Absent. The roots were absent but you could still see them. When you burn a stump, you often end up with a chunk of its heart that doesn't turn to ash. The interesting thing is how the fire always seems to follow the roots, no matter how deep they go, burning away every trace of them. Sometimes, even a year later, a fire can rekindle from deep in the earth where it was banked in some hidden location. Looking down from above, you can see the faithful reproduction of the root system only it's just air. Hollows that disappear into...
"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."...
"Wait, so he hit you?" Beneath Sean's cool demeanor, rage had begun to bubble over. I fingered the bruise throbbing beneath the skin of my cheek. "Uh-huh." His eyes narrowed. I placed one hand on his arm. "Relax. It's done." i soothed, but there was no suppressing his rage; even i knew that. It was like putting mentos into a coke bottle and shaking it. eventually, it would explode. he kissed my bruise, gently, just a little brush. "I'll be back." he promised. I tightened my fingers on his arm. "Please, don't go looking for him. it'll justs make things...
When I was 12, I went to sea. Don't ask me which. I don't know.
It was sometimes blue, and it was sometimes green. And when it got dark, it was black.
The air always felt clear and cold, pushing itself down into your chest. It filled your belly up. Then it would come out hot. Hot and wet.
You could look out, and out, and out. There was just the sky, and then there was the sea. Don't ask me which. I don't know.
Just the sky sitting on the sea.
Except once, there was something else.
Once there...
Running, running from the people behind me. I don't have the time to look back. But I know they are after me. I flee along the soccer field once again. As I have done for so many days after school. There words are thrown at me , they hit me like the punch that knocks out the boxer. The though of boxer reminds me, I am not small any more, I have been running through this fields to training, to practice, to learn to fight back.
I turn around, I use my words to shield myself from there words, I...
"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...
Until now, she'd never thought of herself as pretty. She'd never looked in the mirror and seen what ever it was that society defined as beauty reflected back at her. She had never looked at a picture of herself and thought, "Wow" or even "Not bad".
But as she flicked through the photographs from the night before she found her breath being stolen at the gorgeous creature in front of her.
Nothing was different, not her hair, not her teeth, her eyes or her clothes. And yet, everything was different, miraculously changed, as though a fairy godmother had waved her...
She'd been in the park till noon, watching the gate to the Forbidden City, seeing the tourists as they milled about in mist-rimed sunshine. Finally, she caught sight of him as he approached the gate. Every day without fail, staggering slightly under the weight of his bag. She was overdressed for the streets in a red dress meant for parties not park benches. Flung out suddenly from the warmth of the car, out of favour and, quite suddenly without comfort. At the bottom of the hill she lost him briefly, then saw him, walking alongside two Western tourists, his sack...
My feet ached, but it was well worth it. There was blood on one of my insteps, the left one, and when I walked around the floor I tracked her blood around with me. The room, nothing more than an abattoir, had fit the bill perfectly. There was the pen I'd led her to. I said nothing more than, "You'll like it. It's the spookiest little spot." And she had crawled inside without the least hesitation. And as soon as she did so, the smile left my face, and the grimace reappeared, and I thought, "This is for all those...
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...