No one else stood up when the two elderly ladies got on the bus, so Bear had to provide the example and offered them his seat. He stood up as they approached and made the giving up my seat gesture with his arm. The one lady smiled and him. He watched the smile curdle into an expression of confusion and followed her sightline to see some teenager had taken his seat.
"Hey," Bear said, trying to sound tough and imposing. "You think I stood up for you? I was letting these ladies have those seats."
The teenager ignored him, scrolled...
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...
There was blood on my pillow. For that matter, there was blood in my mouth; It tasted like copper. I don't usually notice the taste of blood, but this caught me somewhat by surprise.
I got up, gargled some water, and carefully probed my mouth with my tongue. As far as I could tell, nothing hurt, and no more blood was coming out. Maybe I cut myself early in my sleep.
I got up properly, fully enjoying the freshly risen sun which was busy spraying it's yellow rays through the forest canopy. There was a fresh campfire pit just visible...
It wasn't so bad, the cancer, eating me from the inside out. Started with headaches, diagnoses, hopes and dreams dashed like fine china on the asphalt. My hands shaking, pillow wet in the morning, children gripping me, knowing without words that life was changing. Daddy is dying, mommy said. Like grandma. No, daddy isn't going to heaven. There is no heaven. Only the great void. Its nothing to be afraid of Sofie. Daddy loves you. More doctors and pills, and then pain and then...nothing. The desire to life squashed like a grape on the supermarket floor. Life itself spinning, a...
Sasha stretched as she woke, the cold early morning air stinging her skin. Looking around, it took a moment to figure out where she was. The woodland near the playing fields. She had never come out this far before. She should hurry back before anyone realised she was missing. There was no way she was going back to see Dr Williams again. He gave her the creeps. There wasn't anything wrong with her anyway. She knew her parents despaired at her stories, but they weren't just stories. Why couldn't they see that? They were every bit as real as she...
Pleasure. Burn. They're the only two words on the whole page - in the whole book if he was honest - that he had read and actually remembered. The rest was a jumble of names, bad descriptions, inplausible mixes of action and consequence.
Pleasure, the word just rolled off the tongue, almost like a cat unfurling itself and stretching lazily, purring as it spots some new distraction.
Burn, more akin to an explosion, though with the same purring quality, it flooded into his ears a lot more passionately than pleasure did, filled his mind with images, tortorous landscapes with dark...
She found the key on the internet.
It seemed silly, a little, to buy a physical and tangible thing like that to open up a locked trunk in a dream. But it was necessary, she was sure. She'd been trying to get into the trunk in the bedroom of the house of doors - the house she returned to over and over again in her lucid dreams - for years. For as long as she could remember.
The trunk, solid and wooden, banded with brass and locked. It was impenetrable. She'd tried peering through the keyhole, picking the lock, everything....
Atop a ferris wheel the poor anxious squirrel found himself above the world far far away from the comfort of his tree and pile of nuts. As the wheel spun behind him, Mr. Squirrel ran ahead trying to keep up as he felt with every turn he would fall. As he lost ground he noted ascending higher and farther away from the ground. 'A telephone pole... a cable... a branch?' he thought could perhaps bring him to safety. When suddenly a gush of wind caused his tiny claws to slip across the rusty painted metal and he slipped. Falling, falling,...
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...
"Now, tell me again," said the attractive blond in the black-rimmed glasses, "why do you think you're a super villain?"
Her patient sighed. He was draped across her leather couch, one hand hanging limp over its side, grazing the lush carpet as though it was soft grass.
The therapist chewed on her pencil and waited.
"How many times do I have to tell you?" he said. "I'm a scientist. I come from a long line of super villainy, and it's up to me to keep up the family reputation." He turned on his side to gaze at her. "Have I...