There was a comma where a semicolon should have been. This drove her crazy. She thought of actually shooting herself in the head but that would have required a 3-day waiting period; besides, she hated guns. So she kept going through the papers, red slashes here, smiley faces there. But many more slashes than smileys. Soon she just started making slashing smiley faces. Her students wouldn't know the difference, she thought.
After all, they couldn't tell the difference between simple punctuation so how could they get her irony?
John, her favorite student and best writer in her Senior Classics class...
I awoke, pissed, the activity, not the feeling, took a shower, got dressed, made coffee, drank the coffee, fed the dog, the fish, the cat, watered the plants, left a note for the cleaning people, heard a story on NPR that made me think of you, began to write a poem about the us we were, before we became the non-us, still it felt good to think of you, your smile, shoes, the way you opened your eyes after they were closed in the aftermath of our coupling, when we were a couple, it turned me on, I went back...
They gathered in the woods. Huddled together, shoulders pressed against each other for warm and support and that deep basic desire for some sort of human contact.
"It's good to see you again John," an unclean, wirey man nodded to his fellow and they clapsed hands.
"You too. Have you news?"
"None. There hasn't been much activity the past month." The man nodded grimly as he listened.
"One of our nests got hit, we lost a few, but the rest of us are fine."
"How about the rest of you?" The other members of the circle, three men and one...
Some people in masks of Guy Fawkes
Stood to protest Scientology's flocks
They wore them because
It gave them a buzz
And otherwise they'd get sued by those cocks
You dance because you don't know any better.
You don't realise what is really going on, you may never truly realise what's going on.
So you dance, the three of you - in a moment they are your sisters, your mothers, your lovers. They are your world, your dance partners, although if anyone asked you their names you couldn't give an answer.
You dance.
You will never see them again, after this moment, after the moon sets and a new day begins. You won't remember anything else about the day but the dance. The dance will live on in your...
We were eating tuna fish sandwiches on the green outside the palace. The sandwiches were soggy but we ate them anyway. The sky and the water were dusk. "It's dusky," I said. "No," she replied.
We ate the soggy sandwiches as we stared at the sky. When you're lost in thought, your sense of taste dims. Staring at the sky and down at the water, I could feel my taste buds run up to my eyes. I could almost taste the sky.
I could tell you I tasted the water, but it just tasted like water. Soggy.
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?"...
Fred wanted the puppets. He wanted all the puppets, man. If Fred couldn't have puppets, he'd be a miserable SOB. All he could ever think about was puppets. He wore his socks on his hands. That's how much he loved puppets.
So when he saw the Punch and Judy set on ebay, he knew he had to act. Problem was: Sylvester Stallone was coming over for lunch. He'd slaved for hours over the meal (pickles on rye bread. And figs.) He wanted to impress Sylvester Stallone with stories of how he rubbed Cheez Whiz into the hair of his buttocks,...
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...
There was a party in the upstairs of the building. On the roof. It was my building too. I had lived there for many years. Paying rent, not having a pet (not allowed), putting up with all the noise and rubbish in the hallways and out. There was a lot of nastiness, to be sure, but it was my home. Come to find out, its the building's owners giving the party. A corporate landlord business that aims to put themselves first and the people trying to live in their wasted spaces last. The party was buzzing, I could hear the...