Until now, she'd never thought of herself as pretty. Even this morning, she hadn't really thought of it. A white dress, sure. A veil, sure. Kitten heels, yes. She had told Marjorie that she didn't want her make-up done.
"I've been doing all right for forty years," she said. Marjorie just looked at her and then looked away without saying anything.
Marjorie was pretty. Everyone thought so. It wasn't so much a matter of thinking, even. Empirically, she was attractive. But she wore a lot of make-up.
This morning Marjorie wasn't there. Wasn't there to watch her pull on stockings...
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...
Framed by white-washed plaster walls, she was a sharp contrast to the beige and grey of the street surrounding her. She reached up and brushed a stray lock of black hair from her forehead, looking over her right shoulder down the street. She was waiting, and her eyes scanned the oncoming traffic carefully, searching.
The young man across the street had stopped walking when he noticed her, a sudden burst of brilliant red against the subdued building. She never looked over at him, never stopped looking down the street at the oncoming mass of bicycles, cars, carts, trucks, and people...
Light.
It had been a while since I've seen it. Not the kind of light that you switch on or off when you walk into a room, but the light that switches on when you hit the bottom. The light that you were missing while you were walking blindly around that led you to fall.
I know many times before I could have just switch it on, but I'm stubborn. I couldn't let go of my pride and admit I could not see and that I was wrong.
Arrogant.
But the Lord is patient. He knows me very well, heck,...
Too saccharine. Too weepy. No dice.
"I asked you to stop!", my youngest shouts to Juliana, my oldest. While they have been fighting, I have been attempting to clean out small hole. It might be the smallest, but it was the only one unoccupied. Being the oldest mama mouse makes feeding hard, especially when you are the farthest from the kitchen, and closest to the broom. Being the slowest, I am the only one that The Human knows about. It's extremely difficult to protect your babies when you cant' even protect yourself, especially when they are so young they can
I was trying to count them. The little bastards kept moving around, making me lose track, infuriating me to no end. I had been awake for almost thirty hours and sleep was no closer than it had been twenty-nine hours ago. Even my imagination wouldn't collaborate in sending me into unconsciousness. Goddamn sheep.
Sheep and sleep were two very similar words, I decided. I instantly sought to catalog all the words that rhymed with sleep. Bleep, steep, reap, peep, seep, weep, beep, keep, jeep. Meryl Streep.
The original verb still eluded me. It would be a long night (and day).
The children were not at school. It was the first snow day of the season, and the buses couldn't get their engines started, so the Board of Education had no choice but to cancel classes. Tyler's parents decided to let him sleep in, but when he awoke at 10 o'clock, Tyler panicked. He leaped out of bed, grabbed his jeans and wiggled into them, pulled a crumpled sweater from his drawer and jammed it on over his pajama shirt, and ran down the hallway to the kitchen, all the while yelling "I'm late for school! I'm late for school! Mom!...
The children were not at school. Where were they? Unkown. I am an English teacher at a high school near Houston and, like any other weekday between late August and early June, I was expected a classroom of childen in front on me. Not on this day. The bells rangm yet I heard niothing. I saw nothng. Heck, I didn;t even smell anything! I walked out into the hallway and talked with the other teachers. Nobody had any students in their rooms. I then saw all the princiapls talking with angry words and loud voices. They didn;t seem to know...
I see his face in my mind's eye and feel my chest being lit on fire. It's not fair. Everything is so perfect when I'm with him, but I always have to wake up and come back to the cold reality that he is only the
Man of my Dreams.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to make his image disappear from where it has burned onto the backs of my eyelids, forming each time I close my eyes again. I feel like screaming at the unfairness of it all until I have no voice left for anything but...