If we never speak again, there will be so many things I've never said. There will be no record of the thoughts that have been chasing each other around in my head. There will be no reason to remember me. You will never know the truth about what could have been - what I wanted us to be. I will never get to make you understand. If we never speak again...
"Wait!"
It came out of nowhere. A rock. A killer.
It was bigger than anything I'd ever seen since breaking orbit, but that wasn't saying much for a rookie like me. My console alerted me to the spinning asteroid and woke me from the warmest blanket of a dream. Of course, that's how it always happens, right?
I make my way up to the cockpit, though it's only on the other side of the thin partition of my shuttle. The Gen-Mark II was designed to hold four and that's how it was filled when we left dock last year. Now mine...
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...
"One scoop chocolate, one scoop..."
"Let me guess, vanilla." the man behind the counter grinned at me.
Was I really so predictable? I felt the colour rise to my cheeks.
"Erm..."
"I was right. I remember." he threw his head back and laughed.
"Actually..."
"2.53 every afternoon. One scoop chocolate and one scoop vanilla. Like clockwork."
He was starting to annoy me now.
"Actually, I was going to ask..."
I stopped. I was going to ask for vanilla. Truth is I only like vanilla and chocolate ice cream. Always have. But now I had started something. Alex was right, I...
I looked through my photo album, my fingers flipping the pages quickly, as I looked for that one photo.
There it was, towards the back.
I stopped and smiled.
I could still hear my voice demanding to have this photograph taken.
A woman stood to my right. Her smile shining with pride as her hand held mine. She had always been there for me. Almost as far back as I could remember now. I often thought of her as the source of my conscience because she always seemed to give advice that pointed to the moral north, but at the...
An aura surrounded her.
He couldn't describe it, couldn't explain it, couldn't put it into words. It was beauty.
She raised her hands, opened her mouth, flexed her diaphragm, and completely, irrevocably drew him into herself.
Her song permeated him, and the light that bounced off of her transformed his eyes into bodiless, empty receptors: everything else faded, his body, his chair, his table. There was only the Vision.
Then the song ended, and he was left floating in the smooth, absent, come-down buzz of the empty amplifiers.
They crouched to peer beneath the stairs. Michelle lay there in a drunken, unconsious heap.
"Ok, how are we going to get her up to bed?" sighed Peter.
"You're going to carry her." said Natasha, flatly.
"No, not again. I didn't move into his houseshare just to spend my Saturday mornings carrying my alchy housemates around". said Peter.
Natasha turned towards Peter and said in a hushed tone, "She's not alcoholic, she's just not over Steven yet".
"He dumped her 2 months ago!"
Suddenly, there was some movement beneath Michelle's still body.
Peter and Natasha peered beneath the stairs again...
"I'm having no part in this. I'm having nothing to do with any of it. Because it's wrong. You're wrong. This entire thing is...it's wrong. It's just...wrong."
"Have you always been good with words?" He sauntered closer, pale fingers tracing my cheek, my neck. "You're relying quite heavily on that word. Wrong. Have you thought about what it really means? How damning it truly is? I don't think you have."
I hated the feel of his fingers across my skin, hated the jolt that had run straight through me, hated the tingling, hated the - I hated it.
He was...
Sandy was impressed. Her son, John, had never thrown a ball back like that before - so hard and fast that it bypassed her completely and flew over the wall at the bottom of the small garden they shared. "Nice one, Johnny!" she yelled. "Let me go and get it, I'll be right back!"
She yanked open the wooden gate recessed into the red brick wall and entered the narrow alleyway at the back of her house - and all the other houses like it. She looked left and right and spotted the ball rolling away from her, towards the...
Goodnight...read the glowing sign above my bedroom door.
I shoveled myself further under the covers and sat with my flashlight, curled in my tiny igloo, my fortress of solitude, catching up on the secret stash of comics that I had hidden in the back of my closet.
I'd read sometimes until the flashlight flickered, in need of more juice from the cheap batteries I'd buy at the store with leftover lunch money. I'd fall asleep squinting my eyes so tight that I couldn't make out shapes on a page, and I'd wake up early to wash the sweaty inkstains from...