"I'm falling in love with her."
"Oh, that's nice, that really is." She watched him sit up, get up, finding his clothes. "I'm glad."
"That means that this stops."
She frowned. "What? Why?"
He turned to stare at her. "Why? Because this is cheating as it is, let alone -"
"This is just physical. Let her have the emotional and let me have the physical." She got out of bed, sauntering towards him, smirking when he turned away. "There's no reason to stop."
"I really feel something for her. I don't want to hurt her."
"You aren't hurting her. She'll...
When I was in Beijing, my dear, I saw a small lass with an ape of a face crouched in an alley and weeping for who knows who. I noticed she was wearing the cheap red cape I bought for you in H&M. When I was in Istanbul I saw a knock-kneed street performer whose laugh was the same as yours. Some graffiti that I ran across somewhere on the east edges of Paris resembled your handwriting, when you scrawled notes left for me coming home legless and too late. I say this not to make you think there are...
Idyllic farmhouse? Well, appearances can be deceiving, I suppose. If the For Sale sign in front had said, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here," we might have been more wary. As things stood,, when we signed on the dotted line we had no idea what we were really buying into... or signing away. The funny thing about souls, you don't really notice them until they're gone.
The anti-grav boots were worth every penny.
Shelly had saved for weeks, mowing lawns, delivering papers, collecting coins from every cushion in the house, to earn enough hard cash to buy them. Her mother had told her not to waste her money, that they were probably just galoshes with springs on the bottom, but the girl refused to be deterred. The magazine ad had proclaimed them anti-grav, and there was a Truth in Advertising law on the books, so they must be the real deal.
And she was right.
But not in the way she thought she would be.
Instead...
Vanquished.
I was confused. This isn't how I expected the novel to end. Who committed the crime? Where was the last chapter with the explanation, the satisfying ending the reader could ponder on when the final lines had been read?
This book looked identical to the others in the bookshop the next day but twenty pages were missing at the back. I was waiting in line to exchange the book when I had a strong mysterious feeling not to.
Returning home I sat on the battered red leather sofa and opened the last page again.
More words than I expected....
I'm dead. Really dead. Not in the "there'll be a twist at the end and I'll be saved" kind of way. Just dead.
It occurred a while back, and while I was living, I thought it was pretty unfair. Most people get 60, 70 years of life. Enough people got 30 or 40 years of life.
I got 25. By the time you're 25, you're only finally getting your last degree, your first bit of experience, stepping over that last big stone in your path before you enter the real world. The one where you earn enough money to do...
Matilda was the first woman he'd ever dated that had been a cat before surgery. She told him at the end of the third outing, to the Italian restaurant, a night of sexual tension, sweaty waiters, mixed up menus and his clumsiness knocking over the carafe of white wine over her lap. She smiled, pink lipstick still intact after a meal of coiled pasta and mince. No leaping up off the chair in horror, running to the bathroom, telling him to F O and never call again.
Matilda held his arm as they left the restaurant and stood looking over...
Fish meant for market was found dumped in a bin outside the school. The mother believed the rotting smell would disguise her hidden bundle beneath. Her post-birth addled brain forgetting only papers were supposed to be in that container and what she tried to dispose would be eventually found.
Margarita wasn't a bad person. She did what she thought best at the time. Took her baby to the church and left her on the steps timing so the priest would find it. The bloody towels, rags, her own clothing stuffed below the fish. She kept the umbilical cord and placenta....
She cradled the faun's head. Tears, vivid green, stained the slight creature's pale skin. Her story wasn't meant to end this way.
Shashera stroked Ferin's cheek. "I'm so sorry, my friend," she whispered, leaning down to press her lips to his brow. The faun shuddered at the chill of her touch.
"You weren't supposed to let him in," he said, voice weak, but thick with accusation. "You were our protector." Another tear dropped from her lashes to splash onto his chest and he jerked at the impact.
"I know." The nymph settled her friend back on the bed. "But it's...
I have come to dread the raven's caw that signals moonrise. It is the dread noise that warns me of worse to come, when I can feel the change come upon me. I beg this of the sun, do not set, do not leave me. Leave me alone with myself and the thing that I carry within me.
This is my anti-aubaude. Leave me with the rest of humanity, walking on two feet. Leave me to tools, to society, to love and all the rest that makes us man. Keep me from hunger, keep me from rage, keep me from...