The trick was picking the tired, lost ones. That was the trick. Many passengers coming into Warsaw Airport had been warned about 'unlicensed' taxis, but if you chose well they would be too confused to argue. The trick was getting their bag. Once you had that, with a "Let me carry your bag, Sir/Madam," they would have to follow you.
The trick was to walk fast enough to scare them into following you, for fear of losing their baggage in the busy arrivals lounge, but not so fast the airport police would think you were stealing something.
That was the...
Augustine - certainly not a saint at this point in time - sat in the garden reading. According to the custom of the time, he read aloud. He read his new passion, the letters of St Paul and the Holy Gospels. Today he was reading in Galatians. Freedom was God's gift to the Christian. Augustine searched his heart and his body. He was not free. He was attached: attached to his mistress and his son, named ironically Deodatus (God's gift); he was attached to the enjoyment of sexuality; he was attached to his comfortable lifestyle. He was imprisoned by his...
When I lost my mother in the store, I was only three years old. I can't remember what happened but I still wake up in a sweat most nights, an innate sense of abandonment, as though I have been on a mission to the moon, stepped outside the spaceship for a walk across the lunar landscape and left behind. Terror.
Mother never recovered from her fear. She spent the rest of my childhood in a daze from a mix of prescription pill cocktails, agrophobia and alcohol. Dangerous combinations.
She was currently in a secure medical facility, unrecognisable from the pretty...
When I was 12, I went to sea. Don't ask me which. I don't know.
It was sometimes blue, and it was sometimes green. And when it got dark, it was black.
The air always felt clear and cold, pushing itself down into your chest. It filled your belly up. Then it would come out hot. Hot and wet.
You could look out, and out, and out. There was just the sky, and then there was the sea. Don't ask me which. I don't know.
Just the sky sitting on the sea.
Except once, there was something else.
Once there...
The sweetest honey was the one they daubed on his lips.
This wasn't really torture; not in the traditional sense. Instead of pain, he was given touches of pleasure.
Simple pleasures - gentle whispers, the smell of bread, the touch of soft wool against his cheek.
After a few days, he wondered if they really wanted him to talk, or if they wanted him to stay. If they wanted him to remain there, relying on them, content to be with them until the end of his days.
To call him a pet would be too extreme, but the principle was...
"Wait, so he hit you?"
We had been over the story several times by now, as Carl sat down bringing a fresh round of amber colored liquid in pint glasses.
I ignored his question as I tried to figure out if this was another IPA or something different.
"Yes," I said, snapping back to reality.
"Damn dude, that fucking sucks," Carl said taking a sip of his beer.
I shook my head in agreement. Took a sip. It was the IPA. Damn that is a good beer.
"Yeah, he just snapped after I told him he was being an asshole...
If we never speak again, there will be so many things I've never said. There will be no record of the thoughts that have been chasing each other around in my head. There will be no reason to remember me. You will never know the truth about what could have been - what I wanted us to be. I will never get to make you understand. If we never speak again...
"Wait!"
Flan in the face, flan in the face, flan in the face.
A wild grin stretched across his face, an expression of pure exuberance, of joy and abandon, just before the pie tin splattered the gelatinous goo all over his tweed coat.
The students were gathered outside the lecture hall, sprawling in the hundreds in the oppressive heat. Here and there, groups had clustered beneath the maple branches, trying desperately to stave off exhaustion. They had been at it for two days already: the most notorious sit-in in America's higher educational history.
As if to further puzzle the wayward boomers...
The young man stared down at the small book, his middle and index fingers pressed down to keep the pages from turning as a breeze wafted over him. It was a strange book full of nature scenes and Japanese people in studied poses. But, what really caught his attention was the bare-skinned, almost European looking woman peeking out at him from a curtain. Her gaze seemed to pierce him and he almost felt that he could reach in and pull her out of the page.
"Hello." He blinked. The woman on the page spoke again, smiling at him. "Hello there."...
There once was a man who live on Richmond street, he died a few years back. Took care of his elderly mother who used to shave her head and named her pet cat Winston Churchill, she had a few pet birds too. Anyway, the man was a Musician. He used to park his van down by this old run down building in the center of town and sit with the door open playing his guitar. He wasn't the greatest and he wasn't the worst, he just really enjoyed what he did. I forget his name but I haven't forgotten the...