I slept inside the dream I didn't spin from yarn
this time inside my dream
i didn't spin another lie within the tale
you never sold to me
I look inside this bed I didn't make
the spell i didn't spin
from yarn inside my dream
I couldn't sell this dream to awakened eyes and ears
and dreams never do
sell themselves well outside the walls inside our hearts
I bake for you but do not eat
I draw for you but do not sell
I sing for you but do not sing
The things and songs from stolen dreams...

Leaving was the easiest decision to make, and the hardest action to take.

They were just sitting there In the box. Helpless.

Helpless was the only word that seemed to match all around. Why wouldn't someone destroy everything in that box. Why wouldn't they be debauched to within an inch of the last bit of everything there ever was?

She was always too soft when it came to things. It's like her house was the place where things came to be rescued, rabbits, fledglings, dogs that ate the rabbits that took refuge there and demanded to be rescued themselves, and...

His apology was not the thing she'd expected when she checked her phone in the morning. With one eye she stared at the screen and then rolled to her belly and pulled the phone to the tip of her nose as she tried to focus.

"I shouldn't have done any of that, I can't stop thinking about it."

She patted her hands over the bedcovers, fumbling through folds until she found her glasses and pressed them to her face.

"I can't stop thinking about it either," she replied, "But I liked it. It was exactly what I wanted."

His reply...

What's this?

Dad showed me the picture of the orangutan splayed on the grass.

A monkey, I said.

It's you, he said.

Neither of us laughed.

Remember that time you asked me for a Coke and I stood at the soda machine filling it with Root Beer imagining Homer Simpson saying Mmmmm Root Beer?

Dad laughed.

I laughed.

It's silent most of the time now. I don't think to text and neither does he.

"Clung to" means everyone in the house knowing when I am there and when I am not. A friend is dropping off some cookies she made...

The curtains were the safety.

I could never sleep unless the curtains were draped and folded over each other, obscuring the window completely. I could not even take a shower in the evenings, because once the dusk and dark hit I would become convinced that the moment I closed my eyes as I washed my hair, that something.... THE SOMETHING would be staring in at me when I open them.

I believed the curtains hid that same darkness. The moment I pulled the curtains apart I would see The Something.

He laughed at me for that.

I'd buried that fear,...

I saw a girl press her cheek into the moldy stone column. Her arms gripped the sides in a hug. Her eyes were closed and she smiled.

I wanted to take a picture of her but then her friend arrived, a girl about her age. They were both older teens. They were American, with spots on their foreheads and chins, hair streaked with pink and blue, pale skin, and wide eyes. They giggled as the first girl, a blonde in a pink jumper kept hugging the column and hamming it up for her friend who took pictures.

I remember when...

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...

"You been seeing the television?" the Guard said.

Huxton squinted, through the bleariness of sleep into the bleach of daylight, he only saw the form of the Guard, an outline of a man, faceless and without detail. Slowly, he sat up feeling as if his bones were brittle to snap. "What?"

He wished he could seem more heroic than a man who has been beaten and tied and imprisoned for days. He felt horrible with a dehydrated mouth that made sticky sounds each time he parted his lips.

"You been seeing the television? They say you is dead, man. They...

"She'd have preferred the electric chair," Melanie said.

A half grin sat on her lips as she stirred the crinkle fry in the ketchup far longer than anyone stirs crinkle fries in ketchup.

"You know when they were discovering the electric chair, they would like pay kids to bring in stray dogs and cats to electrocute to get the voltage just right," Beloved said.

"That's horrible," Melanie replied and she dropped the crinkle fry. "Why would you say that?"

"They finally tested it on an elephant!" Beloved said.

"Wait, who is they?" Melanie asked. She lifted her nose in the...

We made a little church of our own when we promised to marry. You asked me when I barely understood how to love you, and I'd been innocent so long that I think the moment you told me you loved me you became ever more desperate to snap me up. Three days after the initial declaration came the proposal. I ran away from you and hid.

You're a terrible boy. Everyone says so. I'd heard the talk since the beginning of time and I'd seen the queue of sobbing girls you left behind you. And yet.... you told me loved...