The music was beautiful
Mournful
The dress was lovely
Black
My chest was tight
Crying
My mind was spinning
Gone
I remember my Nans pension book. The smell of the paper and the ink. I would hold it to my nose as I walked to the post office. Nan would pre-sign it and Mary, the post mistress, would happily cash it.
Then, at the main counter, I'd purchase Nans usual forty Number Six Tipped and fizzy cola bottles for me. It didn't matter that I was only eleven. In our little village everyone knew everyone.
Eventually the pension books were replaced with the new banking system, something my Nan never quite got the hang of. My trips to the little...
Absent. Gone gone gone, baby gone. She's gone again. She's away. She's fled, she's left the scene. She's vanished. You want to call the cops, hire a bounty hunter, marshal the town, grab the pitchforks, light the torches, whatever it takes, to drag her back. You would do so much, you know you would.
It's the future you can't get a hold of. You know the past and you want to scratch the eyes out of the present, but you don't want to see what's ahead. Just bring her home. This is all. Anything now, you'll do anything. Come back....
The first sentence of Fahrenheit 451 flashes into my head as my last cigarette is lit. That book made me fear a world where books, where knowledge, could not be free. To me that was a crime, I didn't really think I'd have to die for it though.
And for a second I think about how all this started, all I remember of it is a single phrase,"I aim to misbehave." Well I certainly have at this point
Looking back I should have known I'd be caught smuggling those textbooks into this shitty country and really I almost wish I...
I lost my grip on the wheel. Well, not really. In reality, I lost my grip on everything. In that moment, nothing else mattered. The world around me became a blur of distant activity and the noise around me sounded like a conversation floating through walls from the other end of a house. The world both started in motion and went completely still in the very same second. In that moment, walking past him in the hallway, I forgot my name. All I could remember was the image of him walking to his locker that burned itself into my mind....
The drive had been long and hot, and Mac's head barely cleared the top of the steering wheel. Betsy was being an incorrigible fuss, and Mac was silently fantasizing about slamming on the brakes and shoving her out of the passenger side door.
Maybe it was the hat.
He asked her, begged her not to wear the hat, but she knew it would get under his skin like nothing else (except maybe singing show tunes as loudly as possible, so she popped it on her head with a smile and hopped into the truck without saying a word.
That was...
Birds. I hate badminton. Eye-hand coordination was never my strength.
"You'll have fun," Fanny told me.
I hate how the little birdies fall apart if you step on them. Which I always do. They're easier to miss, fallen in the long grass like puffs of dandelions.
"Tell her to play," Fanny told her brother. We avoided eye contact. Like we always did when she was around. Our secret.
"You'll have fun," he said, not looking at me. "I'll let you win."
I didn't want to beat anybody, least of all him. I wanted to fold him in my arms, cradle...
She would never use a sippy cup for wine. She just wouldn't. And not because the other mothers would smell the fermentation on her breath. Not because her eyes would gloss over as the nannies began to talk about the hockey-playing "manny" who worked with the two boys at the Sullivans. Not because she would have to hold tightly to the padded grip of the jogging stroller. It wasn't because her Rosacea gave her cheek bones a cherry hue. It had nothing to do with her morning run to the playground, the mile and half she squeezed in everyday.
She...
Sheila tsk-tsked as she massaged the Ben-Gay into Devin's shoulder. "I told you to leave the shuttlecock practice alone for a few weeks," she scolded.
"I was bored," protested Devin. "I'm an athlete; I can't just sit around all day poking at my Facebook. It's bad for the soul."
"Well," Sheila said, kneading the muscles, "you'll be totally off this shoulder for a few days now. You're lucky you don't need a cast." She stood up from the massage table, walking over to the microwave. Inside she'd heated up a herbal tea, and she removed it now and brought it...
Taste. The middle, forgotten brother in the family of senses.
They don't have helper dogs or monkeys for people who can't taste anything. No one is working on smaller and smaller devices to amplify or stimulate tastebuds.
You can either taste or not and no one really cares.
The one good thing about not tasting anything is you can win all kinds of money on the playground by eating things. Things that might seem disgusting.
I was the richest kid in elementary school. I'd takle bets and then down worms or bugs or the digusting ham and peanut butter sandwich...