"2070. 2071. 2072..."
Abe sighed, noting down the number and position so that he could start again later. He couldn't imagine starting again later, picking up the count, forcing himself to mouth the numbers, let the numbers run through his mind and out of his mouth.
But it would happen. Eventually. But at the moment, he could take a break, relax in a place where the numbers had no meaning.
Sometimes, he felt like the numbers he was counting were his own regrets and mistakes. 148, that he never asked out Jenny Mare three years ago, that he watched her...
It was the fall that surprised me the most. Summer seemed to go on forever, endless heat and misery. When the leaves finally started changing, my eyes were still blinking out the sweat, trying to focus on the shimmering horizon. When it became acceptable to wear heavier clothes, I persisted in the delusion that this was merely a blip, and that the inevitability of summer would win out, sense be damned.
It finally hit me standing atop my building, feeling the inarguable autumn winds whip at me. The smell of woodsmoke filled my nostrils, wrapped around me and told me,...
I had to bind myself together. I could feel pieces of me falling away, an arm, my left toe, my sense of grace under pressure. My lips struggled to speak as my tongue became unattached, my teeth loosened in my gums. My heart threatened to beat itself right out of my body, and I feared that it actually would.
The curse of unbeing is a cruel one indeed. I thought this as I wound the linen around my eyes, working to keep them in my skull. I wondered what I could have done to anger someone of such great power....
sitting on the I see my family crumbling before my eyes. I have achieved my goal, revenge for what they have done to me in my childhood. They took all my friends and everything I was passionate about all away from me, so now I am returning the favor. There they are, my parents kneeling down as they are being beaten to the ground and watching everything they love fade away. this is the way things work now. I am the dominant one and they will suffer at my feet. They have brought this on themselves and I will never...
The fire engine arrived too late. The pile of ash and debris that had once been a column of flame and once been my home was done. Everyone agreed that no one had ever seen a fire burn so quickly, so hot, and so cleanly. There would have been an investigation, but there was nothing to investigate. Just a lot of tiny pieces that were my life.
I knew that it was a bad idea when I had first tried it. Language is not to be taken lightly, even at the most abstracted level it's a dangerous thing. But at...
"So you can sell me anything I want?"
"No, no, you misunderstand me." He smiled a bit too broadly, his teeth white and sharp, his voice bearing an unplaceable foreign accent, slight but there just at the edges of his words. "I am a salesman of want." And with this, he hefted his large case onto the counter.
It was not without effort that he strained it up. Not that his face would betray this, but Jane could see the muscles straining under his beautiful black suit, perfectly tailored, at least to her untrained eye. The case seemed heavy, but...
No one had ever heard the wind blow like this before. It rushed through the delicately carved holes of the sculpture, Driaz's final piece. Made of metal and glass and plastic and wood, it looked like some insect eaten tree, the haunted remains of a mighty forest. It was shot through with holes, some tiny, some massive, some which threatened the very structural integrity of the piece, especially as the wind was blowing through it.
No one really knew why Driaz's Will demanded that his piece be set up way back in the desert like this. It was certainly a...
Oh to drown in ones finest. Her shawl spread around her like tentacles, the pearl necklace, restored to its natural place shimmered under the sodium lights as the diaphanous skirt became squid-like. To prepare for this moment, to understand that you will be suspended in front of hundreds, thousands on a good night. Perhaps there is no better way to die than in front of an adoring gaze.
There would be no death of course, no final throes, no panicked look. The calmness of the water as she let herself go limp, felt herself carried by the eyes of the...
"Light. I feel light"
"I should think so, you lost about half of you."
I struggled to open my eyes, afraid to see what had happened. The last thing I remembered before the darkness was the light, the bright light that had surrounded and suffused me, that had seemed to consume me. A hand waved in front of my face, and at first I was certain it wasn't mine, couldn't be mine. I had never been that skeletal, I had always been a rather large man.
"Easy there, you just did something stupid or amazing, and you're rather week. We...
She was looking ahead, eyes parallel with the ground.
She was looking ahead, eyes perpendicular with the ground.
Parallel. Perpendicular. Parallel. Perpen... parallel.
The car came to rest. Her weight pressed her into the seatbelt. Gravity pressed her really, but she thought of her weight first. Gene had made her borderline bulimic. Speaking of: she wretched onto the ceiling of the car.
Gene's eyes, perpendicular, winced. "Lovely," he said.
Her eyes closed. "Just one last puke, to cap off a year of puke together."
"A year of memorable voms. Remember the first one?"
She nodded.