The bird landed. Worm-in-mouth, ready to feed the little ones. The nest high up in the tree above Central Park. Those birds had the best view in all of New York.
The birds could see snow, sun, rain, and leaves, all land upon the Park's territory; people-watch, bird watch, even. They could sleep, sing, then fly away, and come right back to their home above the sidewalks and tourists.
Birds in NYC, see more than most others do in a lifetime. Watching people kiss, get engaged, fight, collapse, run, die, LIVE. They see night in NY, day in NY, winter,...
The elephant dragged its feet. Reen felt a little sorry for the great beast, obviously ready for a big meal and a nice nap after having carted the two of them around for the day. She hadn't raised a fuss at being led in circles for a half hour--but that was the last time he depended on Kai's sense of direction--and she did several neat tricks with her trunk on command regardless of the repetition--peanuts seemed to keep her happy then. But now the homestretch seemed just as long for her as it for them. The archduke pat at her...
The audience stared open mouthed at me. Well, that is if you can call a audience a bunch of nosey parkers looking at why the area was cornered off by police. I didn’t care. I wanted the word to see. Especially my mother who was standing by the police, tears in her eyes. Oh, she notices me now. All my life, it was my older sister who was the golden child who could do no wrong whilst, no matter what I did satisfied the bitch. I wasn’t perfect to her.
I loved watching her cry. I didn’t cry. I just...
In the event that you perchance upon a mythological entity, and said entity or, dare I say, entities, have desired coconuts, the directions for capturing said coconuts is as follows:
Step 1: Determine if entity — say, your brother — is malicious in intent, or simply a selfish flesh-eating neanderthal.
Step 2: Break his ankles, or perhaps if you feel lucky, both pinky toes.
Step 3: Steal said coconut, bash open with rock and/or machete.
This of course can only work in aforementioned mythical kingdoms. If your brother is Pelops, and you are Tantalus, then you are fully fucked. Perhaps...
Drowning in the sea. That was the trick of it. To be seen to swoon, to fall to the bottom. The pretend to expire. It was the pearls that weighed me down. They alway do. Spiros bought them for the moon. That is what he said. The moon. As if the moon had a price. All things had a price. He gave them to me in the back garden of the hotel under a moon that was more red that white. A bad luck moon. But the band played on in the gallery and couples in their best passed under...
It was the fall that surprised me the most. The fact that it took so long that I could actually be afraid of the action of falling. The wind was stinging my face and making my eyes water, I was screaming but the noise of the explosion had taken out my hearing. The people strapped in around me were mere shadows, forms with fuzzy outlines and indiscernible features, mouths open in silent noise.
I forced my head back round, my throat filling with bile as the ground suddenly rushed up to meet us, my fingers twisting in the belt around...
They were listening.
That simple realisation caught her offguard, her breath temporarily stuck in her throat and she felt, just for a moment, her strength falter.
But the feeling passed quickly because of course they were listening, they were her friends, they had held her up when she was too drunk to walk in a straight line, pushed her hair back from her forehead when she cried and hugged her with glee everytime that they saw her. They loved her, of course they were there, listening as she conquered her fear of singing in public.
It wasn't that they had...
"Look it's not that I don't like you, I really do. In fact, if your company was you, this deal wouldn't be an issue."
We had been discussing this for weeks, it was a deal to take in a growing company as our subsidiary. My company wanted them, as they were competition. They didn't want in, because they knew they were just that to us.
"Phil, I understand that my company has a tendency to say one thing and do another," I said to him, as he paced from his chair to the window behind it. "But we mean it,...
her bedroom wall was a collage of every valentine's day card, folded secret note, doodles, drawings, things her friends had written before their father's got a job in another city and moved. Streamers, deflated balloons, pressed leaves, plastic flowers, candy wrappers, subway, bus and concert ticket stubs. Polaroid pictures and regular rectangle pictures and pretty much anything else a teenage girl might come across in her lifetime of movement.
The detective went over every piece thumb-tacked, taped or stuck to the wall, writing in his little notebook.
"Usually they just run away for a few days," he said. "Then they...
Her youth was long past gone, as emily stared out of her nursing home. Her distant family no longer visited, her friends had slowly drifted from her memories and living years as her mind and body waned towards the final chapter of her life.
Living was no longer an adventure, but a dull existence of being. Happiness and love existed only in her fading memory. She stared across the grey sky and saw a lone drifting green balloon floating slowly towards the endless sky. She felt a connection to the escaping balloon, she sighed and wished her last wish as...