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...
"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...
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...
I had been running for just over an hour, almost breathless. Whose idea was it to train for this marathon anyways? I've always liked running, but never really enjoyed it, you know? There are only so many routes you can take. This time, I decided to say screw the concrete jungle, I'm going to take this somewhere different. So I took to the hills, as they say. Not gonna lie, it was much more interesting than running on pavement. The damp grass under my shoes, the crunching of the twigs, all that good stuff. I stopped at the top of...
The teacher looked at her students and said, "You will not make it."
"You will not be the next R&B star, a famous football or basketball player. You will not become the next Snookie or The Situation. You will not be discovered as a famous model/artist/musician/actress/fill in the blank after a year of struggle in New York City, where you went to 'find yourself.' You will not write the next great American novel. You will not become a billionaire."
The students threw bullets with their eyes that screamed a silent defiance. How dare you?
"You are going to need to...
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...
I woke up hung over, my head throbbing. It felt like mini-jackhammers were destroying my frontal lobe, something I am sure the Scotch took care of last night.
The room was unfamiliar, but I had seen it plenty of times laid out in some IKEA or Sears catalog. I was on the bed with an Oak, maybe Maple, night-stand next to it. The room smelled, not good or bad, just different from my bedroom. Clothes covered the floor in front of the closet, where I suddenly saw my pants. A desperate roll to my side brought back the mini-jackhammers.
The...