Marie Antoinette sat in the tub, eating chocolate truffles and drinking champagne. Her ruffled leggings lay in a heap on the floor. She thought as she looked out the window that she was ever the perfect Mademoiselle. She gazed out onto the misty countryside, daydreaming. Although, what could she dream about? She was living her dream. She took another bite of chocolate and smiled.
Just then, her little sister's pink range rover came trundling into the driveway, reminding her that it was 2015 and she was not in France. She would not marry her prince, because princes don't exist nowadays....
She always felt a little self-conscious about wearing headphones in public. She didn't want to seem anti-social, or too cool, or appear totally oblivious to the bike rider frantically ringing his bell as he approached from behind.
That's why she visited the gardens so much. Not so much for the flowers but butterflies had secrets of their own. They listened to their own songs and drifted through a world of their own. They wouldn't judge her musical tastes and she would be silly to judge theirs. After all, who are the deaf to judge those who can hear in color?
Most times we just picked on the same couple of boys. they were easy to spot and easy to make do whatever we wanted them to do. I suppose that we never thought about the fact that we weren't proving how strong we were by picking the weak ones. I suppose we never thought about much at all.
But that day I decided that I wanted to pick on someone bigger than me. Someone who seemed a lot like me, and them. When I found him he was alone but in just a few minutes we were surrounded by kids...
Three pigeons landed near a sleeping homeless person, huddled up in the alcove of a building along 4th Street. The biggest pigeon, Paul, strutted by the slumbering figure as Marta, the medium-sized pigeon, walked by pretending not to see.
Paul said, "Marta, how can you just ignore this man? If I recall, you were homeless once, too."
Marta stopped to peck aimlessly at a crumb of bagel on the street.
The third pigeon, Gideon, was looking across the street at the bustling bakery, hoping to spot somebody dropping a morsel of bread or muffin, preferably banana-nut, because it was his...
He steps on to the yellow line, crossing the line is something he's practised at. It is an art-form, not something he does with paint or words, but step by step, despite the open arms of the person standing alongside him who is trying to make him stop and think. He sees the oranges, standing side by side next to the limes, he wants to pick up a lime and throw it, but a car crawls by and he doesn't, he picks up an orange instead and throws it as far as he can. The orange flies through along the...
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...
The children were not at school. They had better, bolder, brighter things to be doing. The teachers didn't notice. They never did.
They ran out while at break, amidst the confusion of supposed bruises and teases and stolen lunches. The gates were easy enough to get past. Each girl's hair was neatly done up with a hairpin, after all.
The sky was bluer once they got out, it seemed. So they ran, ran hard, ran free, ran wild. They quickly enough leaped through the confines of urbanity and into spaces never explored before, wild forests filled with strange creatures. Each...
The wall is the place most people choose on their own. You come for a day or a week and it's never to see the sights. The sights are immaterial, and not unexpected. Temples, tea houses with dripping peremera trees hanging soot and sleek flowers over damp pollenated tables. Once thriving book shops and market warrens closed down by the proper authorities. Cab drivers who direct you round about ways and never give useful directions. None of these things are unusual, or particularly memorable. It is instead, the wall itself, that calls to you. The wall is the reason you...
Holly scrutinized the first sentence of her novel. It was odd how not reading it for months had given her a wildly new perspective. When she was writing it, she'd been too close to the material, she hadn't been objective, hadn't made herself consider the fact that she was wrong in anything that she did. There were mental grooves worn deep in her mind that only now were swept away like footprints in the snow.
It ... sucked.
The ecstasy of seeing her work in print was instantly deflated by how awful she judged it to be. A single sentence...
The Potentate surveyed his creamsicle tower smoothly. "Good good," he said in his nasally voice. Rubbing his hands together with childish glee, the balding old man dove face first into the treat and began to lap it up as his guards looked on with a mixture of amusement and derision.