The elephant dragged it's feet leaving sandy clouds of gritty dust in its wake. Behind the elephant a group of half naked woman shook their tambourines and threw spectacular colours of powder around. The colours merged like a flour rainbow. I wondered where my mother had gone and imagined that she had been swallowed up in this multi coloured whirlwind.
I needn't have worried. There she was bending over the twin tub, her hair scraped back, her muscular arms winding the mangle in a slow, precise action. She turned to me and smiled. My heart leapt. She very rarely smiled....
"Wait, so he hit you?"
We had been over the story several times by now, as Carl sat down bringing a fresh round of amber colored liquid in pint glasses.
I ignored his question as I tried to figure out if this was another IPA or something different.
"Yes," I said, snapping back to reality.
"Damn dude, that fucking sucks," Carl said taking a sip of his beer.
I shook my head in agreement. Took a sip. It was the IPA. Damn that is a good beer.
"Yeah, he just snapped after I told him he was being an asshole...
The teacher looked at her students and said, "You will not make it."
"You will not be the next R&B star, a famous football or basketball player. You will not become the next Snookie or The Situation. You will not be discovered as a famous model/artist/musician/actress/fill in the blank after a year of struggle in New York City, where you went to 'find yourself.' You will not write the next great American novel. You will not become a billionaire."
The students threw bullets with their eyes that screamed a silent defiance. How dare you?
"You are going to need to...
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...
So close, yet so far. Matey the Pirate never understood the phrase until these last few days of his life. The woodpecker would get closer and closer to the nub that was left of his leg, chipping away at the wooden peg that was left. He had to make it to shore. The ship was not going to last. The gapping hole in the bottom was filling the ship with too much water. This all meant that Matey would have to float to shore. Alone, he had not enough buoyancy to make it. In such a situation he though could...
I woke up hung over, my head throbbing. It felt like mini-jackhammers were destroying my frontal lobe, something I am sure the Scotch took care of last night.
The room was unfamiliar, but I had seen it plenty of times laid out in some IKEA or Sears catalog. I was on the bed with an Oak, maybe Maple, night-stand next to it. The room smelled, not good or bad, just different from my bedroom. Clothes covered the floor in front of the closet, where I suddenly saw my pants. A desperate roll to my side brought back the mini-jackhammers.
The...
Eternal life.
That's what he'd promised, wasn't it?
Jane didn't know the tall, dark-haired man who had approached her late that night. He appeared as if an apparition as she exited the lonely subway terminal on the way home from an excruciating double shift.
He had spoken just two words. Eternal life. It was a dreamlike declaration - not quite a question, not a statement, just a whisper. But that was impossible.
She had looked at him with a mix of fear and curiosity before shaking her head and walking briskly up the dimly lit staircase. Just before walking into...
I counted the Braille dots on the "DOWN" button for the 43rd time.
Then I counted them for the 44th time.
And the 45th time...
No longer satisfied with simply counting the dots themselves (there are always 18), I was now counting my counts, which, at least, were never the same, though always increasing.
Have you ever been stuck in an elevator? Neither have I. I am inexperienced with this. I don't know what I'm supposed to do while stuck in an elevator. I don't know what other people do when stuck in an elevator. I don't know what Jesus...
It comes from fearing science.
In America of 2025, the faithful had won. No one believed in evolution. No one believed in vaccination. No one believed in soap.
The foreign countries had taken to calling them "Potatoes" because they were white under the thick film of dirt that comes from refusing to wash.
The potatoes were in a panic. Some potato, venturing beyond his or her front door, with a long lost telescope discovered in a storage room, had pointed it at the sky and seen something move. Watching further, the potato did a bit of empirical deduction and derived...
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...