When I was 12, I went to sea. I went to sea to see the sea. I had yet to see the sea until I was 12. Then the sea I saw, and the sea, she saw me.
We hated each other.
I had romanticized the sea, reading stories and poetry and all the great paintings of roiling waves and citrus sunsets, and salty captains and scruffy sea dogs. It got so I could smell the sea without having smelled the sea. And I couldn't wait to see the sea. So I went.
The sea, she was not pleasant that...
She was a regular victim, the kind of person who flinched when she heard a loud noise, ducked when she passed beneath an airborne bird, stepped sideways in order to avoid each time she happened to pass by a pedestrian, puddle or crack. She looked for and expected (and here I'm talking about the worst) in everything. Forget good and better, forget fortuitous, forget fate being in your favour and good fortune... As far as she was concerned, it was always cloudy outside and it rained constantly. In her model of the world life was hard, living was tough, and...
No shoes or socks in the snow, JaKK was only focused on finding the settlement. Escaping was the easy part, finding his family might be hard. Physical discomfort was not part of his programming, his body able to withstand any extremes of temperature.
The scientists had made them. Fed them. Studied them. Experimented on them. Killed them. Few were left.
After two days he was still beside the forest, the neverending trees.
He might be alone. Lost.
But for the first time in his existence.
He was free.
Most voids were black. Or so he thought. In literature. in movies and television. When there was a void, one saw a large blackness that stretched into infinity, broken up only by the colors of whatever object the story placed in the middle of said void, in order to enhance its enormity.
But he stood now in a white void. Had it shone brightly he may have concluded he was dead, or dying. But it was just a whiteness without a brightness. A dull white, if such a thing were possible.
The woman had not walked into the space. Rather...
Matilda changed a great many things in my empty life. I started to wonder if a meal could be too good after such a long time being hungry....?
She filled a vacuum that was up until her kept quelled with the useless, busy ennui that consumes most our days.
Pleasing people who didn't care a whit about pleasing us. Satisfying faceless clients who lived miles away.
She made life real again.
Matilda, her cat taught me a great deal, too.
I'm in love with a robot, but he doesn't know. Yesterday morning when he brought me my coffee, I dropped a less subtle hint, something about pressing each other's buttons. But it didn't register. Or if it did, he is playing hard to get. Why should this one be any different? Maybe it wasn't the best idea to name him Rosie, but that's Hanna-Barbera conditioning for you. The warranty says I'm good until next June, so I suppose I could register the unrequited feelings as a defect in workmanship, but I don't know that it would fly. Rosie in all...
I couldn't sleep with her next to me. I couldn't sleep anywhere as matter of fact. To watch someone become lost in their on ways and forget the ways of others. I decided to go for a walk just to clear my head. I come to the park see a bum sleeping under the funny pages. I decided to part ways with my jack. I feel the night's chilly embrace. I walk back home hoping I can forgive her betrayal. sigh
The day went well. Lots of talk about what we could've done and could've been. Smiles and twinkles led to hugs then kisses.
Memories were relived and sighs..."You know, you had me at Ox Bow Lake. I knew it had to be you. A little maturity in your face, the hair's a little shorter. But the lake's name made me really hear your voice, and that hadn't changed in 40 years."
I always wanted more than we had had...
Hero at Midnight
No one could remember who among them gave him the name Rooster; probably someone long gone by this point. A seventy percent casualty rate will leave one gaping hole in the communal memory. Everyone could remember why: yodeling and ukelele music in the pre-dawn hours was inexcusable by any measure. It had started after the battle for Hill 487. Most of Rooster's squad had been blown into pieces too small to put back together. Hence the coping mechanism. However, after two weeks of this crap, enough was enough, and Private Morlane drew the short stick: shut him...
Ridiculous. Absurd. Absolutely and beyond all normal standards of decency, indecent. That was how I looked in the mirror the morning that I discovered my first gray hair. Or was it my third. I was faced with the overwhelming reality of a head of lustrous, youth-infused auburnness marred by the upright and wiry soldier who insisted on taking up some precious real estate in my brain that could have been much better utilized by a sudoku puzzle or a cure for cancer. How were things now to possibly proceed in a direction other than graveward? What was the sense in...