Time stopped the moment I recognized the driver. I clenched my fists and stepped back onto the curb but the car screeched to a stop and I knew he'd recognized me.
I could have run back into a building, found an exit into an alley. Instead I bolted into the middle of the street and froze on the crosswalk. My eyes met the driver's and I heard as if from a distance the honking horns and screams of cars and people.
My throbbing pulse sent cold pumps of blood through my body and my skin prickled, and my clothes dampened...
I'm lost.
The corn fields turned into and endless turning of green upon green, and I couldn't run because the leaves had become blades.
I've stopped walking. I've stopped screaming. Screaming only made me thirsty, and I even tried tearing a corn leaf to pieces to suck on something, anything. I tried to pull an ear and when I pulled the leaves back, a handful of black ear wigs fell onto my lap, pincher butts spread wide. I wiped them off and ran.
Something cut my upper arm.
I lay now, staring at the sky, it's gone from gray to...
The conversation lasted two words: Alright? ...Yeah
It wasn't groundbreaking, it wasn't revolutionary, it wasn't even poetry, but it was all they needed to say.
They had been the best of friends once, closer than brothers. George had had his own room at Jack's house, Jack had had his own shelf in George's fridge. But somewhere along the way, they had lost that.
Was it because Lissy, George's ex-girlfriend had hated Jack, was it because of the fact that Jack went off to uni while George stayed in their hometown, or had it merely been because of the fact that...
This is not what Steve had in mind when he signed up to test the virtual reality technology at work. Not at all. He thought it would be unicorns farting rainbows. But this was ridiculous.
The scenes were patterned after video games. Not because the team wasn't creative, but because that meant the testers didn't need to take the time to learn the rules of a new environment.
Steve had pulled Super Mario Bros. from the lot. Except there was a fatal flaw in the technology. Enemies didn't die, they just disappeared for a bit. Then they came back with...
Fred wanted the puppets. He wanted all the puppets, man. If Fred couldn't have puppets, he'd be a miserable SOB. All he could ever think about was puppets. He wore his socks on his hands. That's how much he loved puppets.
So when he saw the Punch and Judy set on ebay, he knew he had to act. Problem was: Sylvester Stallone was coming over for lunch. He'd slaved for hours over the meal (pickles on rye bread. And figs.) He wanted to impress Sylvester Stallone with stories of how he rubbed Cheez Whiz into the hair of his buttocks,...
"Wow, that was a fun."
"Yeah, it was."
Water dripped on the floor as they ran through the house and out onto the deck watching the lightning. It scared her at first but then it was like she had never seen anything so beautiful and menacing. Except perhaps her 8th grade Science teacher, Mr. Hanson. He was an odd man, with a thick black unibrow and wrinkles that resembled an old cartographer's first attempt at the East Coast of South America. He had a sinister laugh, not unlike the thunder shaking the ground under her feet.
She remembers thinking he...
(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...
The world is a thin, hollow place.
One wrong step, and you break through the shell, and you go tumbling, tumbling down.
It is oft repeated to students that an exam is not the be all and end all in their lives, that many opportunities await all in this bountiful land of plenty.
These words are reassuring, it gives hope, and puts your life into place in comparison to all the many other people in the world, with no opportunity to even sit an exam. In some ways, it makes you feel lucky for your high, pedestalled position.
Until you...
The moon would never be the same again.
It was three years ago, and she had just gotten off work. She worked late back then, and she stared up at the black sky and pondered herself.
"Who am I?" she whispered aloud, to nobody in particular.
She realized that over the years, she'd put herself into a box. Everything about her, from her work habits, to her social life, even down to her gender identity, were in effort to be normal.
As she stared at the bright circle that stood out against the sky, she realized that being different from...
Capriciously, I repudiated the sky and all its lighting and thunder, snow and rain, and changing colors.
The paradigm wasn't there. Or was it?
Well, if it wasn't and if it were grounded by gravity, then so many Big Things are just frivolous.
Like love.
And losing a lover.
And even being born here, gasping for breath at first, and fighting through a mob just to climb some ranks and "make it." And those were the Big Things, too.
The paradigm here can't hold such Big Things if it was made to only hold such small, ambiguous entities like eating,...