When I was twelve, I went to sea with my father. My mother had protested out of worry saying that I was not yet ready for the trials of life at sea, but once she had been persuaded to allow me to go, I went with excitement behind my eyes and the song of the gulls ringing in my ears.
I remember the very first time I set foot on the deck of my father's small sailing ship. I instantly fell in love with it. The clear blue waves, the crisp air, and the reflections in the polished wood...
Drip. Drip. Drip. The blood plopped to the concrete floor like a leaky faucet. He contemplated about the throbbing pain he felt with every plop.
He enjoyed that feeling. Concentrating so much on one pain over and over again. The first time he asked his boyfriend to blindfold him and punch in him the face - his boyfriend thought he was being dirty.
"You like it rough..." he had coyly responded.
The problem was it stopped being about the pleasure and more about the pain. He wanted to feel the warm liquid glop from his mouth and puddle to his...
Majestic words like maelstrom, preponderance, warbling swirl through my creative whirlpool, pulling in pieces of conversation, tail-ends of admonitions, the lilt of swearing. I live by the calendar, fitting my days into the squares, x'ing the boxes at midnight.
Friday is the wave that crashed but hasn't withdrawn to the sea. I'll compose this in the spiked surf.
I woke up hung over, my head throbbing. It felt like mini-jackhammers were destroying my frontal lobe, something I am sure the Scotch took care of last night.
The room was unfamiliar, but I had seen it plenty of times laid out in some IKEA or Sears catalog. I was on the bed with an Oak, maybe Maple, night-stand next to it. The room smelled, not good or bad, just different from my bedroom. Clothes covered the floor in front of the closet, where I suddenly saw my pants. A desperate roll to my side brought back the mini-jackhammers.
The...
I'm with stupid. It's Jerry's favorite T-shirt. He wears it all the time. It doesn't matter where we're going, he'll wear the shirt. Church, court, the museum-- he just shrugs his shoulders and gives me that grin when I ask him not to wear it. The more inappropriate the occasion, the more it seems to spur him to wear it.
Jerry's never really cared about impressions, that I get. But he also doesn't seem to get that I do. Sometimes, I think he gets some sick pleasure out of watching me squirm while he's talking to a prospective client at...
In the darkened room, the bishop waited, staring out of the window into the dying sun. In the half-light, the Gothic buildings of the Old Town appeared as if bathed in blood. They would be soon.
The princess would come. Oh she might have sworn an oath of loyalty to her brother but in the end words were meaningless. Actions were what really counted. And in a kingdom where son could kill father, could sister not kill brother also?
She had already proved her ability. It was well known that she was one of the most able poisoners in the...
The clock had stopped.
The clock had stopped at two minutes past eleven, but whether that was eleven this morning, last night, or three weeks ago, he wasn't sure. He rarely looked at the clock - it was just something that was there, on the wall, taking up space. Something that he would, no doubt, miss were it ever to be gone, but, because of the sameness of it, because of the reliability of its general shape being where it always was, it went unnoticed.
It was only the fly that was buzzing annoyingly around the room that caused him,...
I had to bind myself together. I could feel pieces of me falling away, an arm, my left toe, my sense of grace under pressure. My lips struggled to speak as my tongue became unattached, my teeth loosened in my gums. My heart threatened to beat itself right out of my body, and I feared that it actually would.
The curse of unbeing is a cruel one indeed. I thought this as I wound the linen around my eyes, working to keep them in my skull. I wondered what I could have done to anger someone of such great power....
The waves crashed and slapped at the stones, slurping up mouthfuls of sand and dragging them back to the deep. Elk stood out on an outcropping, the letter held tight in his hands. He didn't need to read it again, had read it fifteen times already this morning. And besides that, he wasn't an idiot and knew what was happening..could see the signs pointing at the end.
The waves frothed and slapped at the sand and stones.
But a letter was for cowards. Dash a note and sneak out the back window and then move on with your life.
No...
Four men on the port were looking for a penny stuck in the sails. It was the 4th Annual Whale Hunting Organization of America's Penny Party. Hidden somewhere on the great masted ship was a penny and there was a great amount of backslapping and thumbs-upping to whoever found it. It was generally a nice evening, plenty of deep flavored drinks flowing. Gave everyone something to think of fondly, and drunken stories to recount through the long winter months ashore before the ships went out again toward Greenland, toward the Horn. The first year, the penny (different penny) was pinned...