The anti-grav boots were worth every penny.
Shelly had saved for weeks, mowing lawns, delivering papers, collecting coins from every cushion in the house, to earn enough hard cash to buy them. Her mother had told her not to waste her money, that they were probably just galoshes with springs on the bottom, but the girl refused to be deterred. The magazine ad had proclaimed them anti-grav, and there was a Truth in Advertising law on the books, so they must be the real deal.
And she was right.
But not in the way she thought she would be.
Instead...
The curtains were the safety.
I could never sleep unless the curtains were draped and folded over each other, obscuring the window completely. I could not even take a shower in the evenings, because once the dusk and dark hit I would become convinced that the moment I closed my eyes as I washed my hair, that something.... THE SOMETHING would be staring in at me when I open them.
I believed the curtains hid that same darkness. The moment I pulled the curtains apart I would see The Something.
He laughed at me for that.
I'd buried that fear,...
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,...
she didn't look at him. he had been absolutely horrid. he had simply taken off to the other corner of the world and hadn't even thought to come back and see her first. "Oh, darling. I missed you so much. Sweetheart - is something wrong?" "No - it's nothing." he begged her to tell him what wa wrong. she looked at him with her intense stare. "Why don't you guess? You can't just leave me like that! You said you loved me!" "I do love you.." "If that were true you would have come and seen me before leaving again....
The storm had blown over, but not before it had blown over his ship, along with all of his crew. The captain always went down with the ship, but by the time he woke up from a plank smacking him upside the head, he found himself drifting alone on a plank of wood in the middle of the ocean, no one else in sight. Too late to sacrifice himself to the sea gods now.
As he drifted, he knew shore was near. There were too many birds flying about for it not to be. He just had to hope the...
Thou wanted to enjoy his iced latte
Thou wanted to bring the mood down in this joint
Thou wanted these tourists to be gone
Be gone tourists!
Thou forsakes thee!
Tourists
Poseurs
Wanna bees
Beardos
Thou is the grumbly heart of your demise
Thou is real
Really real
So frightening
So fucking real
Thou is not on tourist maps
Pamphlets
Brochures
Thou will burn away all this fake tourist bullshit
Thou will bring the mood down
in
this
joint
"This is your fault," his wife said to him. If you would just put your mother in her place I wouldn't have to and we wouldn't be fighting right now.
He replied loudly, "My fault? How is it my fault she's nosy? She doesn't mean anything by it anyway. You don't have to be such a bitch about every little thing."
"Oh. My. God. Seriously?" She was on a roll now. "It's your fault she's so nosy because you never say anything at all to her when she crosses a line. And once again, I wouldn't have to be such...
There once was a house that no child or adult dared enter, the house was known to be haunted. Even though that the house was haunted, it always seemed to look neat on the outside but it was rumored that it was haunted inside. Everyone knew not to go into that house, except this one child, Annie. Annie was a young girl who had wavy brown hair and big eyes. Annie didn't believe that the house was haunted, so one day she set off to go look through the house, she knew if her parents found out about what she...
We wrote a song for the silver trees. The streetlamps gathered underneath the bridge to hear us. Our band played. Others milled. The night was soft. The river was a metronome.
We wrote a song for the silver trees.
Sylvia wasn't sure she should have been there, never higher than 3rd chair in the symphony, but the viola was for her and her alone. I loved it when she tilted her neck just so. The chains glinting silver in the groaning of the streetlamps.
This was a song for her neck.
We wrote it in a hurry, gathering musicians out...
Drudgery of the everyday. There's really nothing else to explain it. Banality of sadism. John, standing at the dump, Alka Seltzer pill wrapped in a piece of bologna for the birds. Has he ever thought what a bird might feel while its innards explode? That's not really the point. He wants to know if it can work. If he can leave a wake of destruction with nothing but everyday objects.
He watches the bird gulp down the bologna and retake flight. He sees it hesitate, and pop, it falls from the air, guts hanging out of its mouth.
Adam, working...