It was the fall that surprised me the most. I mean, I knew from the first time I looked into his bright blue eyes that I loved him but after a few more meetings, I realized that I was falling in love. I guess I had always thought that it would just be "love at first sight" and that would be that. But it wasn't. I did love him from first sight - make no mistake of that - but with every meeting I had with him, every word we spoke, I fell more in love with him. I was...
I lost my grip on the wheel. Well, not really. In reality, I lost my grip on everything. In that moment, nothing else mattered. The world around me became a blur of distant activity and the noise around me sounded like a conversation floating through walls from the other end of a house. The world both started in motion and went completely still in the very same second. In that moment, walking past him in the hallway, I forgot my name. All I could remember was the image of him walking to his locker that burned itself into my mind....
She felt like she was drowning. All around her there was water. Freezing. Churning. Flowing. Pulling her and dragging her in multiple directions. She tried to fight against it. Tried hard to kick out with her legs, pull the surface towards her with her arms. But no matter how hard she tried she didn't move, not in the direction that she wanted. It was like the water was a womb and she was trapped inside, a helpless foetus, attached.
As the oxygen in her lungs ran out, and her chest tightened so that she felt like her torso was close...
The lamp wouldn't turn on. This was because I was twisting Arthur's nose instead of the lamp switch. However, this doesn't change the fact that the lamp wouldn't turn on.
"Ouch! Stop twisting my nose," Arthur said.
"Turn on the lamp," I said, twisting his nose.
"Not until you stop twisting my nose," he said. It sounded more like he said "twizdig by dose," which sounds hilarious and just made me want to twist his nose further.
"Never!" I shouted. I wasn't sure why I shouted never, but it felt like the right thing to shout. I could sense Arthur...
Every day, the old man walked his old dog in the park. A chain fence separated the park from the road. Also, every day, a squirrel would come down out of a nearby tree, and run along the top of the fence. He came for the dog. Chattering, squeaking, he ran back and forth, incensing the dog. This drove the old mutt absolutely batshit. They had a conversation:
chatter chatter chatter
ROO ROO ROO
chatter chatter
ROO ROO
every day it was like this. The squirrel was doing it to torture the dog, you see. As the years went on,...
Elisha, let me tell you, I love being out here. Hearing the ocean roar like it do, by golly, it's like the glorious music of the spheres.
Drowns out the screaming of our victims, too. Why they have to scream like that, Elisha? Don't they know we're just helping them reincarnate into the next evolution of the species? Damn ungrateful, ain't it.
Whats the matter, Elisha? You don't look so chipper all of a sudden. Are we out of fishing line? We need the lines to be thick and taut, so we can hang them upside down until the blood...
I danced in the circle. Just me, my friend Jeanine, and a fairy. That's right, a fairy. People who study this would call me an idiot. NEVER GO AND DANCE IN A FAIRY CIRCLE, YOU WILL DIE. Oh yeah? Screw you, I want to dance. Dancing is really fun. Especially with a fairy. But I'm kinda tired...I've been dancing for three weeks straight. I should be dead, no human can go without water for more than a week. And I'm rather sweaty. Hey Miss Fairy, can we stop dancing? Please? I just need a water break.
Price of a roll of Kodachrome: $5
Cost of the Canon camera: $200
Wage per photo published in Life Magazine: $25
Price per bushel of corn: $2
Day's wages for detasselers: $0.25
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway.
A voice calls out urgently. She rises, summoned.
"Yu-Jing, laundry!" It is harsh and altogether unkind. She glides into the hall, gown flowing behind askance. Her eyes rest on the floor.
She is addressed without being seen. "Have them cleaned. Collect them tomorrow." The girl gathers, bundles, wraps, more delicately than they deserve. The red gown flows behind her over the floor, across the doorway, into the streets. Yu-Jing takes her master's bundle to the laundromat, the red splashing colors into the muddy pools of the...
He sighed. It was an all-too-frequent result. Women never noticed him (here he paused to chastise himself for thinking that without providing any statistical evidence, and to suggest to himself that perhaps he had an availability bias), and he was lonely.
Why shouldn't he be able to give and receive love, like every other member of the human race (here, he noted that it was unethical to assume that any individual deserves the respect or love of another without earning it, and that he should avoid thinking of a romantic partner as an object that one acquires)?
It just wasn't...