Shots were fired all around town. Poor innocent lives we're taken in a matter of seconds. They were taking over... everything. I had no idea if time permitted our family to move away before we lost our lives. Every night was a nightmare to hear about family friends getting captured and killed. My father tried his best to hide my sisters and I behind the dresser when we heard the soldiers coming closer. Behind the dresser was a hole in the cement wall which was big enough to fit us 3 kids. My mother looked at us everyday as if...
She'd been in the park till noon, watching the gate to the Forbidden City, seeing the tourists as they milled about in mist-rimed sunshine. Finally, she caught sight of him as he approached the gate. Every day without fail, staggering slightly under the weight of his bag. She was overdressed for the streets in a red dress meant for parties not park benches. Flung out suddenly from the warmth of the car, out of favour and, quite suddenly without comfort. At the bottom of the hill she lost him briefly, then saw him, walking alongside two Western tourists, his sack...
Once in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. She hugged her hat to her chest, and lightly tapped on the door, and prepared herself for the worst. Her lips were chapped and as cold as icicles, because of the cold winter air. When there was no answer. A tear drop slid down her grimy, and filthy face. She knocked a little louder this time, and when now one replied. She slid down the wall, sitting on the pavement. A man walked by, and spit on to the step in front of her feet. She...
She'd have preferred the electric chair, but he wouldn't have it. "Think about how much easier it would be on everyone hon," Sarah said as she stared down at her son, sitting in his black Quickie wheelchair. "You wouldn't have to roll yourself so much and your father and I wouldn't have to help you up those steep hills if you had this chair."
Mark stared at the other wheelchair, with its electric motor, and grimaced. "Ma, I'm already lazy as it is," he told her bluntly. "If I don't roll myself my arms will atrophy as much as my...
In the Kiliswa village, status depended upon how many bricks you could carry at once. If you put down any of your bricks, even for a second, you would immediately be pounced upon by your rivals.
It was a harsh life. It wore at you, carrying gigantic piles of bricks everywhere you went, day and night. Only the strongest survived; the rest perished.
Among the strongest were Ja and Na, twin brothers whose parents had died from carrying too many bricks at once (a twin pregnancy was especially hard, for the mother must carry her additional weight AND her bricks...
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...
Her mother was going to kill them when they got home, but she couldn't help it. Flinging her legs high above the corn that surrounded them, she gave a happy giggle and sighed.
"What are you thinking of now?" Greg asked her, pressing a kiss to her hair as he stretched out an arm across her stomach.
"I was thinking of mother, and the stories she used to tell of boys in the corn fields." She put on a high pitched voice, eerily close to her mother's pitch, "they're only after one thing Rose. One thing!" Greg gave the girl...
"Travel light, but take everything with you."
It took her a moment to try and work out whether it was meant as a philosphical proposition or actually practical advice. Not that it felt paticularly practical.
Still. One easy solution. "What are you on about now?"
Effective, too. "Everything you need. I don't want to have to use a phrase book to work out how to ask for...what do you always forget?"
"Nothing. Clearly. Or you'd remember. You may well have learnt the lingo for it, if there was just one thing..."
"Sunglasses. You always lose them."
"Ah, well, that's different."...
The room faded away around her, the bed, the dressers, the walls and windows, disappeared, faded out, until the only thing he saw was her standing there. A sheet twisted demurely around her body. Hair falling haphazardly. Chin tucked in slightly, eyes looking up and beckoning with each slow flap of her eyelashes.
Nothing else existed, just her and him and the unbearable distance between them.
The sheet shifted, her leg emerged, bent at the knee. She spun slowly to face him. Walking forward, unbuttoning his shirt, kicking his shoes off and into the white void surrounding them.
The emptiness...
"I hate her." He spit his words, I knew the taste of her still rested on his tongue, and he gave everything he had to saying those three words with such a vile tone. "Listen, I think maybe this time you guys should-" "No." The way he looked at me, at first with anger, and now with the confused sadness I had once felt a few months back, I felt heartbroken for him. "Maybe it didn't work out because.. maybe it didn't work out because I was still in love with someone else." I know it sounds stupid, and corny,...