We speared our forks on the tablecloth stained with soy and spice and duck sauce as the waiters took the picked-over "Chinese" dinners from our sight. The restaurant catered to American tour groups whose beef and corn tastes fall too unrefined for authentic foreign dishes and who long to travel thousands of miles just to conjure a memory from the hole in the wall Taiwan Garden down the end of Mulberry Street, across from the courthouse.
As our servants sprinkled the remains of our feast in the dumpster like fish food to the swarm of street children eager for their...
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...
"Midnight on the roof.". That was all her note had said. He smiled to himself as he climbed the stairway up to the small rooftop. Sure he'd been a bit rough with her when he'd cornered her at the party but some girls like it that way. Well she obviously had otherwise she wouldn't have contacted him again. Panting a bit he arrived at the security door and pushed his way through. She was there waiting for him as he had hoped but he wasn't alone. "Have you met my big brothers Mark and Jamie" she said as she slipped...
This wasn't supposed to happen. You weren't supposed to feel this way; about your mother-in-law. But didn't the saying go, if you wanted to know what your wife would look like in 30 years...and that was another thing. She only had another few years in her. Her husband wasn't giving it to her. I'm a goddamn octo-phile, he thought. Was that the word? But she was perfect -- an insurance commercial, the cover of Mature Living, hell, the centerfold.
"Theo, is everything all right, dear?" Theo had begun mumbling to himself.
"Yes, mom. I'll have another hot dog, if you...
Gradually.
That was the secret, wasn't it? Build up their trust or indifference, either one would do, like in that fable about the mouse and the lion. First it was hello over the mail as they each made their way back to their separate apartments, next? Why, after months of chit chat, it was coffee shared in the buildings laundrymat. More chance meetings, more talk about incidentals, info on her fake bio. There was no need for him to learn of her unpleasant past. He would only get the wrong idea.
It wasn't really lying, not when she was honest...
They crouched to peer beneath the stairs. They were surprised by how small it was -- "I don't even think an adult could fit in there," he said.
"Sure, if it was an adult midget," she said.
"How big of a midget?" he said.
"We're not really going to discuss the relative sizes of midgets, are we?" she said, turning to look at him for the first time since they found the passageway.
"I think dwarf is the preferred nomenclature anyway," he said with a tired air, pushing the hair out of his eyes. His glasses had slid down his...
The colors bleed into brown, red to rust, green to yellow.
The maple leaves will change and fall with a certain grace-- November will begin.
It mourns the soft breeze of summer, the baked earth from the sun, but looks forward eagerly to the cool rain, and rest in dormancy.
I stand next to the gnarled wood of the tree, placing my hand on the jagged surface.
This time, I'll follow the seasons. I 'll rest and let the autumn bleed from me my growth and energy.
Winter will freeze me, it's icy fingers clutching my heart, winding around my...
I'm lost.
The corn fields turned into and endless turning of green upon green, and I couldn't run because the leaves had become blades.
I've stopped walking. I've stopped screaming. Screaming only made me thirsty, and I even tried tearing a corn leaf to pieces to suck on something, anything. I tried to pull an ear and when I pulled the leaves back, a handful of black ear wigs fell onto my lap, pincher butts spread wide. I wiped them off and ran.
Something cut my upper arm.
I lay now, staring at the sky, it's gone from gray to...
When the colors first started disappearing, no one noticed. After all, the first to go was chartreuse, and no one ever used chartreuse. Almost no one even knew what chartreuse was, most people thought it was a purplish-red color anyway.
So when a few bottles of French liqueur went grey, no one could tell, it might have been a trick of the light and the glass. A particularly terrible shade of salmon, popular for a brief period in the mid-40s was next to go. But most examples of that were already buried beneath years of garbage, or hidden behind five...
I'm with stupid. That's what his t-shirt says. the arrow points at me, because I always walk on his left. People read it and look at us and laugh. They don't know that he doesn't wear it for jokes and giggles. He means it. He always wears it when we go out together, which is only once a week. He allows me to do the weekly shopping with him. He makes the list but I have to carry it, because he always pushes the trolley.
Somewhere deep down I know he's a control freak and I should break away. Amy's...