Ridiculous. This whole argument was absurd but we were going to have it anyway.
"If you heard it, why didn't you pick it up?"
She looked honestly confused but it seemed obvious to me. I scowled at her. "Why is this such a big deal? Yeah, I heard you drop it but I didn't know it was meant for me."
"Did you think it was trash?" Exasperation now threaded her voice and her arched eyebrow told me there was no way I was going to win this one.
"Well, I certainly didn't think it was some super-secret message that I...
Maggie came to Heathrow airport on a white pony she had purchased along the Thames. She was hoping to board the next blind flight to Asia. Perhaps it might take her to Tibet, but you never know with those sort of flights. She had packed a variety of items in her wicker basket, which she always looped to the brass hooks above the seats on the plane. The basket had a vertical fold-out tray, where she had assembled her afternoon tea: a cup of Earl Grey and four cucumber cream cheese sandwiches.
She got in the security line at sector...
The lamp wouldn't turn on and I had to sleep in the dark. I had to imagine what was lurking without light. I was afriad at first and then my eyes adjusted. My pupils opened up. In the morning the sun came in a few strands at a time and I realized that I was still alive and the monsters, goblins, all the things I'm afraid of didn't get me. The light doesn't have to be on to feel safe. Safety is still there with light. I listen to my dog snore and she snorts. She is fat and I...
Wine makes you drunk if you drink too much. I like wine. Its like grape juice with alcohol. They should put it in juice packs and give it to adults. If you drink wine while your pregnant, then your baby will get messed up and look like a raisin. i like raisins. they are grapes that got old and they got shriveled up, like my uncle. He drank too much wine and got messed up. My mother doesn't drink wine anymore. It kills you slowly.
Savouring words was a joy to him. Illiterate for many years; he learnt to read and write late in life. His appreciation grew from prose to poetry to haiku. Others laughed that he swallowed a dictionary. He did not understand the derision. Loving words, enabling communication beyond speech seemed to him a peerless gift.
Then he discovered etymology. Suddenly connections between ancient languages and modern English brought a deepening joy and fruitful satisfaction beyond any other pursuit he followed. When some spoke he understood unusual words and could name the orinating language;
It was cold. Freezing, really. There at the stoop, on the street, glowing in red. Dark, straight hair raking her face. She shivered, stood and walked down the street. To me, this place is foreign. To her, she knows the environment like the stories her mother told her. She walks down the road away from the doorway. Where they threw her out. Spit on her. But now she walks down the road trying to keep warm. She coughs. The shivers shake her again. The cold day drops her onto the street, rejecting her and the brightness of her clothes. The...
The earthy smell of autumn leaves surrounded me and stimulated my senses. The crisp crunch of leaves was projected through the isolated valley as I gaped ahead at the distant disturbance. Harsh rustling and twigs snapping told me that this wasn't wind. This was a predator. My heart raced, its beats rapid and echoing through me. I tried to run but my legs were plastered to the ground, heavy as cement. And then I saw it.
Kenya. She said her name was Kenya.
And then she laughed. I couldn't hear it, not over the music in the bar, not over the shouting of everyone around us. But I saw the laugh, starting in her stomach, and traveling up and out of her mouth.
She leaned closer and said that her parents had grown up with Black Power and Africa awareness, and decided to name her Kenya. That they had grounded her the first time she straightened her hair.
Her voice, the part of her voice I could hear, had a huskiness to it that really appealed...
For some reason, Zombies love wedding veils. Maybe it's a snare mechanism, much like how Venus flytraps look beautiful on the outside before they devour their prey. Or maybe it's some attachment to the things that matter in life, that is, in non-Zombie life. In any case, this one had fooled that part of Ricky that had been longing for companionship of any sort. He had been holed away with canned beans, month-old cooked rice, and a shotgun for far too long not to feel the pangs of desire as she approached him from the woods.
Big mistake.
She lurched...
It was not a world in which it was advisable to take risks.
It could be argued - had been, by a few scholars, in the deep and distant past, a more romantic age - that risks were always inadvisable, that this was what made them risks in the first place.
But those scholars didn't live here, they didn't live now, they were from a world of chivalry and knights and heroism.
They were not in a world where you were burned if you were caught.
There were marks all over her arms - his, too, they sat beside one...