She should have been writing. Instead, she watched the time slide away from her.
5'44". 5'32". 5'11".
What was this? she asked—not herself, but God, the heavens, the hall monitor, anybody but herself. Was this paralysis?
No. This was a choice. And even though she closed her eyes, she still couldn't get away from that.
4'09". 3'58".
Why not write? There was the prompt on the page. She could do this. She was good at this. She always had been, always, always. Write on command. Paper comes back; mark at the top.
She didn't work hard for years and take...
I hated the fairy picture. Instead of feeling at peace, secure, happy I always had sleepless nights. Mom sleeping on the floor near my bed, comforting me when I cried out. No matter where she put the picture, in another room, even in the trash, it somehow once again appeared somewhere in my bedroom. Once it was inside my Nancy Drew book, another time under the mattress. The worst time was when it floated from the ceiling right onto my face! I screamed the house down even though I didn't at first know what it was.
The parish priest blessed...
Imagine you're sitting at a table and the drunk version of you sits before you.
What would you say to one another?
Would the drunk you tell you the truth, admit to all the honesty you bury deep within or would the sober you manage to quell all of the clarity with your denial and issues?
And which one is the real one at this point? You spend more time with alcohol than you do with the voices in your head these days. So if your friends were to join you at the table, which of the two of you...
They were trapped for seven days.
And all he could think about was how stupid and incompetent everyone was. Oh, he could get them out if he wanted to. He'd figured out how in the first 10 minutes the lights went out, the tracks stopped moving, and the world stopped spinning.
But he figured he'd rest down here, in this quiet place where people were sobbing their regrets, anger, pity, sorrow, prayers to each other. Lamenting their pathetic lives as they neared their starved deaths. He could smell the piss by the corner where they'd all mutually agreed to designate...
He smoked pipes, ate limes, ate the gnats he swiped from the air. The lions lounged in the front yard. He chose lions because of the theme of pride. He had a rudimentary but certain understanding of pride. He stood at the front window staring at the lions, locking eyes as often as he could.
The doorbell rang. He turned quickly, spilling a squall of wine on the hardwood floor. The lions didn't stir. He heard a knock on the door. The lions stared at him.
"Mary?" a middle aged, crows footed woman queried as she stepped over the threshold.
"Mistress…" the young maid gestured her in, both blushing. Somewhat flustered the farmer's wife surveyed the room.
"Tom!" she blushed on blushes. Something the old woman had not thought possible. Interest upon Interest. Clearly no Pythagorean shape would ever do this web justice.
"I haven't said naught, Po… I mean, Mistress." the plough boy blurted. He was good at blurting, the witch noticed. It was good he had found what he was good at, at such a young age.
"Meg, I need your help again…" the...
"Grandpop's teeth didn't look like that."
"How do you know?"
"Because mom always said you got his teeth. Do your teeth look like that?"
"Maybe after they'd been in the ground for fifty years."
"Not even. Look at the length of them."
"No, teeth keep growing after you die."
"That's nails, dummy. And they have to be attached still. You think teeth keep growing if they're just loose like this?"
"Who can say?"
"You know who would know?"
"Yeah, but she can't exactly tell us, now can she?"
"Well, she'd know for sure."
"Grandma's probably the one who did it...
Justin was just a regular guy before I discovered him. Sure, he'd played Chronoball before. I'd even seen him do quite well for an amateur, when I checked my notes later. But that fight in the bar was what got him noticed. He's on more Creds than several small planets' GDPs now; I get 20% of course.
When Jack, who'd always had it in for him since High School, threw the first punch in the Snug, Justin hadn't flinched. He'd thrown the Chronoball, which had been resting on the bartop, over Jack's head. Contact with the far wall activated the...
The results were in, and the guy she voted for came second. She wasn't one bit surprised. Kate was never the lucky one.
At school, her younger sister was the academic one, and of course this was the attention grabbing trait where their father was concerned. Acheivements, medals, gold stars, good grades. These were the things that made a child great.
Kate was bestowed with other virtues. Naturally blonde hair, a pert, rosebud mouth and breasts at fourteen. Her male attention had come from another place altogether, usually behind the science block under the watchful gaze of Gary Spivey and...
Officer Malone stopped at the doorway of the house.
"Do you smell that?" she asked.
The rest of the team paused as well. There was no reason for any unusual scent to be present, but they'd learned over time to trust Malone's senses; she'd built up such a reputation for her instincts that some of the newbies were actually afraid to go near her, afraid that she'd be able to unearth some deeply-buried skeleton in their past.
No one did, but just to be safe, gas-masks were applied to everyone but Malone herself, and the team pressed forward.
The first...