He stares into her bloodshot eyes, her glaring furious and terrified back.
She has not slept in over 24 hours and it is by sheer will-power that she manages to remain erect and alert. He must not win.
It must be over soon, she dreams, hallucinates, cries to heaven and God and all her nightmarish waking hells.
Freshman Biology.
First it was the night sweats. Then the spontaneous attacks of anxiety. Her boyfriend left after the sleep talking began, screaming about failing and nonsense and the like.
A test? No, more than a test. This was it.
Her delusions extended...
"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...
It was raining. It seems like it was always raining these days. What with the movements of this air flow pattern and that air flow pattern, Chicago had been caught in the middle of a vortex. And all the moisture and condensation of the Earth seemed to dump here.
So, I waded through the puddles and small rivers forming in the streets. Cars were uncomfortably close to being a little too deep in trenches of the alleyways.
I crossed this street and that road. On my way to meet a friend, someone that I use to know. Back when the...
It approached. This was it. Now or never. It's funny, through all the months of planning, I never really thought about actually having to pull this thing off. It was all diagrams and plans and discussing strategies. But, here we were. D-day, as it were. Time to do it. No time for backing out now.
I swallowed hard, unable to shift the lump in my throat. Could I really do this? It all seemed so big. The stuff of Hollywood movies. It didn't really work out in real life. What did I think was going to happen? We would drive...
I have been frustrated for weeks. Can't come up with any ideas about 3d printers - articles or fiction I've been asked to write. Suddenly I realised a way around this. I sneaked out some brain matter from the lab at work and re-created objects on the machine that I then used in a way I cannot explain (for legal reasons). Hence I had my own neverending supply of ideas.
The website editor was beginning to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume and creativity I was producing on a daily basis. I managed his frequent questions as to where I...
Safura was stalking her victim. Through the cobbled streets, around the market barrows, past the gates of the jail and under the washing lines strung between the slum buildings of the poor. The bones of an ox; she already had these. The teeth of a hound; yes, these too. Now all she needed was a few drops of blood taken directly from the heart of an innocent child.
The little girl stopped to buy an apple at a stall. Safura waited in the shadows behind. Jane, the stall holder, gave the child a rosy fruit and smiled at her.
"It's...
And then there is the approach of Autumn and September impatiently tapping at the window, intimidating August, chasing it away. I reach out my hands in an attempt to catch hold of it, but it is already overshadowed by distance, one step removed. Only yesterday it was April and there was the whole of Summer; it was a time of promise and hope. I naively believed that I deserved it, that I would be delivered unblemished months. It was such a bad winter, so very long and cold.
But here I am on the edge of the season, dragging so...
You had me at 'ox bow lake'. But the time machine accidentally switched itself on and didn't stop until I was back in 2012 where I started. I spent months in regret afterwards, looking online at the black and white photos of you with the rest of your Native American tribe, uncomfortably posed for the camera. I could not mend the glitch in the machine, could never return to a life with you. Sometimes I spend time with your ancestors, I have made friends with little Jimmy, your great great great grandson. I can imagine that he could have been...
The winter of 1970 in the Bay Area was not something I ever expected to experience- especially since I was born in 1990. My folks scolded me every night for sneaking into the backyard whenever there was a full moon. It wasn't my fault: grandpa planted the story about the time-well in my head and it sprouted into a maddening obsession.
My hair was now curly instead of wavy and my hands reverted into the pudgy state of toddlerhood. Who was I, in this time, and why was I only a spectator? My new parents talked about the lunar landing...
There was a little girl who loved a boy. It was her first time with a crush on a boy. It was her first time with love. This little girl was my sister, so I tried to explain to her that she was too young to love. She wouldn't listen. She loved her "boyfriend" too much.
One day, I took her to preschool. She ran over to a boy tried to give him a hug and a kiss. He pushed her to the ground. "Don't talk to me, you Wussy Wimp!" he shouted.
I ran over to her to help...