Leonard stumbled back. He almost fell. His heart raced and sweat stuck his shirt to his belly and back and armpits. He'd had patients worse off than Bea, patients with bloody ends, with pointless existances, tortured creatures that lived and died hooked to electricity and strapped to beds. None with the relative safety and comforts that he'd been treating Bea in, the comfort of home.
This was a scheduled meeting in the garden, she'd come from the trees, barefoot, bare arms, makeup garishly applied and with the gauzy veil over her face. His boy would laugh, he imagined, would point...
I have seen lesser gods dancing on my street. I have asked for their names.
Come again?
The water for the tea is boiling. I hope you don't mind, but I need to leave. I hope you don't mind. I really hope you don't mind. I will stay, I will continue this conversation, but you can't hold it against me.
You don't believe me.
I have heard the wind patter the leaves at my doorstep like the footsteps of tree children playing.
I am nowhere near death. Why do you ask?
This is not about dying.
I have wanted to...
We are made of fluff and light.
We are made for a continuing struggle to come together in our floating.
When I fell in the garden and you laughed I knew it was not from cruelty, I knew because we are the same you and I. Unable to keep out the beauty that is the terrible world.
We whisper the standing wave form that is the one true light.
We will collapse back upon ourselves and drift into the unrecognizable dawn.
But today
My love
We will kiss with muddy knees and full laughing hearts, and God will smile.
Waves. The sound was the first thing she noticed. She had to be somewhere near the ocean. She took a moment to register her immediate situation. Her right hand grasped a jutting piece of rock, and her left held tight to a thick branch that had somehow taken root in the cliff face. Her feet rested on a narrow ledge of rock that was no more than a few inches. She was thankful for her small feet, which her mother used to say were her best attribute.
She had to be at least 20 feet up. The ocean was too...
She could tell I was faking it. My smile felt wrong, though no one else knew. She knew. A glance at the priest standing before us revealed that he was none the wiser to my feelings. But she could tell, I know she could. She stood there, hands grasping mine, tears shining in her eyes, a wide grin stretched across her face. Was she faking it, too? I was panicked this morning, knowing that I was to be married in a few hours. Maybe she felt the same. My calm facade got me through the waiting, but I was nervous...
I met him on the beach. He sat, fully clothed, legs ajar with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth, ash dropping sullenly, almost petulantly into the faded crotch of his blue jeans. His eyes were a-glaze, his raybans askew and he hadn’t seem to notice me sitting down beside him.
It was night. Behind us various Reggaeton tunes blared from various speakers, set outside the rows and rows of cocktail shacks at the side of the beach, all selling cheap and strong and just how we liked to drink it. The sky was jet and pinpricked with...
In hindsight, the solution was obvious. Of course it was. It always is. But at the time it seemed like an impossible thing, a thing that would never be solved. A thing that would haunt her and taunt her forever and ever amen.
The crossword in Mrs Grey’s daily paper may not, to others,especially perhaps her husband, have seemed like much of an importance, but to her it was everything. It was the thing that, for just an hour or so each day, made her feel clever. It made her feel like a proper human being instead of the tired...
It was cold. Freezing, really. There at the stoop, on the street, glowing in red. Dark, straight hair raking her face. She shivered, stood and walked down the street. To me, this place is foreign. To her, she knows the environment like the stories her mother told her. She walks down the road away from the doorway. Where they threw her out. Spit on her. But now she walks down the road trying to keep warm. She coughs. The shivers shake her again. The cold day drops her onto the street, rejecting her and the brightness of her clothes. The...
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...
She cradled the faun's head. She listened to its soft breath, listened to its complaint, listened its petition. But what could she do? What judgment could she give that would hold in the face of her ever-shrinking kingdom. Every year she shrunk, every year there were more men, and every year there was less.
At night under the moon she called her sisters, who had all once been close, close enough to be one, but now far and spread. They came if they could, sent emissaries if they could not. They talked until the edge of the sun, bloated and...