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...
They were listening. From somewhere distant, came the familiar sounds of gunshots, stone-throwing, angry slogans. But here it was quiet- deserted streets, shut down shops, boarded windows and houses so dead that they wouldn't be out of place in a graveyard.It was safe to be here. Nobody would mind, nobody would bother. They flitted out in the glorious sunshine of a bright day, trying to ignore the smell of dried blood mingled with the fragrance of the lake, the trees and the mountains. The pigeons of Srinagar were not worried about the curfew.
The stories rarely stop when the party does.
He was not tall, or lean, but he was fashionable. He had the bushiest eyebrows, like tiny mink stoles pasted to his forehead, and a strange (but familiar) teetering gate to his walk as he meandered like a river through the empty park lawns.
"I hope I didn't insult her," the man worried to himself as he kicked an empty potato chip bag across the path. He spotted a bench looking out over the old friend, duck pond.
There our lonely man sat. Contemplating the emptiness of it all. No ducks, even....
It was Andy from the grave.
"Can you speak up?" Caroline, distracted anyway by something on TV, couldn't understand him.
"I said it's Andy. From the grave. That's the muffling, the grave."
"Well, it doesn't help you're such a mumbler anyway. Wait, do you mean you're actually calling from the coffin?"
"Not really," said Andy, "but I am dead somewhere. I don't feel like I'm in a box. I feel like I'm in a cloud."
"That could be the coffin. I saw it," Caroline remembered, "it was plush."
"That's nice."
"Listen, did you want something? I've gotta head out in...
The wires passed from hand to hand in the complex trading ritual. THe boy watched raptly, taking his training with the serious concentration of surgeons and chess-masters.
"You wrapped the wrong red and pulled the wrong green," he noted to his papa in mixed Spanish. The wires were then braided into his hair, the auburn hues mixing with the artificial Christmas tones.
"The day your hair grows out of these strands, you will have all there is to desire in this world. On that day, you may cut these colors and move on to the next."
The tea kettle screamed...
I was staring. I could feel myself doing to but I couldn't stop. I was transfixed.
We had met only three days ago and already I just knew that she had made an impression. Although until this moment, I had no idea just how much.
Her skin was flawless marble. Her frame slender and perfectly proportioned. Her hair long, thick and silky.
She was perfect.
Even now, as took off her clothes and showed me her secret.
The giant red scar cutting into her side.
She wasn't ready to tell me where it had come from, but I was okay...
She wandered between the potbellies and the beer guts, the sharp-cornered purses and the waist-length hair that tickled her nose. She could smell the body odor of the teenagers, ripe and fertile. Popcorn in cardboard buckets passed under her nose, the butter shiny like gold.
She wasn't afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of. They were people. People everywhere. It wasn't like being lost in the woods, in an ocean, in a cave. Those places where she would be alone, those were scary places. Here she wasn't alone.
The carousel echoed its off-key melody and bounced off the carny...
I stood on tiptoe to see what the catcalls and commotion were about. "Let her breathe!" someone shouted. "Get a room!" called a tall man next to me. I watched the jubilation, the adoration, with partial mortification. The people around pushed and jostled as the couple became the sideshow.
"Don't let go," my mother said, squeezing my hand tightly in hers.
I preferred her hand to the passion going on above me. The clutch of bodies surged ahead, straining to see. The couple was quickly forgotten as the crowd's attention was captivated by the parade ahead, passion finding another outlet.
I couldn't sleep, so I went out for a late-night walk around town. When I got to the bridge, I stopped to look out at the bright lights in the city.
Suddenly, a woman came up to me and gave me a hug. Not wanting to be rude, I hugged her back as we both looked off in the distance. I'm not sure why, but she began to move her hand lower down my back. I tried to hint that she was making this even more awkward than it already was by moving my arm up, almost to her neck,...
Freddy knew once he'd started to hallucinate he was Napoleon that he'd smoked a joint too far. Or Allison had sneaked something strange in there. His mouth tasted of ash and flecking leaves.
We're all eating cake! he shouted. He couldn't hear very well in his left ear, it seemed to echo there. His voice was strange. Tiny, as if he were a mouse.
Agatha, who was currently drinking blood from a wineglass, told him that was the wrong thing to say. He wasn't Marie, now was he? And even then that wasn't what she really said.
Freddy didn't care...