"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...
Words were labels that he had never paticularly enjoyed. Words were lazy, letting you lapse into not thinking about them. Once you had the label for it, you could move on, not bother thinking about the object itself.
"Weird" was a label. It was a sentence. It was a write-off. A decision that he wasn't worth worrying about, not worth bothering with. They tried to pretend it wasn't, or at least some of them did - at least the cruel ones were honest. They didn't pretend they wanted to understand him. As far as they were concerned they did; they...
"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...
What happens when life finally becomes too much to bear? He thought about it a great deal - but was unable to put hiself into those shoes. What happens when you feel death is more important than life? Or is that the wrong question to ask, he wondered. Perhaps the real question was: why had she decided that death on her own was preferable to life with him?
He had come home that day - an ordinary day like any other day - and been surprised not to find her in her usual place in the kitchen. Every time he...
When we reached the top, we were so dizzy from the thin air we'd forgotten why we had to climb and headed back down the mountain.
At the bottom, clear-headed, we remembered why we had to climb and headed back up the mountain.
This continued for the rest of our lives.
"This dream - it was better than waking."
"That's incredibly flawed. Inherantly flawed. You can't control the dream - for all you know, in the next few moments, you could've... You could've turned up to someone's wedding. Someone you hated. Or worse, someone you loved."
"If that's the kind of dreams you have, I'm not surprised you can't understand how a dream could be better than waking." I made a face. "That's really the best you can come up with? Oooh, a dream wedding." My nose wrinkled. "Is that a pun?"
"A very strained one." She replied, going to make...
She was the most delicate girl in town. But looks could be deceptive. Ruth knew he was somewhere in the house. Unfamiliar surroundings would make it difficult for easy location of prey, but that wouldn't delay the inevitable. She was as confident as she could be that no help would come. The old place was too isolated; one of its charms. Ironically, it was what had attracted her to the place. The appeal of sole occupation. Nothing to disturb her work.
Fortunately, she'd made it to the Kitchen and its drawers of sharp, clean, very clean knives. Ms. (note the...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway.
Passersby ignored the frail, shivering thing, their eyes never dropping, their heads never turning. She might have been a doll in a window, or something someone left behind. She wasn't any of their business.
A little round boy with a little round face in his little grey jacket wrapped around his little round belly poked at the girl with his little round foot.
The girl, who wasn't much older than he, looked up from the protective valley of her arms and smiled at him. The little...
1943
Population. 1943
Even painted over, the 2 was still visible if you looked at the sign at an angle. And the previous 1 if you were real close, but from a passing car, residents or the occasional visitor to Sleepy Falls would see, if they were paying attention, that a new resident now inhabited the town. Ted wiped his brow with his customary cotton handkerchief and reseated the dusty Sheriff's Hat.
"It's not straight." said this week's Deputy, who decided to punctuate this pearl of wisdom with an increasingly annoying, yet habitual spitting out the passenger window.
The fact...
I jumped. I blacked out. When I awoke, head ringing and eyes spotted with colours, he turned round slowly.
"You ever heard of an Ox Bow Lake?"
"nuhuh" I said. Mind you, the gag would have rendered the same result as a Shakespeare soliloquy.
"sahwiwochee" Hell, it was different. Maybe if you were a dentist, this conversation would be less one sided. I eyed the man who had broken in to the lab, wondering if he'd had orthodontist training. He knew his way round a physics lab alright, but fiddling with the quantum accelerator probably wasn't the best idea. That...