I stopped running and gasped for breath. My brother caught up to me and dropped to his knees in exhaustion. My hand traveled silently to the weapon at my waist. I stood behind him breathing heavily.
"I'm sorry brother, but I can't share this time." In one swift motion, I brought the metal down on his head. His body crumpled in front of me and lay motionless.
The audience stared open mouthed at me. The thundering applause filled me and my brother sprang up from his crumpled heap on the stage floor and grabbed my hand for our final bow.
Away.
He'd escaped.
And not in the usual way.
Home from school at 7:30pm, another long day of detention for crimes uncommitted (who ever did anything really deserving detention – and when has detention been worse than the alternative. Questions he wrestled with with his head on his desk) – home long after sunset, he pressed his head against his pillow and cried.
The tears awoke the empathy of the waters in the room. His fishbowl grew stormy. A glass of water shuddered with tsunami. The poster of the ship on the wall erupted in gale and he could feel the lash...
She stared down into the shallow pond from where she stood on the banks, and sighed. There was world just below the broken surface of the water, a world that she longed to understand. The lillypads floating on the surface seemed to hide their world from hers, but she knew better. The world below, it was alive and well. It was something that she could feel, from the tips of her fingers, up her arms and across her heart, and all throughout her entire body.
All she had to do was jump.
Though the pond was only a foot or...
The drugs were beginning to wear off. Minute by minute the butterflies, those glorious, evanescent, friendly butterflies, were fading. She pressed the earpiece of her headphones to her ear. Pink Floyd were sounding like a noisy nightmare. As she gazed out across the valley, with its endless vista of trees, trees and more trees, she came down to earth with a bump. She should get back to work - artificial props might give her a brief respite, but she had a deadline to meet and a quota to make. Sighing, she pressed stop and slipped her headphones down round her...
"Will you just buy a newspaper?"
"I don't need a newspaper. I'm going to say 1985."
"No way, it can't be any later than 1973. Look at the can."
"I see the can, but -"
"Then you see the logo style. That's totally an early seventies steel can. Just buy a paper so we can figure out when we are."
"Look, the phone has a Southwestern Bell logo. That means it's AFTER the breakup of AT&T. Therefore, we are sometime in the mid-eighties."
"But soft drink companies had already switched to aluminum cans. How do you explain that?"
"I don't...
Taste was one of those things that was meant to be very personal, and yet everyone seemed to recognise bad taste.
The joke may have been ill-timed, but she maintained that it wasn't in "bad taste" - soon finding herself in the minority (one, in fact).
Fine. Fine, fine, fine - he would've laughed, if he'd been there. Then again, him not being there was the entire point.
He would've laughed at that, too.
It was a nice, warm day, and that was ridiculous - funerals were meant to be full of rain and the dark and thunder and the...
It's always late at night that it hits you. Just as you're about to go to sleep, you're about to actually give in to the quilt, to the mattress, and the darkness, your mind is going to release, and then -
Sometimes it's a welcome thought. Sometimes it's useful, helps you get things finished in time, or it's a great idea you need to put down. Sometimes.
Rarely.
Sometimes it's mostly neutral, and it's just getting rid of it that counts.
Sometimes.
Most of the time, though? It's one of those haunting thoughts. One of the ones you don't know...
The conversation lasted two words: Alright? ...Yeah
It wasn't groundbreaking, it wasn't revolutionary, it wasn't even poetry, but it was all they needed to say.
They had been the best of friends once, closer than brothers. George had had his own room at Jack's house, Jack had had his own shelf in George's fridge. But somewhere along the way, they had lost that.
Was it because Lissy, George's ex-girlfriend had hated Jack, was it because of the fact that Jack went off to uni while George stayed in their hometown, or had it merely been because of the fact that...
He ran into the room, his heart pounding, and his clothes soaking wet. Mrs. Hudson trailed in behind him, wringing her hands with anticipated concern.
"He just pushed passed me, Mister 'olmes!" she apologised. I nodded supportively and guided her elbow out of the room with whispered reassurances.
Our visitor immediately captured Holmes' attention. Remarkably for about a second more than his usual gaze would consume unannounced guests at 221b Baker Street.
"It's about m' small'oldin' Mr. 'olmes" he blurted out in what sounded like a Highlands accent. Possibly one of the smaller island settlements, I postulated. He did sound...
Kenya. She said her name was Kenya.
And then she laughed. I couldn't hear it, not over the music in the bar, not over the shouting of everyone around us. But I saw the laugh, starting in her stomach, and traveling up and out of her mouth.
She leaned closer and said that her parents had grown up with Black Power and Africa awareness, and decided to name her Kenya. That they had grounded her the first time she straightened her hair.
Her voice, the part of her voice I could hear, had a huskiness to it that really appealed...