"She'd have preferred the electric chair," Melanie said.
A half grin sat on her lips as she stirred the crinkle fry in the ketchup far longer than anyone stirs crinkle fries in ketchup.
"You know when they were discovering the electric chair, they would like pay kids to bring in stray dogs and cats to electrocute to get the voltage just right," Beloved said.
"That's horrible," Melanie replied and she dropped the crinkle fry. "Why would you say that?"
"They finally tested it on an elephant!" Beloved said.
"Wait, who is they?" Melanie asked. She lifted her nose in the...
Sadie didn't believe Mother when she told her it would be a greater adventure than the ones she entertained in the garden. Mother squeezed her, kissed her cheek, and they all laughed once upon the summit. The air was so cold and dry it cracked the skin of her cheeks and it chapped her lips, yet it felt thin and clean, like the waters from the stream.
The ladies breathed heavily, hands on their lower backs, stays pinching them into a dazed sort of happiness. The men gallantly offered arms for them to lean on.
They lingered a bit longer...
"I want grandchildren."
"I know, ma. But, I'm just not ready for-"
"-Did I ask you what you're ready for?" ma interrupted me, once again. "I'm old, lonely and in need of grandchildren. As my only child, you owe me that."
I closed my eyes and sighed heavily. Why? Why does my mother torture me so? "Listen, I really do have to-"
"-When are you going to get a man?"
"Mother!"
"Don't act surprised. You're 28. You've never had a steady boyfriend. The girls in my book club are starting to wonder about you."
Embarassment covered me from head to...
dear bobo,
happy birthday! i am sorry i missed it, but i hummed the song for you this morning while we convoyed into the city. i think you're eight now, but it's hard to keep track 'cuz you just seem so big and grown-up each time i see you.
mom tells me you got bit on the neck by a spider the other day and that you haven't been feeling so great. she says maybe you're not having a birthday party this year 'cuz some weird stuff happened when you first tried to go back to school after getting sick....
They gathered in the woods. In ones and twos, hiding in lengthening shadows. None walked there proudly, none stood tall, with their eyes blazing. No. This was a gathering of shame, a coven of the embarrassed and beaten.
It was probably Malachai who spoke first, that devil of lovely hair who had seduced women away from their husbands for centuries. "I think it is long past time that we declare failure." There were many murmurs of agreement, along with a few shouts of disapproval.
Barbastos came next, his red skin oiled and beautiful. He was known for his ability to...
I have come to dread the raven's caw that signals moonrise. It is the dread noise that warns me of worse to come, when I can feel the change come upon me. I beg this of the sun, do not set, do not leave me. Leave me alone with myself and the thing that I carry within me.
This is my anti-aubaude. Leave me with the rest of humanity, walking on two feet. Leave me to tools, to society, to love and all the rest that makes us man. Keep me from hunger, keep me from rage, keep me from...
My mother loved colour. She spent the last weeks of her life in a hospital bed, with its monotone greys and whites. People gave her all kinds of gifts and cards. But her favourite one was a bright purple robe with pink stitching.
That gift was from me. Truth is, I'm more of a tactile person. Yet I knew this was what she craved most--her two favourite colours in the world.
At her funeral, we released balloons in pink and purple. Or, rather, everyone else did. I held onto mine. I wasn't ready to let her go yet.
Today, though,...
"Travel light."
"But take everything with you."
A murmur of confusion ran across the gathered crowd.
"That will only slow us down!" The young man who had been such a cool head through all of their troubles spoke firmly, with an authority far greater than his age would normally have allowed.
"We can't allow them to find anything which they could use against us." The town drunk retaliated. Or at least, that was all he had been, until the shadow began to cross the land and the war drums had begun to beat once more, since then, he had been...
Nothing made sense.
Her eyes ached - the more she studied them, the less the words made sense. The words weren't working, they weren't doing their duty, they were just shapes on the wall. They blurred out of focus - was she just tired, was it her eyes?
Or were the words willfully confusing her? Was it deliberate? A merry dance they were leading her on?
She traced them with her fingertips - that couldn't be right, they were letters carved into the stone, they couldn't shift (ink, she could accept, could flow, could shift, but these were stone words,...
Now, supposedly, if I start out a hundred meters ahead of Achilles, and Achilles is travelling five times faster than me, when he has covered that hundred meters, I will nevertheless have travelled twenty. And when he travels twenty, I will have travelled four. And when he travels that four, I will have traveled .8 meters, and so on and so forth, such that Achilles will never reach me. I win.
But Zeno, the cur, says that, eventually, Achilles overlaps me. "We know it from experience," he tells us. God damn experience! I know that if Achilles is continually arriving...