"So, old woman, how do you cure Love at First Sight?"
The crone laughed like a deadman's rattle. "Ah, there's a thing. Well, if you were some maid, I'd say a kiss. Or to be truly rid of it, a marriage." She pronounced marriage 'marry-ahj' the old way of yore.
"Neither is possible. I'm already wed, and happily too, were it not for this accursed lust that's come over me."
"Tell me her name and her story." the wise one requested. Of course, she already knew the girl. The lovesick sow who'd pleaded for a love spell. Yet she listened...
"what is it," he asked, "With people today?"
"Well, that's a fairly broad question, isn't it? There couldn't possibly be a sufficient answer," I started to say. I got as far as "We..." before he started back in again.
"No no no no no." The volume doubled. "NO NO NO NO NO NO!"
"No what, dude?" I tried to sip, but my glass was empty. Worst service ever. If I could just catch the eye of the damn
"NO!" He grabbed my arm. "Don't be this, like, moral relativist. Some things are better than others, and people used to read...
Powerful legs, legs charged by the spirit of youth, the longing to break free and simply run full pelt meaninglessly. These legs, this energy took her gambolling madly down to the bottom of Grandpa's garden to the summerhouse. Back at the town house, up his room was death, despair, disease and unbearable suffocating sadness and stifling stillness. Here outside was green; fresh wet green, distant roaring traffic - movement, life energy, freedom. Her lungs were full of cleaner cooler air and her hair pulled straight out behind her. Fresh air hair. She reached the summerhouse door and ran in.
'He's...
When the father arrived home to his squalid, Lower East Side tenement building, he was exhausted. He paused at the door to pose for a Jacob Riis photo, and then trudged though the entryway. The grit of coal from the furnace in the oil refinery still covered his face. This, despite the fact that we worked on the docks hauling fish. His apartment was in the rear of the building: a cramped, filthy space overlooking a pile of rubbish that the realtor had described as a “quaint fixer-upper with a partial city view.” He approached the door, removed a rat...
Johnny, my boyfriend was aptly named. Laura, my dad's girlfriend called him 'The Pirate' because of his long dark curly hair, caught up around the forehead with an old blue and white bandana. Looking remarkably like Johnny Depp in his Caribbean pirate movies.
I suspected something was going on between them. Lots of eye contact, protracted, meaningful. And they were always joking about, you know that kind of banter where you can just feel the sexual tension.
Johnny was handsome so I suppose it wasn't that unusual. He looked mean and sexy in his long black leather coat, black boots...
Find within yourself the path to truth, and you will never steer yourself wrong.
Good Lord, what a load of crap, he thought, sharpening the shovel again.
Rely on my own internal frame of reference to tell me what is the true path? Hell, if I thought my internal compass was true, I'd be in a better place now. Isn't that right, Jenny?
No, I guess you wouldn't have much to say about it, would you?
I never thought we'd be in this position, Jen. I honestly thought we'd make it. But I followed my heart, and that led me...
"Well shit, that didn't work," the conductor said.
He walked around the wreckage, pulling out passengers. Women, mostly. The men waved off his advances.
One gloriously attired woman emerged from a smoldering welt of torn metal as though she were departing at Poughkeepsie. Nary a scratch or displaced hat-feather.
"You are the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on," the conductor thought. What he said was, "Ma'am."
The day was still high above them, children kicking rocks along the tracks. The conductor scratched under his hat and wondered, well what the hell now?
A man sitting in the...
Words like knives, thrown back and forth across the room, like a death-defying circus act.
Husband and wife tossing sharp insults, from the couch to the kitchen doorway. Neither landing anything deep, glancing wounds, already scraping scarred tissue.
Neither really feels anything for the other anymore. But the dance, the battle, the contest keeps them together. Light reflects of the blades as they flip and fly.
Thud into walls. Plink against the floors. Bounce of their scaly armour of experience, disdain and dull hate. It aches in their bellies. They think it might offer some release, against the mounting pressure....
Bombs were the last thing on his mind. The first thing on his mind was an egg salad sandwich. Then bombs. He had exactly two things on his mind.
He was a very simple fellow, a bomb enthusiast who ate nothing but egg salad sandwiches. He didn't even have a proper name. Just He. Sometimes He answered to His or Him, depending on the tense.
There was a bomb in the bedroom and, being a bomb enthusiast, he was enthused by this. The only way to defuse the bomb was to eat the fuse. The fuse was not an egg...
"So anyway that was what he said yesterday and she wouldn't agree with anything he was...."
The sound drifted away as he continued to stare straight across the carriage. It was the same every morning, she would complain about everything that happened the day before, all the way in on the train, and then again that evening, all the way home.
He, well, he would do the same as always every morning, stare straight ahead at the woman directly across from him. She was beautiful. Here light browne hair rested neatly on her shoulders as she read what seemed to...