I jumped. I blacked out. When I awoke, head ringing and eyes spotted with colours, he turned round slowly.
"You ever heard of an Ox Bow Lake?"
"nuhuh" I said. Mind you, the gag would have rendered the same result as a Shakespeare soliloquy.
"sahwiwochee" Hell, it was different. Maybe if you were a dentist, this conversation would be less one sided. I eyed the man who had broken in to the lab, wondering if he'd had orthodontist training. He knew his way round a physics lab alright, but fiddling with the quantum accelerator probably wasn't the best idea. That...
For a change I was ok about Carl's clothes this month. Blue was perfectly acceptable compared to the horror of April - canary yellow. He's a bit weird, my fiance. It was a sort of take on color psychology but relating to months of the year, something he read in a kooky astroglogy book. My mother wouldn't let him into the house in February as purple reminded her of a childhood trauma she was still receiving therapy for.
Carl was also into UFO's, The Illuminati, Ley Lines, Quantum Jumping (he believed he had a double living in China who was...
Giles inhaled the drink and closed his eyes, fluttering his eyelashes.
“A hint of dark oak definitely.”
“Perhaps a deeper bouquet like a rusty copper,” Lynton replied.
Giles cradled his cigar lovingly, and crunched on some spare ribs.
“Why would you call a a fine cigar a Cuban he mused? The Cubans were incredibly common
and impoverished. I mean it’s a symbol. It stands for something more.”
“Why would you call a decrepit decaying old bat a Queen?” Lynton replied, that’s the English
language Giles, cut a vowel here twist a syllable there; it’s a kind of phonetic prostitution,”...
Johnny, my boyfriend was aptly named. Laura, my dad's girlfriend called him 'The Pirate' because of his long dark curly hair, caught up around the forehead with an old blue and white bandana. Looking remarkably like Johnny Depp in his Caribbean pirate movies.
I suspected something was going on between them. Lots of eye contact, protracted, meaningful. And they were always joking about, you know that kind of banter where you can just feel the sexual tension.
Johnny was handsome so I suppose it wasn't that unusual. He looked mean and sexy in his long black leather coat, black boots...
"If you weren't strumming that chord over and over, I might think you were asleep," said Howard.
"Yeah, you might be forgiven for thinking that," replied Memmy. "No, I just rest my head on the body of the guitar. Here. Like this." Memmy's head didn't move. It was already on the body of the guitar.
"Don't you guys play electic guitars," asked Howard.
Memmy didn't look up. "Not when we're depressed. Hey, hand me that bottle, would you?"
"Which bottle?" asked Howard.
"The one that's not empty," said Memmy. He still hadn't looked up.
Howard shook several in sequence. One...
She couldn't go outside very often, but when she did, it made her feel like the cancer wasn't as bad as it was the day before. It was summer; Lea had to go outside in her almost hospital-like pajamas; sanitary and sterile for her safety. Her mom sat on their apartment stoop as she watched Lea splash in the Manhattan fire hydrant. The trees looked dead around her still, and made her worry about Lea; her only daughter, at 12 she was already dying. Terminal illness doesn't warn you when it's taking over; it's not like the President declaring war...
They were listening, she just knew they were. As she crept across the carpeted living room floor, she prayed that her parents wouldn't hear her. God only knows what would happen to her if they caught her trying to escape.
She made it to the front door and glanced at the darkened hallway behind her, sure that her mother would come storming into the living room at any moment. She did not.
Lacy reached out and gripped the shiny copper door knob firmly, slowly turning it clockwise. A click resounded like a gunshot in the quiet of the night, despite...
What's this?
Dad showed me the picture of the orangutan splayed on the grass.
A monkey, I said.
It's you, he said.
Neither of us laughed.
Remember that time you asked me for a Coke and I stood at the soda machine filling it with Root Beer imagining Homer Simpson saying Mmmmm Root Beer?
Dad laughed.
I laughed.
It's silent most of the time now. I don't think to text and neither does he.
"Clung to" means everyone in the house knowing when I am there and when I am not. A friend is dropping off some cookies she made...
Leaving was the easiest decision to make, and the hardest action to take.
They were just sitting there In the box. Helpless.
Helpless was the only word that seemed to match all around. Why wouldn't someone destroy everything in that box. Why wouldn't they be debauched to within an inch of the last bit of everything there ever was?
She was always too soft when it came to things. It's like her house was the place where things came to be rescued, rabbits, fledglings, dogs that ate the rabbits that took refuge there and demanded to be rescued themselves, and...
Midnight
On the roof.
A shouldn't-be time in a shouldn't-be place,
Thad pecked a shouldn't-do cigarette from the packet and lit it with a burst of flame that violated the darkness and fizzed against the silence.
He exhaled a plume of smoke, pushing it away from his body with his breath, but it hung about in his personal space as if it was reluctant to go too close to the edge.
He looked up. Some mist up there was blocking out the stars and, for now, the moon was balling along behind a strip of cloud. There wouldn't even be...