He set the plate before her. He watched her eat it clean.
"Where have you been?" he wanted to know.
Instead he said, "It's good to see you again."
She nodded at him, said something about being tired, bouncing around too many places, too many people. But he only heard, "I've spent every free moment with him, letting that stranger come inside me."
So his response probably sounded non-sequitur to her. "When's the last time you had a weekend to yourself?"
"A while. I don't know how long."
"Four weekends," he thought. "The weekend before that we went to the...
The sound reverberated through the streets. Chant. Gregorian. Darkness illuminated by thousands of candles, human snakes weaving their way through the streets. This was the first time I'd visited Taize but knew it would not be the last.
Simon did not feel the same. Hated being surrounded, enclosed by people. Unnerved, anxious clinging onto me like a child instead of a man ten years older.
I felt at one with the crowd, heard the repetetive words flow through me, part of me for evermore. Tried to shrug away the insistent pulling at my coat sleeve, ignore Simon's shout in my...
The daring were punished. Oh, how they were punished. For their transgression of assumption: public mockery. For their foolish hubris in believing that one could get away with such tom foolery: A dressing down by the town jokesman (and I use jokesman loosely as anyone in town would and will tell you that he was only installed as the town jokesman thanks to nepotism. After all, it's his father who is in charge of humor.
Yes they were a sight to see, the daring. The sad faces of such dissapointment as you would assume most of them saw some sort...
Until now, she'd never thought of herself as pretty. And, if she was honest, she still didn't. It wasn't her mind that had changed. It wasn't even thhe mind of the world in general. Just the rather pleasant opinion of one particular man who she had met while walking into town. He had caught her eye as she passed, caught her hard and fast in fact. She was forced to an abrupt halt, staggered by it's impact. Not unpleasant, mind. Gentle, but admiring. There was power in that. He had looked and smiled and then complimented her on her looks,...
She had made her bed and she now had to lie in it: that was what her mother had told her and what she now believed. So she was lying in it, like a good little girl – meek and mild, silent and compliant: behaviour that had got her to where she was now – unhappy, stuck, unravelling. Because old habits die hard, you see, and it is difficult to change. How does one forget three decades of learned behaviour? How does one peel off and discard the labels people attach? They don’t, that’s how, because they can’t – not...
He knocked the three knocks. The two rap-raps. He whistled like a wren. Then he knocked twice again. The flight attendant replied, "Captain. Pick up the phone. I'm not playing your games."
"Oh come on. Just reply with the secret knock. It's easy."
"What is it you want?"
"To go to the restroom."
"Ok. Punch in your code and I'll punch in mine, and we'll get you to the lavatory and back."
She punches her code, her hand on the handle. She waits. "Captain?" She hears three knocks. Two rap-raps. A whistle like a wren.
"Captain. I'm a grown woman....
Once upon a time there was a bug who wanted to live on my finger. I called the little fella over and asked him to stay a while. This all started when my father said to never touch a big because it might bite you. After he died, I decided to ask bugs to come over and sit for anhile. It made it easier to think about my sorrow. I named the different bugs, every single one of them. One bugs name was idiot. He sat there as I picked off a wing. The other wing was still there. It...
He put on his green scarf and walked out the door. Damn door. Never closed properly.
The sun was peaking behind some clouds. Damn clouds. It was probably going to rain.
He winced as he felt the warm sun on his face. It had been months since he'd seen the sun, months.
Damn sun. Probably give him skin cancer, at best, a tan.
Dear Santa,
Hi. I'm not good at beating around the bush, so I will get right to the point. Here is my list for Christmas this year. I realize that it is April 15th, and I am late in filing my taxes, but I felt this was more important than filing my taxes. Also, I really, really, really don't want to file my taxes. Anyway, my Christmas list.
1. I'd like a pony. A plain, brown pony is fine. If you can bring one named Trigger or Lightning or Sidney Applebaum, that would be terrific, but really, just a regular...
It’s like each of our lives is played out alone, obedient to the rules of a separate game board, the ladders, the squares, following the thread of a unique tale, a tail that curls around until it meets up with its maker, its head, forming a neat ball (transparent, weightless), floating effortlessly on the wind, drifting along alongside billions and trillions of other small balls, all caught up in their own complex narratives.
Yet interestingly, while it is easy enough to peer inside each of these other balls as we pass by them, (noting, as we do so, what its...