She heard it calling out to her. Her clearing in Yellowstone -- it was whispering that it longed for her presence. And on this day, when she felt like the world was collapsing around her -- its edges bent and frayed and its fringes burning up in smoke -- she dragged herself there up winding paths and wild trees.
While most people saw Yellowstone as a national park, she saw it as her backyard, her sanctuary, her refuge. She had a clearing there, all her own, that bears in the hundreds of years they'd been there hadn't even found. But...
"Ugh," Shiloh said, rolling her eyes over the steaming cup of coffee that she had been holding for the last twenty minutes.
Her boyfriend Micah looked across the table and couldn't help but let out a very quiet laugh. "What?" he asked, still laughing as he did.
"Don't what me," she replied softly, shaking her head as she took a very long sip of her still piping hot coffee. "Don't, Micah. You know exactly what that ugh was for."
After Micah had graduated from university with a degree in chemical engineering, he had convinced himself that he didn't want a...
I cannot be old as were, but I'll be as old...
No springs, no machination, no burn, can retreat the circle
but the circle will come round
--not old as were
Along the shore they did not remember
Walking until their flesh and their ligaments
Wasted
No mercy for the parched
And she stood staring from behind pa(in)
And he paced
And he destroyed
And he ripped--because
This is not the girl I wanted
This is not the girl I knew
This is not the girl I ordered
Custom made behind a pa(in) of glass
Darling or darling oh darling...
I thought she was made of china, the first time I met her. Girls that perfect didn't exist, only dolls. Frozen icons of perfection, unattainable.
She made me feel clumsy - she was slight, small, pale, hiding behind perfect ringlets. On paper we sound the same - the same could be said of me (apart from the ringlets; my hair is straight, limp) but she wore it with pride, I treated my height as a disability, my weight as an inconvienience, my skintone a health hazard. I looked sickly, she looked ethereal.
Somehow it wasn't a surprise when she spoke...
(To read Part 3, follow this link: http://sixminutestory.com/stories/somewhere-better-part-3.)
"Choose as you please," said Someone Good. "Surrender to the breeze, or fight for control. Which do you value: predictability, or potential. The known and the now, or the unknown, the good?"
As the air whipped in gusts around her, gripping her, twisting her, she struggled. Within herself, she wrestled for a choice. Would she allow herself to be carried up by these winds of change?
Somehow she knew that this was a defining moment. It was here, in the borderlands of Somewhere Better, that she could either fight her way back...
They panic was reaching heart-stopping momentum now. Jake was sure that at any second his body would give up, surrender, break apart or explode or melt away into the once beautiful sea. It wasn’t beautiful any more. The fear had seen to that.
One minute having the time of their lives, the next…
“Shark!”
That one word was enough to instil panic into the entire group, even the captain, the tour guide. Everyone. And no one had known what to do – it hadn’t been covered in the onboard safety announcements at the beginning of the day, so many long,...
It was cold. Freezing, really. There at the stoop, on the street, glowing in red. Dark, straight hair raking her face. She shivered, stood and walked down the street. To me, this place is foreign. To her, she knows the environment like the stories her mother told her. She walks down the road away from the doorway. Where they threw her out. Spit on her. But now she walks down the road trying to keep warm. She coughs. The shivers shake her again. The cold day drops her onto the street, rejecting her and the brightness of her clothes. The...
It approached. Well, as much as the end can be said to approach, as opposed to us approaching it. The great beast, that stalking horse of the apocalypse, with massive paws that looked like human hands, a lion's head with a mane of fire, and the body of a wolf.
The great hunter Talianto was selected from all people to confront this end. Of all people her spear flew the straightest, her blade cut sharpest and cleanest. If there was any hope of defeating such a monstrosity, of doomsday that moved in shadow and swished a spiked tail clearing all...
You know damn well the head is in the box. You know damn well how this movie will end. But her legs are across yours and she shaved. They're smooth like you could have only guessed, because in winter she was all jeans and tights.
You've been hovering with your hand on her knee and she's so into this damn movie that you've seen one hundred times. She hasn't mentioned that she thinks about sleeping with Brad Pitt, but you see the way her eyes get when he comes on screen. She has yet to give you those eyes, but...
"Constellation of freckles."
I made a face. "Oh, that's going on the list."
She nodded with a degree of authority - she hadn't needed me to tell her it belonged on our list of paticularly purple prose, our list of phrases that were to be avoided at all costs.
"Can you even get a constellation of freckles?"
"Well, of course you can, it's an arrangement - it's the implication I resent. That freckles are like stars - who'd have starry freckles? You can't wish on a freckle."
"You could. I think that could be quite a romantic scene."
"Depends on...