I was walking to grandma's when I spotted the yellow box with a question mark on it. I liked it so much that I leaned against it and stuck a little red thing in my chest. Unfortunately, the little red thing was poisonous and I died. My eyeballs fell out and my skin ripped open and I bled everywhere. Then my body shrunk so that I looked like a voodoo doll. I am still standing against the yellow box with a question mark on it.
bruno went to Kentucky Fried Chicken to buy mashed potatoes and figs. He only had...
"You know why girls suddenly change their hairstyles don't you?" He leered over my sister with that gap-toothed smug-motherfucker grin. "Girls change their hair every time they make a major change in life. Like pigtails right before or right after a break-up. Females actually believe this changes them as a person."
My sister giggled, which is my favorite part, right before she undid the top two buttons on her blouse, which is my least favorite part. "You're so right," she said. She kissed him, hard, right before she saw me peeking under the door.
She scowled at me, but she...
Tom watched the sun set slowly over the skeletal remains of Brighton Pier. He had spent the day wandering through the narrow lanes of the town, stopping in the curio shops, selecting strange items from dusty shelves. A pocket watch, its mechanism rusted by age and inattention, was warm in his hand. Its smooth surface, touched by a hundred hands, was plain and unadorned. He wondered who had bought it, seen it in the window of a watchmakers, taken it home. Who had carried it in their pocket. Had they perhaps stood at this very spot, looking out to sea,...
Silence. Stillness. That's all I wanted. The screaming, the yelling, dishes breaking, I had to get away from it all.
This was supposed to be a family vacation, we were supposed to take time away from the every day to get to know each other better, to 'talk about our problems'. Thanks, Dr. Freud, but I don't think that's going to solve any of our problems. This little cottage overlooking the lake isn't going to make us understand and love one another.
Nobody notices when I walk away - they're too busy arguing. I've always been the quiet one, they...
She unwrapped her sandwich and fed it to the pigeons, just as she did every day. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered making them in the first place, when she knew that she wasn’t going to eat them. And then she remembered the birds. How they would come hopping towards her when she sat on the same old bench, the paint long gone and no one caring enough to give it a new coat, the splinters of greyed wood sticking to her clothes as they grabbed at any chance to be free of their prison.
She understood how they felt....
Kids cuddle everything and aren't afraid of anything. One time, I fell asleep, and woke up in the arms of a toad. Another time, I was dreaming and thought I had received a personal relationship with non-Euclidian geometry, but in reality, I had been eaten by an alligator. Oh well, third time's the charm, right? How many snuggle-happy toads and princess-devouring alligators can there really be in the world? The odds against ever encountering such a thing are astronomically low, even in the soft, cottony arms of a drug-induced stupor.
They say that dreams are messages from God, and I...
As she sat she thought and thought quick furtive thoughts.... of how how how and when could she move away from that place, move across the narrow streets of the city, and out into the fields of the countryside. It was too dark to see, but important to leave before dawn. Red that recedes like a shade in the dark, shouts in the daytime. She ought to have worn brown, her vanity tripping her up again. Her hands clasped the small bag of pearls, the only money she can bring back with her, the only reward for these weeks of...
The last thing before the end
Once again I found myself wondering what we were doing. If anyone had told me that I would have found meaning at the bottom of a dark place trying to keep the world safe froma secret that wasn't mind-numbing, but mass panic and hysteria wouldn't be too far from the expected.
It was still a terrible thing to be haunted by things that really just wanted to be a part of the sunshine and sky again.
I was what you could call a keeper of dragons. But the truth about dragons I have found...
He didn't think he was much of a cat person until he met Matilda. Matilda was a small, scraggy, skinny cat (or maybe kitten, he wasn't completely sure) who had turned up out of nowhere on the day he moved into the house.
Obviously a stray, with patches of pale pink skin shining through the missing squares of black fur, his heart ached when he saw her. An actual, physical pain which surprised him. He was not a caring person. He scrabbled through boxes marked 'KITCHEN' until he found an old tin of tuna that had been shoved to the...
It was a picture to burn.
His arm was wrapped around her waist and they were cheek to cheek, grinning like fools at the blank eye of the camera. Her arms were flung around his neck, a laugh frozen on her lips as they stood, all dressed down for a summer evening together, in her driveway.
She carefully held it to the candle flame and watched the smooth paper blacken and burn. Watched the image slowly eaten away to ash that fell like dark snow over the candle.
The dusting of ash of what had been her life: lies, broken...