"Travel light."
"But take everything with you."
A murmur of confusion ran across the gathered crowd.
"That will only slow us down!" The young man who had been such a cool head through all of their troubles spoke firmly, with an authority far greater than his age would normally have allowed.
"We can't allow them to find anything which they could use against us." The town drunk retaliated. Or at least, that was all he had been, until the shadow began to cross the land and the war drums had begun to beat once more, since then, he had been...
The water was clear but her conscience was not.
Carla gazed into the crystal goblet's depths, the sparkling liquid reflecting the sunlight that filtered through the kitchen's old fashioned windows. It was one of the things that originally attracted them to the old, refurbished barn. The glass irregular, thicker at the bottom, letting the natural light unevenly through its depths, like the sun seen from underwater.
Carla smiled at the memory. They had been happier then. Happy and in love and carefree, despite the financial uncertainty of starting a new life together. But they had scrimped and saved for their...
They were listening.
That's what my mother always told me when I enquired about the two men sitting on the bench in the park.
Every Tuesday we would find them there, sitting as still as statues, seemingly staring straight ahead. My mother told me that they were blind and that that was why they never seemed to be looking at anything in particular.
She said that they listened so much because they couldn't see; that they took in double as much information through their ears. They were drinking in the sounds of children playing and dogs barking and couples walking...
Sasha stretched as she woke, the cold early morning air stinging her skin. Looking around, it took a moment to figure out where she was. The woodland near the playing fields. She had never come out this far before. She should hurry back before anyone realised she was missing. There was no way she was going back to see Dr Williams again. He gave her the creeps. There wasn't anything wrong with her anyway. She knew her parents despaired at her stories, but they weren't just stories. Why couldn't they see that? They were every bit as real as she...
I had to bind myself together. I could feel pieces of me falling away, an arm, my left toe, my sense of grace under pressure. My lips struggled to speak as my tongue became unattached, my teeth loosened in my gums. My heart threatened to beat itself right out of my body, and I feared that it actually would.
The curse of unbeing is a cruel one indeed. I thought this as I wound the linen around my eyes, working to keep them in my skull. I wondered what I could have done to anger someone of such great power....
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...
Majestic words like maelstrom, preponderance, warbling swirl through my creative whirlpool, pulling in pieces of conversation, tail-ends of admonitions, the lilt of swearing. I live by the calendar, fitting my days into the squares, x'ing the boxes at midnight.
Friday is the wave that crashed but hasn't withdrawn to the sea. I'll compose this in the spiked surf.
The contours of her form were clear under the light shining through my window. She was laying there nude on my couch as I drew her. My eyes, flicking back and forth from the paper to her. My hand, gliding wildly across the paper in motions similar to a snake whipping it's way across a desert. I had asked her to model for me. Not because I have a crush on her. Not because I'm trying to date her. But because her body is so gorgeous. It flows with every move she makes, twisting and bending and flowing. She lays...
Lange onboard sweating it out, Lange onboard getting cold grits, Lange in his bunk in those pitiful few hours to himself when he could think on his home, on the vast seas between him and it. Reciting lines--fragments--from those books his sister Rachel used to read aloud. The carousing above over and only flatulence angry growling left over.
And when the crew came alongside the _Steadfast_, and murdered the husband in plain sight of the wife and the girl, whom they took below, Lange mopped blood and chummed the sea with the husband's body for the sharks. It was then...
The sky was blue, the grass was green and the little clouds were as fluffy as the picture in a child's reading book. All was well with the world. And on her swing, she could see above the park, above the neat hedges and the flowering bushes. She could, as she swung higher still, see over the row of terraced houses and into the street beyond. Over the flowering cherry trees and the neat gardens with their blossoming plants, over the heads of the middle class and middle aged gardeners and housewives and shoppers and busy bodies of the suburban...