There's nothing like a few moments watching television while eating popcorn and drinking lemonade. Kelly absolutely loves watching television.
Unfortunately, she works second shift and misses a lot of her favorite primetime shows. Thank God for TiVo, right?
Right.
She can fast forward between comercials, record anything she likes and relive all her funny, tear jerking, pulse racing moments at the click of a button. So long as she has the room on her beloved TiVo, Kelly can rule the world.
Right now, she just wants to pause. All that lemonade and popcorn from the begining is starting to catch...
Captive. Surrounded by watr, the woman could not breathe, could not fight, could not even open her eyes. Her waist was bound and her feet were weighted and she was sinking. Soon to be erased.
The man in the boat had asked her one last question before he rolled her out. Now, sinking like a parachuter, she did not think about her little boy at home, or her parents (they would be so sad), or all the things she would leave behind. No. Her last moments, the last grains of sand in her proverbial hourglass, and Mari was thinking about...
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...
"I have something to tell you."
These are not words you want to hear from your girlfriend when you first walk in the door after a late night at work. Still, Lewis tried to stay calm, tried not to let his imagination get ahead of him. He sat down at the formica kitchen table, looking up at Sadie. She was actually wringing her hands. He thought that only happened in stories. A long pause...
"Well, honey? What is it? You're making me kind of nervous here."
"I know, I know. I'm sorry. I just... Ok. Here goes. I'm... I'm a...
With fifteen minutes until the start of the hearing, a bagel stop was inadvisable. The queue for the espresso machine was exactly as long as usual, and the trainee behind the counter should have stuck with the chai order. His bladder screamed in that unmistakably shrill screech added urgency to an already pressing situation. "Ignored again! Be better if I was free trade, huh" When an onion bagel and a cafe con leche appear on the counter there is only one choice to be made. As he pays a skinny fallow skinned sidles up to him and opines, "You was...
I thought she was made of china, the first time I met her. Girls that perfect didn't exist, only dolls. Frozen icons of perfection, unattainable.
She made me feel clumsy - she was slight, small, pale, hiding behind perfect ringlets. On paper we sound the same - the same could be said of me (apart from the ringlets; my hair is straight, limp) but she wore it with pride, I treated my height as a disability, my weight as an inconvienience, my skintone a health hazard. I looked sickly, she looked ethereal.
Somehow it wasn't a surprise when she spoke...
She didn't look at him.
"So that's my answer, is it?" He stared at her, hoping, praying for - well, anything. Any kind of response. A show of emotion.
She didn't look at him.
"Fine. If - if that's how it is, if that's - fine." He wanted the weight to lift from his shoulders, now that he knew the truth, he wanted something to happen, some kind of change - he wanted to feel something.
There was nothing. He was numb. He wasn't even angry, he just felt cold.
"So I'll be going then."
Her back was to him...
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...
She'd have preferred the electric chair, at least that one bloody moved. She could get up a good speed on that one, maybe she could get out of it, escape their sympathetic looks. It was bad enough losing the power in your legs without their condescending looks. Idiots.
Apparently it was a "power chair", but, frankly, bollocks to that. Jokingt that she was living out a death sentence was one of her few pleasures left - that terror in their eyes, the "oh god how do we respond to that" was what she was living for right now.
Actually, that...
I used to feel like a bird in flight
I would cut between the trees
and see the clouds from upside-down
I would pull up to the top
of skyscrapers and hop
along their ledges
My silhouette against the moon
My reflection in the harbor
Yeah, I used to feel like a bird in flight...