It was midnight on the roof,the stars bright and shining, the moon full and gleaming. Sat up there alone I contemplated my own existence. As this speck in the whole tapestry of existence, can my life have meaning? Will I be able to understand all that life presents to me?
These questions plagued my mind for a few minutes, turning over slowly whilst I search for any answer, to questions I knew would be impossible to find one for. In the tranquility of the night, the mind often wanders to such matters. Within the idea of the unknowable, is the...
It's midnight and we're sitting on the roof and your hand is on my knee and I'm leaning my head on your shoulder and you're saying something about the stars, about how bright they are, about how they look the same on the other side of the world, something cliche like that. But they don't, do that? I hear a door slam from somewhere inside and I can feel you flinch. You're not supposed to be here, I guess. You think I've got someone else, but I don't. He broke up with me yesterday morning, on the front lawn as...
Mannequin legs hanging from the wall. Nailed by the heels, they create the effect of being suspended in space. I don't know why I did it, but somehow, they comfort me being there, detached from all body and context, the pink ballet shoes seamlessly blending into the leggings and the beige wall. This is my world, this is the inside of my mind - a single flat line, drab, unstimulating. Seeing more vibrant colors, seeing the artificiality of "beauty," seeing a well-crafted world - nothing makes me more angry. My nothing is a word unto itself.
Ben and Jessica are...
He sat in the truck parked on the gravel drive, his arm hanging out the window, a cigarette dangling from his finger. The radio was on and Bon Jovi's Bed of Roses was blaring.
She watched him from the behind the closed screen door.
He lowered the visor so she wouldn't be able to see his reddened eyes. Def Lepard's Pour Some Sugar On Me came on next, and he tweaked the volume nob. He could tell she was still looking at him.
He finished his cigarette and flicked it out the window. He took a long drink from the...
Set down the light
set it down anywhere
The pure clean of a random weeknight on the coach staring at the white ceiling. So many balls in the air so much that I can not control. I have given control to others.
It is my human condition.
I will set this ball here on this perfectly lit field. Void of trouble. Maybe someday I will throw it to you and wonder, as I lay here in this white clean apartment,
will you throw it back?
I looked at the passport, and then back up at the woman standing in front of me.
"Are you serious?" I asked, a puzzled look on my face.
She looked sad.
"What is to be funny?" she said, her broken English somehow endearing.
"I don't know how they do things in..." I turned her passport over, and looked at the country name listed. It took up three lines, and many of the letters just looked like squiggles to me. "...your home country, but over here we do things differently."
"Is me!" she smiled, and I felt my tough exterior melting...
The words hovered beneath my glowing finger, power incarnate. I lifted the text, spinning it lazily in the air, before hurling the curse at the image of my nemesis.
The photo I had ripped from the backcover of her book dissolved, dripping onto the table, her face hideously deformed, the black ink staining the tablecloth beneath.
"She thinks she can write horror," I said, the deathly silence of the basement swallowing my words. "She doesn't know what horror is." I smiled. "Yet."
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 drugs were beginning to wear off. Minute by minute the butterflies, those glorious, evanescent, friendly butterflies, were fading. She pressed the earpiece of her headphones to her ear. Pink Floyd were sounding like a noisy nightmare. As she gazed out across the valley, with its endless vista of trees, trees and more trees, she came down to earth with a bump. She should get back to work - artificial props might give her a brief respite, but she had a deadline to meet and a quota to make. Sighing, she pressed stop and slipped her headphones down round her...
(To read Part 3, follow this link: http://sixminutestory.com/stories/somewhere-better-part-3.)
"Choose as you please," said Someone Good. "Surrender to the breeze, or fight for control. Which do you value: predictability, or potential. The known and the now, or the unknown, the good?"
As the air whipped in gusts around her, gripping her, twisting her, she struggled. Within herself, she wrestled for a choice. Would she allow herself to be carried up by these winds of change?
Somehow she knew that this was a defining moment. It was here, in the borderlands of Somewhere Better, that she could either fight her way back...