall, or lean, but he was fashionable. He had the bushiest eyebrows, like tiny mink stoles pasted to his forehead, and a strange (but familiar) teetering gate to his walk as he meandered like a river through the empty park lawns.
"I hope I didn't insult her," the man worried to himself as he kicked an empty potato chip bag across the path. He spotted a bench looking out over the old friend, duck pond.
There our lonely man sat. Contemplating the emptiness of it all. No ducks, even....
The dapper man picked up a penny and found a little hole. The hole was smaller than the penny, but larger than a dime. The man, dapper and penny-wise, bent down on dapper knees, head bowed, right eye squinting into dime-sized hole.
"Dimes, dimes, dimes! Mole men flipping dimes, muddy mason jars tight with dimes!"
He wigle
I know that if I keep going I will make it, just a few more yards surely. My body - weak, my mind - blank, my friends - gone. I lost them a few days ago in the stormy waters that came from beneath. Evidence from our fishing vacation that we had been anticipating for weeks, in smithereens. Why me, why am I the only one here.
Surely this has to be a sign from above, Gods way of letting me know I'm special and he has other things planned for me. I promise, I will not let him down,...
He was absent. Again. The kid would only show up on test days - on which he performed well enough. But that wasn't the point. All the other students showed up every day, and worked earnestly. And taught each other. And applied the concepts. He would pass the exams but forget all the material down the road. It would be like most of the bright students - playing with ideas. Treating it all as a show - as a game. Show up to perform. Wasting their talent. Lacking direction. Lacking any real purpose. Where was the kid going to get...
They gathered in the woods, but that was not enough to save them, as they were mistaken for trees, cut down and shipped to a lumber mill.
One of them was fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be made into thick planks; most of the rest were sadly torn apart into sawdust and mulch. But that one continued to live, in great pain, as he was violently sawed and assembled into a large, polished grandfather clock.
They attached to him some cold, foreign bits of metal that moved jarringly. The ticking of the gears against his aching frame was unceasing; day...