I jumped.
I know it was dumb but at the time I didn't really think I had any other choice. Besides, it's not like I really thought about it. I just did it. Just took that leap. Stepped off the edge without looking down first. He was coming after me and my instinct took over and I am now lying in the bed that I made.
Of course I had the choice of socking that guy at the bar, the one who chased me, the one weighing about 300 pounds and all of that muscle. Of course I could have...
"I think we need to take the Easter eggs back," Gerald said.
Louise looked up from placing an Easter bunny on a table. "Why's that?"
"Because one just hatched."
Louise frowned, crossing the room to where Gerald was coddling a small bird in his hands. She was hoping for some kind of explanation, which proved to be difficult to do when he looked more confused than she did.
"What do you mean," Louise said, rubbing the back of her head, "when you say that it hatched?"
"Well, I was getting some of the eggs out for the hunt, right? And...
We are there. We are in the shadows, in the gaps, in the spaces between words. We are in every moment where you pull away, where discretion replaces narrative, we are there.
We are there in the knowledge that you do not write all things that happen, we are there, waiting in the wings, filling in the gaps, in the spaces.
You did not write us - you never write us, nobody writes us (and who would read us, who would read every banal moment, every second, what soul could stand the painful inevitability of one moment following the next...
He laid back, eyes closed, a smile stretched across his face. Summer never felt so good; the sun beating down made him relaxed, and he felt like he could sprawl out on the grass all day long.
With eyes closed, his mind drifted to summers past, lying on the grass with his dog Buddy after catching a frisbee back and forth. His mind was in another place, somewhere peaceful, simple, romantic even.
A place where the sun rises and sets with beautiful colors, where the grass is plush and Kelly Green. A place where the sailboats against the sunset have...
OK guys. Calm down. Yes, I am standing on the edge of a cliff. No, I am not contemplating suicide.
For a start, my life is worth living. I have a new girlfriend, a great job, an apartment with a mortgage and a loving family. I don't drink and I only smoke after meals.
So, what am I doing here?
I am thinking of my future and of the choices I need to make. Like today, when I phoned my girlfriend (gorgeous, blonde and randy) and she said she thought it was time for commitment. But am I ready for...
Nothing made sense.
Her eyes ached - the more she studied them, the less the words made sense. The words weren't working, they weren't doing their duty, they were just shapes on the wall. They blurred out of focus - was she just tired, was it her eyes?
Or were the words willfully confusing her? Was it deliberate? A merry dance they were leading her on?
She traced them with her fingertips - that couldn't be right, they were letters carved into the stone, they couldn't shift (ink, she could accept, could flow, could shift, but these were stone words,...
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...
”Beware the Bwgan Fawr.” the old Vicar sighed. “Every chapel has to have its ‘Ysbryd capel’…”
“Its chapel ghost?” the younger clergyman replied. His pronunciation was still more ‘gog’, more Northern, than the man he was replacing felt comfortable with. Too… foreign. If such a phrase could be used for a fellow Welshman.
A shame, his body was found the morning after his first Midnight Mass. Just outside the chapel door, lying as if it had carried a great weight across the threshold, and then collapsed with the release of his burden. A heart attack, they said. Strange in someone...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. She shielded her eyes from the flashes of light that arced across the blackened sky, her face soaked with tears, her heart pounding in her chest as the cacophony of noise rattled her skull.
In London, a family huddled together in a corner of their living room, across from the window that had blown itself out from the force of the first impact. They held between them the grandmothers crucifix, praying to their God as if he could save them.
A man stood atop the Eifel...
Taste was one of those things that was meant to be very personal, and yet everyone seemed to recognise bad taste.
The joke may have been ill-timed, but she maintained that it wasn't in "bad taste" - soon finding herself in the minority (one, in fact).
Fine. Fine, fine, fine - he would've laughed, if he'd been there. Then again, him not being there was the entire point.
He would've laughed at that, too.
It was a nice, warm day, and that was ridiculous - funerals were meant to be full of rain and the dark and thunder and the...