What did it matter what he thought of her? She knew he couldn't ever really see into her.
"You want the veal," he said.
And he was right; as much as she didn't like it, he was right.
"You're wrong," she told him. She looked at the waiter. "I'll have the mixed greens with the balsamic on the side."
It was a kind of a sneer, a way to get back at him.
Simon carved out a bite-sized piece of meat and held it on his fork, reaching across the white linen tablecloth.
She opened her mouth, mesmerized by him,...
she tracked him to the cafe. it wasn't right that her past was in his mind, and not her own. she watched his every move. when he sat down, she entered. she sat across from him, acting as if this was perfectly normal. "I need to aquire the information you're carrying. that information doesn't belong in your hands, anyhow." she said. "I don't know what you're talking about." he said simply, taking a sip of the dark liquid swirling in his glass. "I'm talking about my past. my parents, the journal, the apprentice, everything." she said, softer with every word....
"Do you believe in ghosts?" he asked
"No I don't." she replied
"You're about to."
The doors opened wide with their bottoms scrapping across the wooden panelled floor. The light shone out in a thing line and then a bigger line and then a rectangle and then eclipsed the entire room in thick white light.
She turned to him with fear in her eyes. She was quaking in her little boots, her little hands started shaking too, she searched for comfort. He held out his hand.
"All good things" he started, require a leap of faith..."
She looked him in...
She unwrapped her sandwich and fed it to the pigeons, just as she did every day. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered making them in the first place, when she knew that she wasn’t going to eat them. And then she remembered the birds. How they would come hopping towards her when she sat on the same old bench, the paint long gone and no one caring enough to give it a new coat, the splinters of greyed wood sticking to her clothes as they grabbed at any chance to be free of their prison.
She understood how they felt....
There's somebody standing in the corner of my room. I can't see him, but I know he is there, and yes, it is a he. The collar of his shirt flaps soft with the night air, and the breadth of his hands dwarfs the whole space. I don't move, but it's not because I'm scared. I just don't want him to know that I know. That he's there. I don't want him to leave. His keeping watch while I sleep, a sort of volunteer sentryman, comforts me like my father's stroking my hair. Maybe it was my father who dispatched...
The conversation lasted two words: "Never again." They said it at the same time as they exited the restaurant. Why had the waiter insisted on swaying them away from the salmon and toward the tough lamb? Was it deliberate? Did he know this was a make-it-or-break-it meal and was itching to break something, anything? Did he glean from their terse looks that something dire was already on their horizon, and while the kids were asleep, the exorbitant sitter keeping watch, they were out to rehash the missteps that had brought them here? Had the waiter's ex-wife just taken him for...
I shot my butler. I didn't mean to, i swear. It was an out of body experience. i didn't know what i was doing until i had pulled the trigger. i mean, Jeeves had been awesome. Why on Earth had i shot my butler?? and, more importantly, how in the world had i shot my butler? I didn't even own a gun, for heavens sake! Maybe i was hallucinating. But how does that make any sense? if I hadn't shot my butler, who had?It was the only solution that made any sense. I had shot my butler. Oh my gosh,...
"I shot my butler, but I did not shoot the chauffeur" Mrs. Kensington said. "I don't know who could have done such a thing. That poor old man."
"The butler or the chauffeur," the detective asked.
Mrs. Kensington coughed with polite outrage.
"The chauffeur, of course," she said. "The butler can rot in a thousand hells as far as I'm concerned."
The detective flipped back a few pages in his notebook.
"You say the butler had been stealing from you," he asked, scratching his nose. "Did you have any proof?"
"Proof is in the pudding, as the maid would say."...
Millions. It seemed like it anyway, the number of people that were lining California's streets in the 60s and 70s. "Making it" or trying to... Rebelling, singing, pan-handling, and trying to fit in. Half-clothed, non-clothed boys and girls (we couldn't call ourselves men and women, we were only 15 and 16 most of us). We were in a revolution. Haight/Ashbury was the center of it all, at least for us. The LSD had its hold on some of us, others were fine just being thousands of miles away from where they grew up, just to feel "free." San Francisco changed...
Whenever she had balked at doing her homework in high school, her mother had always turned to her and asked, "Nadine, would you rather be a big fish in a little pond, or a big fish in a big pond?"
Nadine was pretty sure her mother was misquoting that aphorism.
Not entirely sure, of course. She hadn't been entirely sure of anything in years; she didn't feel entitled to feelings of certainty without a diploma or GED under her belt.
These days, Nadine was definitely just a small fish, little more than a fry. She was the fish that all...