Fireman? Firewoman? Fire...person?
Esme sighed as she approached her firetruck. The trouble with magic, she reflected, was that while it got you where you need to be quickly, that sometimes meant that you skipped over important parts of the path.
It had been a simple enough spell of purpose; she paid her fifteen hundred dollars, and in return she got given her perfect career. The career that she would enjoy the most, be most suited for...the career that would make her happy.
Purpose was a popular spell-type, and it had definitely resulted in a happier populace, but no one had...
The cool water soothed her. She had to get out of the stifling heat, and the stifling company. Why she had agreed to this trip she would never know, but he had insisted.
'It will be good for us,' he said.
No, it won't, she thought. It will be sheer torture, because we both know we're flogging this horse beyond it's natural lifespan. But she packed anyway, not realising that lying beside his sweaty body would be the final nail.
She floated for a while, staring at the stars. They were bright in the cobalt-blue sky, pin prinks of brightness...
Dane took another well-aimed pump at the car. The iron pipe splattered headlight glass all over the curb.
"Good fuck!" I sputtered, "What's wrong with your freako eyes?"
"I'm sick. Some sort of crow disease. Can't be helped. Hand me that roll of tape." He pumped his fist while taping diapers to the antenna with his free hand, reeling to some invisible unholy orchestra. Probably electro. Probably some sort of depeche mode shit zonking around in his gourd. His eyes bugged yellow and I knew he had finally gotten news that yes, it was cancer, and yes, it was hereditary....
Dancing, the camera so close, so infringing on the intimate margin between her face and his chest, she tore her gaze from the lens. Awkward, having two camera men so near.
She turned in his arms, leaned towards him and he lifted her by the waist, and she lifted her leg, forming the shape of a four.
On the stage again, the cameras rushed with her as she leapt across the stage. When she stopped and stood to her toes, a camera met her at eye level. She looked directly into the lens.
"Oh." The man's left eye, peeking from...
"Wait, so he hit you?"
We had been over the story several times by now, as Carl sat down bringing a fresh round of amber colored liquid in pint glasses.
I ignored his question as I tried to figure out if this was another IPA or something different.
"Yes," I said, snapping back to reality.
"Damn dude, that fucking sucks," Carl said taking a sip of his beer.
I shook my head in agreement. Took a sip. It was the IPA. Damn that is a good beer.
"Yeah, he just snapped after I told him he was being an asshole...
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,...
They were listening.
That's what my mother always told me when I enquired about the two men sitting on the bench in the park.
Every Tuesday we would find them there, sitting as still as statues, seemingly staring straight ahead. My mother told me that they were blind and that that was why they never seemed to be looking at anything in particular.
She said that they listened so much because they couldn't see; that they took in double as much information through their ears. They were drinking in the sounds of children playing and dogs barking and couples walking...
In these parts, they could not afford trains. Instead, they strapped the Jews and leftists and gypsies and cripples and social undesirables onto sleds on the back of a Volkswagen and hauled them to the camp, which was really a slapdash cardboard affair. The guards were lazy and disinterested. They really didn't see a point in the whole thing, but they did their jobs nevertheless, smoking cigarettes with the more gregarious prisoners. They resented the prisoners and beat them - After all, they thought, why should I have to waste my life standing around guarding these people that the Reich...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. It wasn't a normal doorway because when I say doorway you think of things like wood and brass nobs and, possibly, hinges.
This had none of those.
And it was hardly a red gown, because you are likely thinking of something you'd take to a ball, or if you're the really twisted sort, and I can tell you are, there's an image of a piece of clothing given out to a somewhat disturbing institution, or asylum, for those less inclined to modern verbiage or intent on...
Wow. The Statue of Liberty. I've lived in New York my whole life, and have personally seen it one time, and it's on my I heart NY credit card, of course. I played the Statue of Liberty once in a 5th grade play about America. I was "Miss Libby" and I sang about inflation. "The Red White and Blues" my song was called. I was 11. I wasn't a very great singer, but my teacher had great faith in me, as did my mother. There's a VHS tape of it somewhere, I do know that. Only once, though, have I...