They gathered in the woods, but that was not enough to save them, as they were mistaken for trees, cut down and shipped to a lumber mill.
One of them was fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be made into thick planks; most of the rest were sadly torn apart into sawdust and mulch. But that one continued to live, in great pain, as he was violently sawed and assembled into a large, polished grandfather clock.
They attached to him some cold, foreign bits of metal that moved jarringly. The ticking of the gears against his aching frame was unceasing; day...
"Oh god. Oh god, oh god, oh god. I think there's something underneath the bed."
Jacob sighed, rolling over and twisting the blankets in an infuriating fashion. "Anna, you're twenty-five years old. Don't you think you're a little old for this?" Of course, he would say that.
Anna twisted the blankets right back. Blankets were protection. Blankets were life. If she were covered with the blankets and Jacob were not, the rules dictated that Jacob would be eaten and Anna would be spared. Everyone knew that. But Jacob wouldn't let this go without a quarrel.
"Jesus, Anna! I'm cold! It's...
I'm in love with a robot, thats all there is to it. When his parents tell him how to live his life, where to go to college, where to work, even when to go on dates, he just goes along with it. He makes me so upset sometimes. I know that he has brilliant ideas and knows exactly what he wants to do with his life, and yet he lets others decide everything for him. If only he would stand up for himself. I know who he really is. He is wonderfully funny, incredibly smart, and full of ambition. But...
Heather had never found her talent.
The smallest amount of knitting made her arms feel like they'd fall from her shoulders. Her paintings looked like they'd been crafted by a toddler. Even decoupage, just gluing paper onto things to decorate them, seemed beyond her reach; in every project the images were wrinkled and unattractive. What was she doing wrong? Time and time again she struggled to release her creative genius, the one she had been told lived inside each and every person, but evidently she preferred to stay hidden deep inside.
Standing on the bridge, she watched the churning waters...
Wow. The Statue of Liberty. I've lived in New York my whole life, and have personally seen it one time, and it's on my I heart NY credit card, of course. I played the Statue of Liberty once in a 5th grade play about America. I was "Miss Libby" and I sang about inflation. "The Red White and Blues" my song was called. I was 11. I wasn't a very great singer, but my teacher had great faith in me, as did my mother. There's a VHS tape of it somewhere, I do know that. Only once, though, have I...
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...
The drugs were beginning to wear off. Minute by minute the butterflies, those glorious, evanescent, friendly butterflies, were fading. She pressed the earpiece of her headphones to her ear. Pink Floyd were sounding like a noisy nightmare. As she gazed out across the valley, with its endless vista of trees, trees and more trees, she came down to earth with a bump. She should get back to work - artificial props might give her a brief respite, but she had a deadline to meet and a quota to make. Sighing, she pressed stop and slipped her headphones down round her...
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,...
”Beware the Bwgan Fawr.” the old Vicar sighed. “Every chapel has to have its ‘Ysbryd capel’…”
“Its chapel ghost?” the younger clergyman replied. His pronunciation was still more ‘gog’, more Northern, than the man he was replacing felt comfortable with. Too… foreign. If such a phrase could be used for a fellow Welshman.
A shame, his body was found the morning after his first Midnight Mass. Just outside the chapel door, lying as if it had carried a great weight across the threshold, and then collapsed with the release of his burden. A heart attack, they said. Strange in someone...
In hindsight, the solution was obvious. It always was, that was the glory of hindsight. And it wasn't so bad when you didn't have someone crowing at you, not quite saying "I told you so" but thinking it very loudly indeed.
She wasn't sure why she put up with him. Twenty-something years they'd been friends. You got less for murder (she'd thought about it - not for long, but it had still crossed her mind). He was cocky and insufferable, and the best friend she'd ever had.
Very irritating, the way these things seemed to dovetail together so neatly.
They'd...