"Knives."
The scientist looked up. The musician was bright-eyed, excited, although there were bags under his eyes. She replaced her spectacles (why did she always take them off for the close-up work? It didn't make sense) and gave him her full attence. "Knives?"
"Knives." He sat down on the stool, gangly, limbs too long. He was not suited for the labratory - not a huge surprise, really. "Knives are the answer. We...we cut."
It was almost cute, watching him try to describe what he presumed the scientific method was. "Do you mean dissection?"
He nodded, enthusiastic, excited. "Yes! Yes, we...
The disco ball turned on its dusty axis, shining pixels of glitter light across their worn faces and twinkling in their liquid eyes. Eyes that darted to the front door when someone walked through. This hotel bar was the opposite of pretension, the only tension coming from the anticipation of meeting someone to make the night less lonely.
He came in for a beer--procrastinating to book his hotel for a corporate conference plus budget cuts at work meant he had a room at a low budget hotel. All the eyes followed him as he took a spot at the bar....
Until now, she'd never thought of herself as pretty. The purple satin fabric reaching her feet. Hair tied up beautifully. She had never looked better. Walking down the stairs towards her date a look of amazement on his face she knew this was going to be the best knight of her life.
A smile spread across her face as she saw the entry into the prom. Her friends standing outside waiting for them so then they could all walk in and rock this party together.
Silence.
The vicar cleared his throat. 'Do you Isabella Riley take....'
'I heard you.' she said, suddenly reappearing from the dream world which had captivated. 'I er... I don't.'
Suddenly aware of a hundred pairs of eyes, she took a deep breath. Ben's mouth fell open. Shock visibly clear on his face.
'Iz?'
'don't Ben.' she murmured. She had to get out of this church. She couldn't possibly marry him. Be commited to one man for the rest of her life. She just couldn't do it.
'But Iz. What? I mean, why?'
'I'm sorry Ben. I really am so, so...
My own pink shoes were the last thing I saw. Then, darkness. I tried to put together the pieces of the puzzle in those final moments but nothing seemed to fit. I was supposed to go to work that morning.
Supposed to. That would haunt me. I was supposed to do a lot of things. I was supposed to pay my rent on time, I was supposed to pick my daughter up from school, I was supposed to meet my husband for dinner that night. It seemed none of that would be happening now.
That morning, after taking the dog...
I walked down the street with my pants around my ankles, arms akimbo, doing the Super Bowl Shuffle with a boombox wrapped around my ears. I had picked up 20 D batteries at the store, and if I was going to do something, I was going to do it right.
With the screaming vocals of Ronnie James Dio blaring from two overworked speakers, I strutted along the Santa Monica Pier. Rather, I did the Penguin Push all down the boardwalk. It was times like these when I was proud to say that I could rock out with my cock out....
I thought she was made of china, the first time I met her. Girls that perfect didn't exist, only dolls. Frozen icons of perfection, unattainable.
She made me feel clumsy - she was slight, small, pale, hiding behind perfect ringlets. On paper we sound the same - the same could be said of me (apart from the ringlets; my hair is straight, limp) but she wore it with pride, I treated my height as a disability, my weight as an inconvienience, my skintone a health hazard. I looked sickly, she looked ethereal.
Somehow it wasn't a surprise when she spoke...
The man wrote to the woman down by the river Yo. He had finished in the fields and his brother was calling from the high hill.
"Young!" he screamed "the soldiers are here!"
The man dropped his pen. The notepaper, pink and full of tiny perforations the man had made in the shape of a lotus flower, flew in the direction of a crane's nest. A young bird who was wading blinked at it. Soon, it began to rain.
The soldiers carried out the brother and left behind the others. A girl ran to the river for the pen as...
Daring to be noticed for the first time in her life, she pushed her chair back and stood up.
"Yes, Ms. Clark?" The professor deadpanned, "You have something you'd like to add?"
Rebecca tugged on her shirt slightly and took a deep breath.
"Yes, I do." She felt her cheeks turn red, "That's is wrong."
"Wrong?" Rebecca hated this guy and she took secret pleasure as he looked wildly at the board, searching for his error, "I don't see anything wrong here."
"It's in the first line." She felt like a hero even though her voice was shaky.
"Oh, I...
It is beautiful. The trail was never going to end. Or at least I wasn't going to make it to the end. I won't live forever. I will die before we reach the end of the trail. We'd been traveling for three years. By all calculations it will take another four to five years. I realized that as I was digging through the journals from the explorers before us. I realized that the rest all knew that, they just didn't want to tell me. To tell me that what I had fought for wasn't ever going to be mine.
But...