Vanquished.
She looked at the body of her enemy lying there on the floor. She knew she should feel a sense of triumph, but instead there was only sorrow. Sorrow for the lost years, the million memories that would never be, the milestones both present and future that would never be shared.
For you see, the dead body belonged to her mother.
Her mother had run out on her father soon after her birth, and the girl had wondered all her life what it was like to have a mother. Someone to make sure her hair was perfect on picture...
Listen to the sounds that the butterflies make. Listen what they say when they communicate, as they talk to each other, their little butterfly whispers, back and forth, their conversation. Through these special headphones, you can for the first time hear the conversation of the butterflies.
Sadly, twenty seven years ago was the last time we saw real, live butterflies. The great butterfly passing of 2017 was a hard, lonely time for human beings.
But thankfully, forward thinking scientists recorded every sound, every movement, every bit of data they could about 2102 different butterfly species. And now you, through the...
I'm dead. Really dead. Not in the "there'll be a twist at the end and I'll be saved" kind of way. Just dead.
I suppose you want to know what happened. It was Geoff. In the bedroom with a vase. Not a very imaginitive death, really. But there you go. I went from a person to a statistic in the blink of an eye.
Dying is an odd sensation. Like when you're really drunk or hungover and the room spins when you sit up. It's just like that. I watched as he ran around wiping up the blood, hiding the...
Inner core
Outer core
Mantle
Upper mantle
Crust
Susan.
Flora between her fingers,
Seeds between her toes.
Like Cinderella, I thought,
recalling an old "Wizard of Id" panel.
I stroll above the layers of the earth,
sing-songing under the tarp of heaven,
bulging with the weight of infinity.
Susan springs to her feet.
"Jesus Christ, a spider! Kill it!"
tangling her hair with
typewriter fingers.
I catch it on a leaf and
move it across the field.
I guess that makes me Mantle.
I'm not sure how it will end between us. I am not sure about the middle. I can't even promise that I'll remember how it began.
But what I can promise is that in years to come, your friend or your girlfriend or your child will ask you to tell the story of us. and when they do, I can promise you that you will smile.
I won't matter how it ended or how it started. In that moment, you'll pause, and smile because you'll remember the bit that made it great in between.
"She was an optimist" You'll say....
When represented on a flat surface, a right angle can appear acute or oblique.
They stood in front of one another with only the silence in between.
It had been like that for a while. She hadn't known what to say. He had been waiting for her to say it. So both stayed silent, begging each other to break it with any kind of sound.
The silence had actually begun from the moment the date had begun, strange because it wasn't their first. No, it was one of many. The pair had been together for almost three months now. He had asked her if a date that night sounded good. She said yes, because...
I would have otherwise been absolutely fine. Everything was going according to plan. We were doing it. Oh, it was bliss.
Never would I have thought that events would turn the way they did. Oh it began with just a simple slip. The gravel underneath my feet began to shake. The panels seemed to slip from below. But my friend was convinced we would be okay. I told him it was a terrible idea. Sneaking onto random roofs. What were we thinking?
Well, I wasn't, that's for sure. I'm not sure if he was thinking or not, either. But he...
"Dammit it's cold today." Bard pulled his hat further down over his forehead and huddled into his fur. "This shit just ain't worth it, Jake." The mule nudged his shoulder and tugged on the lead. He knew where warmth was, as well as his grain.
Man and beast drudged along the logging trail beneath the cold, thin light of the winter sun. Behind them clouds piled up over the horizon, snow dark and ominous. Bard could hear the wind starting, a distant rush of sound bending tree branches and pushing the storm closer.
"Two more miles and we're home," he...
It wasn't easy to stack the gold bars in the cellar. Very heavy. I kept one in my bedroom so I could look at it whenever I wanted. Part of me was trying to warn there was something strange going on, another (the greedy part) knew that it was synchroncity that worked this for me.
Cousin Marty told me about the new shop between the Chinese Grocery store and the old-fashioned chemist. Strange as I'd never noticed the shop even though it was supposed to have been there for the last month. Marty showed me the rare whisky he'd bought,...