She would never use a sippy cup for wine. She just wouldn't. And not because the other mothers would smell the fermentation on her breath. Not because her eyes would gloss over as the nannies began to talk about the hockey-playing "manny" who worked with the two boys at the Sullivans. Not because she would have to hold tightly to the padded grip of the jogging stroller. It wasn't because her Rosacea gave her cheek bones a cherry hue. It had nothing to do with her morning run to the playground, the mile and half she squeezed in everyday.
She...
I shall wait.
I shall wait for the timer to go through it's course.
Wait for the little seconds to pass me by.
Produce nothing of content.
Produce nothing of consequence.
Just words strung together in a jumbled sort of way.
Words become random assortments of letters.
Meaning is lost in the rush to get them out.
It's killing me.
Realizing that six minutes is such a vast distance of time.
And yet my brain cannot seem to function adequately.
I like to sip my stories like brandy.
I like to savor my poems, swish their contents around my mouth...
She peered over her laptop screen, wishing that during her youth she had plucked her eyebrows into a thin line like her mother's - they always managed to make her look more stern than she every really was.
Right now, she would have given anything to be able to pull that off.
Somehow she'd managed to get the class quiet and at least convinced them into acting as though they were doing their work. But it had been a hard battle.
It wasn't that she viewed her entire career as a teacher as a war, just this class, and a...
The dapper man picked up a penny.
Then he picked up a dime.
"Which of these is worth more?" he asked the children arrayed in three neat rows on the floor in front of him.
"The dime!" they chimed in chorus.
"Very good!" said the dapper man. "And why is it worth more?"
"It's shiny!"
"It's pretty!"
"It's more specialer!"
"I've got three of 'em in my pocket!"
"Great answers, children!" said the dapper man. "But actually, a dime is worth more because it's so much easier to use a dime for Rhyme Time!"
The children cheered and began to...
Martin put the off-white china mug to his thin lips and took a long drink of his rapidly cooling coffee. His eyes scanned over the classified ads for the hundredth time but, once again, there was nothing. Nothing in his field, nothing in his area, nothing, nothing, nothing. The pen poised in his right hand tapped against the page angerly and he took another mouthful, swishing the lukewarm liquid between his cheeks.
"Good morning, pumpkin." Candice's bare feet padded along the bare hardwood behind him, and Martin soon found his girlfriend's arms wrapped tightly around his chest, her face buried...
Fault. It is so common a word. Used by so many to allay the suspicion that they are truly the ones responsible. And who am I? I am no different.
My leg moved as if in a dream, gliding through time and space like it was made of water, no jelly, no gravity. It moved, ever so slowly towards a destination that I couldn't help but be brought to. Call it fate, call it fault call it whatever you will but in the end that is where I ended up. One foot in the street and another on the sidewalk....
The Dapper Man picked up a penny. He brought it up to eye level, examining it critically. It was smooth, round and shiny. Its surface was unadorned, save for a shiny "1" engraved on the face.
"So, what you're saying is that I collect one hundred of these...", he began.
"...and we can buy access to the next level", came the hurried reply.
The Dapper Man eyed his colleague, doubt riding in his voice. After all, the One-Eyed Cowboy always had an angle in these dealings.
"You know, I've not been playing this game for long, but it seems to...
The bottom of the fountain was a shimmering mural of pennies, the dapper man reached in and picked up a penny, this particular one caught his eye, something gleamed differently about it, something that niggled in his memory. He had a vision of walking this route as a boy, knickers and plaid, a little beret on his dark head.
As the memory became clear he saw his mother, in her radiance that was lost as he got older. The years withered her frame emaciated her skin mere parchment covering frail bones. Cancer. She had died not long after his fifth...
The dapper man picked up a penny. He rolled it around in his fingers, enjoying the coolness of it. It was raining, and he had had only seen it because the bronze colour had shone up in the middle of a shallow puddle.
The dapper man remembered a rhyme he had heard when he was tiny. See a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck. He thought there might be more to it than that, but that was enough for now. He had a Very Important Meeting to go to that afternoon, and if a bit...
The dapper man picked up a penny and found a little hole. The hole was smaller than the penny, but larger than a dime. The man, dapper and penny-wise, bent down on dapper knees, head bowed, right eye squinting into dime-sized hole.
"Dimes, dimes, dimes! Mole men flipping dimes, muddy mason jars tight with dimes!"
He wigle