Kenya. She said her name was Kenya.
And then she laughed. I couldn't hear it, not over the music in the bar, not over the shouting of everyone around us. But I saw the laugh, starting in her stomach, and traveling up and out of her mouth.
She leaned closer and said that her parents had grown up with Black Power and Africa awareness, and decided to name her Kenya. That they had grounded her the first time she straightened her hair.
Her voice, the part of her voice I could hear, had a huskiness to it that really appealed...
I know, I know, there's a million things I need to do. Every day, a million things. Check this, talk to him, to her. Don't forget to fill this out. Drive there, don't forget. Get it right the first time so you don't lose more time doing it twice. Or worse.
Only at the end of the day, is it legal to relax. Only when the world is on half-time, lunch break, dinner break, time out, penalty box.
The sun is one big green light for everyone. You can't stop when the world is go.
If I didn't want to...
One person shouldn't be able to change your life forever. I think we all know people who have been affected outside of their control - torture, rape, molestation... it's a little fucked up to put love in the same category, isn't it?
Maybe the crucial difference is that it's a sweet anguish. That's why I feel sick to my stomach, I can't sleep at night, my conscious is fixated on one person and one event. It makes me smile when I don't feel like crying. This seems like such a high school thing. Aren't those the cuts that make the...
They where here again, this phonebox that they grew up at. There youth had been spend trying to understand the system inside the box. Exploreing what a telephone is, how it work and how it charges you. Now they where back, Johan the older sibbling had decided he wanted to have this phone on exhibit in his new apartment.
So they went to work, together. He and his brother that shared that interest for technological system that was there childhood. Together they pried it off the wall at the same time talking about all the memorys of exploreing the telephone...
The border. He had. To find. The border. He'd made this trip a hundred times before and each time the damn thing moved. When he thought of it - if he thought of it at all - he imagined it as some kind of mystical shimmering veil. Except you couldn't actually see it. Couldn't map it. It might be there with the next step or it could take a thousand more and he never knew which it would be. He was pretty sure he'd been walking straight for it but... had he just been circling? Was he even heading in...
The sepia girl smiled at me as I tucked her photograph back into my wallet.
I'd found it several years ago, inside a book in a box on a table at a garage sale. I hadn't ended up buying anything from the sale, but I'd taken the photo. I suppose you could say it was stealing, but I've never thought about it that way.
She seemed lonely. I was just taking her from a life spent between pages on the Ottoman Empire, with me. I travel a lot, and a part of me wanted her to see the world.
I...
The cold bit at her toes. Pulling them to her body, she peered over the top of her blanket. The world was beginning to come alive. People hurried on there way to work, lights flickering on across the pale grey skies.
It was an odd time of day; it brought with it relief and pain. She was glad of the sound, the sights of other people. The nights grew monotonous, full of nothing. Every minute seemed like hours, every hour like days as nothing but black emptiness stretched out before her. As day broke, cutting through the darkness, she often...
Dispossessed
All he had to his name was this park bench, and not even that.
As he sat and gazed off into the distance, he contemplated his fate. He'd lost his job, then his home, then his family. Nothing was left to him, not even his body that lay six feet under rotting in a pauper's grave. His spirit sat on the bench that the shelter had dedicated to his memory. Suicide had not ended his suffering. Dispossessed of everything he had held dear, he contemplated getting his life back.
His ex-wife stood looking at the bench, at his name...
He sat in the truck parked on the gravel drive, his arm hanging out the window, a cigarette dangling from his finger. The radio was on and Bon Jovi's Bed of Roses was blaring.
She watched him from the behind the closed screen door.
He lowered the visor so she wouldn't be able to see his reddened eyes. Def Lepard's Pour Some Sugar On Me came on next, and he tweaked the volume nob. He could tell she was still looking at him.
He finished his cigarette and flicked it out the window. He took a long drink from the...
Peasants. That's what I thought when I looked out the window. Nothing but peasants on the street below. Uneducated people. I watched as one of them gave birth. Immediately, she put her baby in a tree. There was a bees' nest there and the bees stung the baby. Even from up here I could hear the baby scream. The baby fell out of the tree. I think it broke a leg because it didn't move after that. The baby just cried and screamed and ate fig newtons. It bled too. A lot.
Slowly, I ate my Almond Joy bar.
Gweedo,...