OK guys. Calm down. Yes, I am standing on the edge of a cliff. No, I am not contemplating suicide.
For a start, my life is worth living. I have a new girlfriend, a great job, an apartment with a mortgage and a loving family. I don't drink and I only smoke after meals.
So, what am I doing here?
I am thinking of my future and of the choices I need to make. Like today, when I phoned my girlfriend (gorgeous, blonde and randy) and she said she thought it was time for commitment. But am I ready 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...
Chaz and Elinor tear-ass through the forest, hands raised ineffectually above heads, sodden shoes slapping on undergrowth, alternately laughing and yelling "Ow. Ow. Ow!"
The hailstorm pelts them from above, chunks of ice the size of large coins, not nickle-and-dimeing today but quartering and Susan B. Anthonying. Chaz gets a Kennedy fiftycent piece to the top of the skull and takes a header, facefirst into the soggy pine needles below.
"I think that one actually trepanned me," he shouts.
"What? Get up!" Elinor hauls him to his feet and they keep running.
The tent, they're sure, is just over this...
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.
He ran into the room, his heart pounding, and his clothes soaking wet.
"I just ate a fire hydrant," he said.
Mom and I were drinking tea by the fire. Now mom's brow furrowed.
"Donald, whatever do you mean?"
Donald peeled up his soaking wet shirt so we could see the hydrant protruding through his skin. I could see flecks of red paint trying to break through the skin above his solar plexus.
Mom went into the kitchen and came back with some pliers.
"We have to remove that hydrant," she said.
She stuck the pliers down his throat and...
There's somebody standing in the corner of my room.
He showed up yesterday. Waltzed in through the front door like he owned the place. Maybe he does, actually. I certainly don't.
I've been here for a couple of months. When the sun's up, I'm usually out doing something else, like fishing in the creek out back, or building a dam with rocks and fallen branches. It passes the time. Every now and then it even gets me something to eat.
But in all my time here, I'd never known anyone to even step off the sidewalk onto the lawn. Never...
I have come to dread the raven's caw that signals moonrise. It is the dread noise that warns me of worse to come, when I can feel the change come upon me. I beg this of the sun, do not set, do not leave me. Leave me alone with myself and the thing that I carry within me.
This is my anti-aubaude. Leave me with the rest of humanity, walking on two feet. Leave me to tools, to society, to love and all the rest that makes us man. Keep me from hunger, keep me from rage, keep me from...
People always said that I was like a coin. I had two sides.
No one really knew what side they were speaking to. I'd always laugh it off and say I as a Gemini by nature. I had two personalities. I had two ways of looking at things. I was two people.
Until one of them died. The happy side. The reasonable side. The rational side. The RIGHT side. For some reason I just stopped being a double act.
What was left was wrong. I am wrong now. Many people had left me when that side died. My sister would...
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...
"Obtain the marionettes!" Fox's tone was commanding.
'Obtain', thought Fred. That was just like Fox: always using a big word when a small word would do. He could have said 'get' instead of 'obtain'. But then, again, Fred's mother had told him 'get' was a terrible word and it should be avoided.
"Are you listening? Did you hear me?" Fox bellowed.
"Sorry. Yes," said Fred. "Get the marionettes."
"Use force if so required."
'Hit the bastards if you need to,' Fred translated to himself. He pummeled his right fist into his left palm to show Fox that he'd understood.
He...