In 1921, he flew from the Great Rift Valley, along the trails left by the ancient Martians, to find the Temple of the Sun. It was buried, like so much else on Mars, in red sands over the course of millennia, but that meant nothing when you had a native to escort you to their ancestral home.
"So, how can we breathe here?" Pete asked the small, silver creature before him.
It sat in the biplane, strapped in, looking ridiculously small in the pilot's seat. "Air bubble," it replied, fiddling with the dials.
Pete had never flown in a biplane...
I carry you with me.
I carry you with me here.
Right here, in this tender spot
in this hollow space.
I carry you with me.
I carry you on the tip of my tongue
Just on the tip, so that I can
carry you with me here,
in my words, in my sounds
There. That word, that sound -
Said just as you would, just as you have
Because I carry you with me,
I carry you with me here.
Right here, in the downturn of these lips,
In that expression you wore had that carried with it a...
Charles didn't know what to think. The heat on his cheeks hurt too much, but he didn't like it when the flame disappeared. Jenny was the one holding the camera. She told him that they could all share the candle. It was one flame for the entire group. A moppet party, dad called it, because it was not their birthday.
Mom was sick. Charles could only think of that. She'd pale cheeks and skin stretched over her face, and her hair tangled and black and her mouth a gaping, gawping hole. She didn't even recognize any of them when they'd...
They were trapped for seven days. Faced with a myriad of uncertainties, this much Antonius knew to be true. The pangs of hunger had eventually morphed into a constant feeling of nausea. However there was no escaping the continual thirst that couldn't be quenched. How he desired his lips to touch the current of a fresh spring. Anything to replace the mix of his urine and rain water he had survived on this past week. Still the worst of his locked away environment was the person with whom he shared his cell, Marcus.
"How can he sit there with that...
The first time I saw Tommy, I knew he was a total douche. I don't allow my sister to date douches; shit — no brother should. That's rule number 2.
Rule number 1, in case you are wondering, is that you don't interfere with your sister's romances. But I take exception with douches.
Of course, there's a perfectly civil way to address his low-life status without resorting to a politically un-savvy term like "douche," which can alienate the polite, women, and my parents equally well, but anyone who knows me will say there ain't a bone of misogyny in this...
Malcolm's coo became a cry. It had been hours since we had locked ourselves out of the house but it made no difference to him or his needs. The boy wanted his parents but was incapable of the simple act of walking over to the door and unlocking the deadbolt. The life Malcolm led was one of constant need, one of dependence.
The debilitating accident last year 'scrambled his circuits' as his mother put it but while the rest of the family wrestled with the fact that my son would never walk, eat, speak or function on his own, she...
The year was 1986. I was traveling through the American South with a spaniel I had picked up along the way who answered to the name "Kenneth".
My goal was to reach Little Rock, Arkansas in order to see the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library and Museum. Unfortunately, I had committed a great error and had greatly misjudged, as he would not even be elected for another six years.
Whoops.
While the spaniel who responded to the name "Kenneth" almost certainly knew that I was too early, he remained mute. In all the many weeks we spent together, he only...
"Tell me what you did. Tell me what you did yesterday."
She was at the bottom of the stairs in her own house. She was alone, but she knew she wasn't. The lights were off and it was dark.
"I was home. There was nobody there, except him."
She put her foot on the first step, and slowly pulled herself up. When she reached the second floor, she put her hand on the railing to steady herself.
"I felt like I was going to pass out. It was because of him."
She walked into her bedroom, looking nonchalant though there...
The world was so close to perfect, he hated having to point out the flaws to the designer. It was his least favorite part of the job; they always took it personally. Months to design each reality, thousands of hours of effort by the design teams, but it always came down to the lead designer to take responsibility for the deliverable.
Clients were, of course, unreasonable in their expectations of what kind of world they would live out the rest of their lives. They were clients, after all. The health and happiness of a hundred thousand subsequent generations would depend...
Water. I wish I were drowning in it now. That my car veered into the canal while I was driving home. Somewhere I shouldn't have been. A blue-house, now painted tan, that I've visited 100 times. A house where I rang the doorbell, felt stupid there was no answer, and drove home. On the way, I turned into an oncoming lane by complete accident... Cars beeped, and luckily no one was hurt. Startled, I made a U-Turn, and headed home. I wished there was a thunder storm, a hail storm, something to cover my windshield to make my car just...