Becky hoped Tom saw what she had written before her teacher did.
Mr. Smith was notoriously tidy about the things in his classroom. Desks were wiped down once a day, not by the school janitorial staff but by him personally. In other classes she knew friends who would write on the desks, leaving messages for the students who sat there after them - a sort of school texting service between students without cell phones, but Tom took only this one class after her. Would he see her message? She could pass it off as a doodle and if he said...
Lola was a name that grated on my ears. Most people considered it sonorous and calming, but after my teenage years, fraught with rebellion, Lola was a name uttered in exasperation rather than cooed.
THat is why I insisted Spencer call me Lara. It was a close sound so that I would still answer to it, but distant enough from my childhood that I could free myself from my past mistakes. He didn't seem to care either way. Lola, Lara, both names meant love to him and loving me was all he knew to do.
He found me in the...
The girl looked up at her mother and said, "We're small."
It was sudden--so sudden that the mother looked down at her child in surprise. But then she nodded solemnly. "Yes. Yes, we are."
"Why are we small?" the girl wondered, glancing at the many people in the room. Some, with a friend or a mate or someone, and some with an empty chair beside them. Her mother sat down in one of the tables, looking longingly at the other chair, which was empty.
"Because there's a lot of people. We're a small part of everyone. And you're the smallest."...
It was her masterpiece.
Jutting out of the water, everyone around could see what she'd created - what *she* had created.
Some, she knew, would say it was ugly. Some would say it was an eyesore. Some would say it was totally unnecessary, but she wouldn't let any of that bother her.
It was her creation, her mark on the world, and that was all that mattered.
She wouldn't live to see it, but as it happened, she was right. She left her mark, and as she'd ignored, everyone hated it. Everyone, by extension, hated *her*, and rarely did a...
His dive, performed in front of the small, half-drunk dinner party, was perfect in his mind. He'd had a few martinis at dinner, his wife looking at him strangely over her chardonnay. But he was on a roll that night. And Joyce had come with that husband of hers, Jerry, and had shot him her own looks as he went on about this and that. Sometimes the words came spilling out in a beautiful procession. Tonight, he was on.
Then the whole group wandered out to the backyard after he had told them he was going to perform the dive...
The old trash can on Drake and Washington avenue was the witness to the biggest mistake of George's life. Sadly, he threw in the carnations he had bought, sad remembrances for ideas that should have died long ago. They covered his old manuscript like flowers on a grave.
I saw a girl press her cheek into the moldy stone column. Her arms gripped the sides in a hug. Her eyes were closed and she smiled.
I wanted to take a picture of her but then her friend arrived, a girl about her age. They were both older teens. They were American, with spots on their foreheads and chins, hair streaked with pink and blue, pale skin, and wide eyes. They giggled as the first girl, a blonde in a pink jumper kept hugging the column and hamming it up for her friend who took pictures.
I remember when...
I remember being that young. They seem to be about the same age that I was when I was engaged to my now ex fiance. We were so hopeful at that age. Thinking that we would take each other by the hand and go through this life sifting through all of its difficulties, learning together how to be separately one. We would hold each other like this young couple is now, tightly, looking out over the night time city lights thinking that we'd find our place somewhere. How wonderful it was. But how much more painful the conclusion to our...
He exited the train at Buenos Aires. That was as far as his ticket would take him. He wandered around the city for a while afterwards. It wasn't much, so he boarded a flight to London. The flight stewardess was pretty, but not overly so. Her hair was perfectly tied up in a bun and her lips were pink, straight out of a Barbie Doll. He smiled at her. She smiled back. That was as much as he would allow himself.
When he got off in London, he walked to where his house had been. He stared for a while...
£18,000. That is what the twisted gold wire bracelet was worth to me. Commonly known as a torc. Iron age. It was easy to steal and by the time anyone noticed the absence, it was being despatched by courier to a new home. That night I couldn't sleep. I've never felt guilty taking antiques from the public yet I couldn't get the bracelet out of my mind.
Found by schoolboys looking for treasure. Chance in a million. One of the boys suffered a family tragedy and this unexpected discovery brightened up his life. I couldn't stop thinking about the personal...