Tina is at 6 AM mass every day, no fail. Masses in the Catholic church only change once a week and they revert back every year. In the five years since she's gone daily to mass, she's heard this particular mass 33 times already. Blessed is she among women.
The sanctuary at St. Agnes' smells like a basement. There is mold, dust, incense, old women with wool stockings and perfume. The pew closest to the door on the right-hand side is where Tina always sits. There isn't even a kneeler on it and Tina genuflects with her knees on the...
People always said that I was like a coin. I had two sides.
No one really knew what side they were speaking to. I'd always laugh it off and say I as a Gemini by nature. I had two personalities. I had two ways of looking at things. I was two people.
Until one of them died. The happy side. The reasonable side. The rational side. The RIGHT side. For some reason I just stopped being a double act.
What was left was wrong. I am wrong now. Many people had left me when that side died. My sister would...
There's somebody standing in the corner of my room.
I think they're me.
I mean, she - think it's a she, the lines are fuzzy - looks like me. A bit, anyway. She looks how I could be. Maybe how I should be. But she keeps flickering and altering - maybe she's just a potential me.
Or maybe she's all the potential mes.
I step closer to her - I can't tell, not really, that expression keeps shifting, but she seems to be happy about it, I think there's a smile (more smiles than frowns, anyway).
I open my mouth...
The lamp wouldn't turn on.
Strange, she thought, I just changed the bulb yesterday.
Feeling her way through the dark living room, Camille passed into the dining area and saw the stairs leading to the second floor were lit with tiny tealights. Following them up, she called out, "John?" No answer. A little louder, "John, are you home?." At the top of the landing, more candles lit a path from the stairs and into the hallway. Camille started down the hall but paused when she passed the closed bathroom door. Thinking John might be inside the bomb shelter-like walls, she...
There had been a time when he could have named all the seas on the moon, and pointed them out. That seemed to be in another life. He curled into a ball as tight as he could go and tried to ignore the pain in his leg and the weakness stealing up his body. He tried to ignore the cold seizing his limbs, and instead recited lists of constellations, dragging them from the pits of his memory. He even managed to get a couple of the moon's names. He uncurled one hand and the claw-like fingers groped blindly for his...
The maple leaves will change and fall with a certain grace - November will begin.
Carla read that sentence in her Literature textbook over and over, and the thought that kept running through her mind was, 'Who edited this book?'
That wasn't entirely true, but her internal monogue ran along these lines. Was she the only tenth grader who knew that semicolons connected independant phrases? Older people complained about how texting was ruining the language, but what difference did that make when a text book author, in what she assumed was an edited textbook ILLUSTRATING the language, couldn't even catch...
Capriciously, I repudiated the sky and all its lighting and thunder, snow and rain, and changing colors.
The paradigm wasn't there. Or was it?
Well, if it wasn't and if it were grounded by gravity, then so many Big Things are just frivolous.
Like love.
And losing a lover.
And even being born here, gasping for breath at first, and fighting through a mob just to climb some ranks and "make it." And those were the Big Things, too.
The paradigm here can't hold such Big Things if it was made to only hold such small, ambiguous entities like eating,...
Monkey banged into the table leg. The box hesitantly tipped over, shortening its shadow. Small waves of wine sieved through the table cloth.
"That fucking dog."
We laughed, watching our evening sink into the carpet.
We were too high to be drinking anyway.
Her joints screamed as the winter chill ran through her veins and iced her skin. It was so cold out and this blizzard was never-ending.
Julia huddled around the oven pumping heat into the 500 square-foot apartment, something her mother said to never do but it's not like the heat worked.
"Why the hell did I go out there?" Julia said aloud to the appliances.
She threw Ryan out for a reason but months of anticipation made the actual act much harder. She wasn't even sure if it was going to be today, but in the end it was. He...
Dust obscured the dim lighting above. Clutching a paper bag, the girl lurched to the elevator. Old, worn doors opened, and she descended.
Outside the building her suitor waited wearing a tattered tweed jacket and chipped bifocals. In his hand, a pair of freshly cut daffodils.