I think it's number nine. Eight maybe. All I know is my face is slightly tingled.
"Another," she asks as she walks past me.
I give an affirming nod. She has to know I am nearing my limit, but I have learned to play this off well.
"You had the Green Line, right?"
I nod again.
The Cubs are on, and they are losing. Nothing new there.
A couple sits in the corner talking about important couple things.
Two friends sit the right of me, discussing how much their lives and the Cubs suck.
The glass ends up in front...
"What is a pension, anyway?"
She stared at him. "How do you not know what a pension is?"
He shuffled his feet, not looking at her. He mumbled something indistinct about not really having to worry about that sort of thing, what with his family, and the fortune (the fortune was probably now lining the public purse, or possibly a lawyer's office, depending on the outcome of the court case)
There were times when she felt the gap between them more than others. She took his hand - now wasn't the time to start comforting, there was no time for...
Travel light, but take everything with you. They were father's last words to me before he took my mother and sister down the wooded trail opposite mine and my brother's.
The cossacks had burned our village to the ground an hour ago, and he told us we had to flee into the woods, where they would have more trouble finding us.
When I was young, we used to play in the forest, so I knew it well. I would take my young brother Sasha to a lake a few hours' hike from here, that the cossacks don't know about.
I...
It wasn’t a specific look, or anything she said exactly. It was the things she didn’t do that gave it away. The way that she didn’t automatically include me in the conversation, the way she didn’t look to me when something funny happened, the way she didn’t move up to get more space but stayed, leg pressed against mine, reminding me that she was there.
All the instincts we’d developed about one another over the many years we had been friends were now kicking into gear and compensating for all the things we couldn’t say, not with all these people...
"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...
"I hate you! Get out of my face!"
Wow. That's just the way any teenage girl wants to start her day: the most popular guy in school declares in front of the entire gym class that he hates her guts.
Well, that's just the story of my life these days. Everyone who's anyone hates me. As if to emphesize that point, a red ball crashes into my face, knocking off my glasses.
"Simmons! You're out!" the gym teacher's voice echoes though the gym.
So, I go settle on the bleachers with the rest of the people out of the most...
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...
Travel light, but take everything with you. Words that my grandmother used to say in wisdom. And words that I've never take to heart till now. The twister ripped though our neighborhood and everything I owned was taken with it. My Children and wife stand now where our Kitchen was. With a heavy sigh, I remember those words my Grandmother used to say, I truly have all I need standing in the kitchen.
”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...
You can count me out.
You can count me out.
How many times do I have to say it? Count me out of your scheme. I have no desire for riches, fame, or even immortality. Just life.
That's all I want. Just to live my life. My peaceful, ordinary life. And the only way I can do that is for you to count me out of this.
I wish you'd make the same choice, but as things stand, you had a good life.
Well, a decent life.
Oh, who am I kidding? When you meet Beelzebub, try not to give...