They were listening. Annette had no problem reading a report in school to a classroom full of students who were busy catching up on homework, drawing doodles, or discreetly pulling out their cellphones when nobody was looking; but this was different.
This was in front of people who'd come voluntarily. People who /wanted/ to hear what she'd written. People who actually enjoyed talking about math in their free time. Weirdos.
And that's what scared Annette. They were listening. If she'd done poorly, they'd actually care. They had a passion for the subject that she'd hated, despite her natural talent. Why,...
”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...
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...
They crouched to peer beneath the stairs. Michelle lay there in a drunken, unconsious heap.
"Ok, how are we going to get her up to bed?" sighed Peter.
"You're going to carry her." said Natasha, flatly.
"No, not again. I didn't move into his houseshare just to spend my Saturday mornings carrying my alchy housemates around". said Peter.
Natasha turned towards Peter and said in a hushed tone, "She's not alcoholic, she's just not over Steven yet".
"He dumped her 2 months ago!"
Suddenly, there was some movement beneath Michelle's still body.
Peter and Natasha peered beneath the stairs again...
blahblah fuck
The children were not at school. Not today with a masked gunman roaming the streets. Everyone was indoors with the doors bolted, probably hiding in closets, attics or basements.
Jess was outside in the sunshine, on the swing. Whooshing high in the air and back down, laughing aloud, breaking the silence, wondering where the helicopters were, the swat cars, armed police.
She felt as though she was the only person left on earth.
Perhaps she was.
That's what the gunman thought when he spotted her long dark hair through the gap in the fence.
He was tired by now, wanted...
The gate closed behind them. That was the last time they would see the outside world for a long time. They had to make a new life for themselves. It would be limited, of course, but you can get used to anything if you have to. Well, it's either that or give up. Josie asked her mother, 'Why are they doing this?' Her mother didn't know the answer. It was just as well. That knowledge would have been enough to turn her very soul black. It would never be suitable for an 8 year old child to hear. They went...
The wires passed from hand to hand in the complex trading ritual. THe boy watched raptly, taking his training with the serious concentration of surgeons and chess-masters.
"You wrapped the wrong red and pulled the wrong green," he noted to his papa in mixed Spanish. The wires were then braided into his hair, the auburn hues mixing with the artificial Christmas tones.
"The day your hair grows out of these strands, you will have all there is to desire in this world. On that day, you may cut these colors and move on to the next."
The tea kettle screamed...
The first few days she hadn't noticed the bars. She'd noticed very little about her surroundings other than that they were wrong. As her head became less fuzzy and she began to understand why they were wrong, that this wasn't where she was supposed to be she tried to learn everything there was to learn about this unfamiliar environment.
It was on the tenth day that she'd counted, that the sun shone for the first time. Whereas it had looked grey and dreary outside, the glowing sunlight made it look full of possibilities. The bars were on the inside of...
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...