Daring to be noticed for the first time in her life, she pushed her chair back and stood up. Jerome, her uncle's brother, took no notice of her. Her hands were cold and shaking. He continued eulogizing. "He was a great man, and there's no denying. We all..."
"No."
That got his attention. All of them, really. She clasped her hands together tightly, willing her voice to be steady. Jerome raised an eyebrow at her. "Did you have something you wanted to say, Candace? Why don't you come on up here and say it?"
She swallowed, hard. The idea of...
Sometimes, the best cure for loneliness is to actually be alone. Which is actually kind of hard to do, considering there are something like 6 bills people on the planet. You have to actually try.
Alone is different from lonely. Alone is a choice. Lonely is a sickness. My sickness has lasted two years, six months, eleven days, and I'm to the point where I must get better, or die. So I put on my black "fuck off" jacket, and put my headphones in my ears, and I made a choice to be alone. And I walked. I walked all...
"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...
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...
The ghost girls kept appearing on the photographs. Even on the really old one of my grandfather.
I wasn't that concerned, it was bound to be an effect of those new pills from the doctor. The leaflet had a million and one side effects including hallucinations.
On my seventy first birthday all the family were round my house and I was just blowing out the candles on the three level chocolate cake when there was a pounding on the door.
Police.
They took me into the kitchen and closed the door. Sparing the rest of the family the embarasssment of...
If I had a box full of pounds from every time someone said if I had a pound for every time
It would probably have like £50 in it
Because although that's a common phrase
It doesn't come up THAT often
Think about it
How many times have you actually heard someone use that phrase
Probably like fifty
Yeah?
I thought so
So next time
Put a pound somewhere you can forget it
And then when you find it
You'll remember this story
And that way
As long as you are alive
So am I
And if you told it...
I had been running for just over an hour, almost breathless. Whose idea was it to train for this marathon anyways? I've always liked running, but never really enjoyed it, you know? There are only so many routes you can take. This time, I decided to say screw the concrete jungle, I'm going to take this somewhere different. So I took to the hills, as they say. Not gonna lie, it was much more interesting than running on pavement. The damp grass under my shoes, the crunching of the twigs, all that good stuff. I stopped at the top of...
The day had dragged on. Lari looked around the street as she left work. She felt as if she had just ran a marathon with cement shoes on. You wouldn't think that being a marketing assistant would make someone so tired.
The street was full of the regular faces. People that she saw everyday, but never really looked at. Lari sighed as she waited for her bus. I need a vacation, she thought.
A young girl walked by, licking a dripping ice cream cone and holding a large red balloon. The girl didn't care that she had dripped chocolate down...
I had a dream the other night. We were sitting alone in our rooms, all of us, every single one, when suddenly —
The walls just fell away. There was no sound, no pyrotechnics; with a quiet resignation, all the matter in the world, except for our warm, breathing bodies, fell down into the void, leaving us floating purposelessly, naked.
And we all looked at each other, as the psychic frameworks that we etched into the streets, into our homes – our routines, our beaten paths, all the conventions that existed not in the world, but in the world as...
It was inexplicable that two latino, hipster twenty-somethings from East Los Angeles would talk like 85-year-old Jewish retirees from Queens, yet that was how it was.
"Pull ovah and ask fuh direck-shuns," shouted Isabel.
"I know where I'm going!" Ricky replied with a Yiddish accent that seemed to come from nowhere. "You always do this! You always want to undermine my AUTHORITY!"
He exclaimed very loudly, mostly because he was hard of hearing and couldn't monitor his own pitch. Isabel was silent for a second, silently mouthing words to herself. Then, as if in an afterthought, she said, "You just...