Not that I mind being dead. It's nothing to be saved from, really. Oh, at first believe me, I railed against it, bracing myself for whatever fight or hell lay before me. But after about an hour it seemed pretty clear to me that nothing was going to happen.
Literally, nothing happens when you are dead. To from your own view point anyway. Granted, I do not have a body to call my own anymore, but being dead feels surprisingly like being alive does. Only with less worry. And not taxes of course.
But if you can read this, and...
It was like one of those stop-motion films. Or maybe it was more like that handful of pictures his mom brought out when she was drinking. Dealing out snapshots of her life as if she had a chance at a full-house when the rest of them had just folded and walked away. The one dimensional images coming faster and faster.
He remembered the phone call, running out of the apartment without a jacket, the feeling of panic. Had he even closed the door? The car, his wife waving at him from across the busy street. No, that was wrong. That...
A tattoo of a shadow remains when the light recedes.
Mock the sun, then, and ridicule the clouds. They've always seemed so stupid anyway.
Clouds. The poets can have them. They can have the clouds and the sun. Where are their clouds on a sunny day? And where's their sun on this overcast morning?
That's my shadow. I always have it. I don't need the weather -- just the steady hand of a artist.
Tattooed, herself.
The note on her mirror, written in femme-fatale-red lipstick, a shade she had bought but never been courageous enough to wear out of the house, said to meet on the roof at midnight.
The windows were closed and the door was locked. The recent humidity expanded the cheap wood door, causing it to stick in the frame and she could never open it without Mrs. Montgomery sticking her head out of the next apartment and telling her to keep it down.
So whoever came in didn't come in that way.
Lucy walked through all the rooms again, checking the windows,...
These three peasants are gathered round a plough, drinking ale and sharing a small knob of cheese between themselves. It's a sunny day in Northumbria and the midday sun makes it hard to work, so these guys are taking a break. The ale is cheap and the cheese is rotten.
"You see the sunset last night?" asks one.
"Yes. It was beautiful." agrees a second. The third peasant doesn't speak. He just stares lengthways down the field.
"See that cow?" he finally interrupts. "Rumour is that it's magic." The others are intrigued now and stare down the field at the...
My name is Joseph Buxton and I am a terrible person.
The audience stared open-mouthed at me as the blood welled around the wound and covered my hands which were clasped over. I wouldn't normally do this, try to save a man's life, but I felt I owed him something. As he bled out and stained the cuffs of my shirt, the useless audience just stared on unmoved.
I felt his heart slow to a stop and watched the life drain from his eyes. He was still now, it was over.
I rolled up my sleeves and flagged down a...
"Sam!" the guy shouted. "This is it!"
Sam followed, but he wasn't sure this WAS it. How could it be? They'd been waiting for this for hours, for days even. How could it be?
"Get the nebulizer," he said. "And be quick."
Sam could never remember what the nebulizer was or what it was for. He didn't think it had anything to do with the surrender, but he didn't really know and so didn't like to say.
"Got it," he said, handing a doohicky over to the ambulance driver.
"Thanks, man," he said, not even looking. The guy was intent...
I'm trying to hang on, really I am. My arms are tired and my muscles burn as sweat and tears find their way into my eyes, making them sting. "Hang on," you say. What if I fall? What then? Can you catch me if I fall? I think I might slip. My fingers are striped red and white from gripping this rockface for such a long time and my head is spinning. I can't make sense of anything for one horrible moment and then I am surrounded by water. I realize that I have fallen into the ocean. The last...
I'm dead. Really dead. Not in the "there'll be a twist at the end and I'll be saved" kind of way. Just dead.
I suppose you want to know what happened. It was Geoff. In the bedroom with a vase. Not a very imaginitive death, really. But there you go. I went from a person to a statistic in the blink of an eye.
Dying is an odd sensation. Like when you're really drunk or hungover and the room spins when you sit up. It's just like that. I watched as he ran around wiping up the blood, hiding the...
Water. I wish I were drowning in it now. That my car veered into the canal while I was driving home. Somewhere I shouldn't have been. A blue-house, now painted tan, that I've visited 100 times. A house where I rang the doorbell, felt stupid there was no answer, and drove home. On the way, I turned into an oncoming lane by complete accident... Cars beeped, and luckily no one was hurt. Startled, I made a U-Turn, and headed home. I wished there was a thunder storm, a hail storm, something to cover my windshield to make my car just...