I held it at arm's length. The stench permeated the air around me. (I had just gotten a word of the day calendar, that's why I knew what permeated meant.) Pinching my nose, I placed it on the table.
Whatever it was, Andy had gone through a lot of trouble to get it. He saw it floating down the river, and he dove in after it. Too bad that two minutes later, after he caught up to it, a barge full of household rubbish tipped over and spilled its... cargo all over him. It reeked of consumerism.
I pulled the...
I am still half dreaming as I open my eyes against the night. The alarm hasn't gone off yet, shaking me awake with its awful, soul grating shriek, and it is not yet morning. I glance at the slime green display on the clock - 2.18am. Not good. Something has disturbed my sleep at this usually, thankfully, unknown hour and I just hope that I can ignore it and drift back down into my rest.
I try, but there is a sound, or some movement, or maybe it's both things, and my eyes are open again even though I wish...
Outnumbered.
I thought I should've won this contest, but I clearly couldn't think of any number larger than the theoretical 1st entry of the 2nd series of busy beaver numbers.
Okay, yeah, the 2nd number, obviously, but then I would have to rigorously define it, and I don't understand the math well enough for that.
"Good game"
"You admit defeat?"
"Yes, I admit defeat. Your knowledge of large numbers and advanced mathematics is clearly superior to mine."
" . . . aaaaaaand?"
" . . . and this is a clear fact even though I've spent 7 years of university...
The first few days she hadn't noticed the bars. She'd noticed very little about her surroundings other than that they were wrong. As her head became less fuzzy and she began to understand why they were wrong, that this wasn't where she was supposed to be she tried to learn everything there was to learn about this unfamiliar environment.
It was on the tenth day that she'd counted, that the sun shone for the first time. Whereas it had looked grey and dreary outside, the glowing sunlight made it look full of possibilities. The bars were on the inside of...
My four-year-old son was out of control. He tried to climb EVERYTHING, he made crazy yelling noises all the time, he had about a ten-word vocabulary, and he slipped out of his room every night to sleep with his pet jungle cats.
And it was all his grandpa's fault.
I should have seen it coming the day my son was born. I held him in my arms, showed him to my father-in-law, and said, "Hey, Dad, ain'tcha proud?" And he just twinkled his eyes at me, and ran his hand through his dreadlocks, and grunted bemusedly to himself.
I should...
'Just a little more." She said wearily, but the fierce look of determination on her face kept Malcom from insisting further. Her hands gripped the support rail so tightly that her knuckles drained of all colour.
'Alright, alright, if you really think you can do it.' He said softly, taking a step away from the wheelchair at the ready to wheel her away back to her room. He had to admit it, he admired her persistence, even if it was against his better judgment.
Her first step on her healing leg was shaky and the beads of sweat on her...
He exited the train at Buenos Aires. This place was so unfamiliar and so new. Nothing left for him to linger around for, just this new, foreign place, with everything ahead of him.
John's life was previously tragic; enough to leave a full apartment, to take one suitcase, buy a last-minute, super-expensive plane ticket, and leave St. Louis in the dust.
The sun was setting as he walked down the airplane stairs to the tarmac; no sense of time, or anything that was going on. John knew no one. John cared about no one. The tan faces and dark hair...
(To read Part 3, follow this link: http://sixminutestory.com/stories/somewhere-better-part-3.)
"Choose as you please," said Someone Good. "Surrender to the breeze, or fight for control. Which do you value: predictability, or potential. The known and the now, or the unknown, the good?"
As the air whipped in gusts around her, gripping her, twisting her, she struggled. Within herself, she wrestled for a choice. Would she allow herself to be carried up by these winds of change?
Somehow she knew that this was a defining moment. It was here, in the borderlands of Somewhere Better, that she could either fight her way back...
They had only met a through days ago through the happy coincidence that they were staying at the same hotel on the same island at the same time. They had met at a bar, neither their friends back home would be surprised by that fact, and had become fast friends.
Gloria was twenty-one, a full time secretary who was travelling alone, just needing to escape the soap opera of a life she had back home.
Mallory was a second year student, on holiday with her mother, step-father and three much younger half-siblings. She had been relieved to find a kindred...
It was practically viral by now. the video a friend of mine had posted on youtube, of our mass dance party for cancer. Everyone was doing it. There was a practically a million other videos like ours, everyone doing our dance, to various remixes of that song. We had worn masks, for some bizarre reason, and evryone was doing that too. i had seen everything from drama masks to those little ones you see doctors wearing. I watched yet another video of people throwing their arms in the air and twisting their hips. I was kinda proud of us. coordinating...