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...
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
Framed by white-washed plaster walls, she was a sharp contrast to the beige and grey of the street surrounding her. She reached up and brushed a stray lock of black hair from her forehead, looking over her right shoulder down the street. She was waiting, and her eyes scanned the oncoming traffic carefully, searching.
The young man across the street had stopped walking when he noticed her, a sudden burst of brilliant red against the subdued building. She never looked over at him, never stopped looking down the street at the oncoming mass of bicycles, cars, carts, trucks, and people...
Spinning. Reams and reams of golden thread passed through her fingers as the spinning wheel conutinued on its endless spiral of revolutions. She had blisters now on all the fingers of her right hand. Blood seeped from under her nails and dulled the glow of the thread as it piled higher and higher on the floor beside her. She wondered what the point was but knew she couldn't stop. He would be back soon and then she would know her fate. Spinning. He said that if she got through all of it he would give her her freedom. She didn't...
Backwards, triumphant, towering low over this once perfect field of brown and dusk.
held soft in the omnipresent rapture of breathing.
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. In her hand she held her family's pendant. At that moment Chang, her brother, snatched the pendant from her. "What are you doing with this Huang-nuni? You know not to play around with this."
Suddenly, a bright light emanated from the silver pendant, engulfing Chang and Huang-nuni. They were surronded by white. An old man approached and spoke "You have entered another plane of being. Now begone!"
Chang and his sister reaapeared in the doorway to the astonishment of the servants. From that day on, Chang...
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...
Scott winced as he saw the woman spread the fingers of her left hand on the table. Of the standard complement of five, she had only her pinky and thumb remaining. The others appeared to have been cleanly sliced off.
"Ouch," he said, taking notes on her chart. "What was your occupation?" he asked politely, trying not to let the sight bother him.
"Data entry clerk," she said in a laconic, bitter tone.
"I, ah, yes, I can see how that would be ..." Scott coughed to disguise his confused verbal fumbling. He wrote some more, primarily as an excuse...
We were playing a family game of tag. I was the seeker acting as if I was a robber making sure no one was hiding from me. I heard a ringing in my ear. It was nothing but silence and the creaking of the wood beneath my feet. I checked every single closet. But I couldn't find anyone. It was like they had left me here alone trying to find them while they were out doing something fun. I decide to check the basement. I walked don't the slanted wood stairs. I heard the whispers of their v
The Moon would never be the same again. I don't know what happened. It's my job to research and study the Moon, but not even I can explain why the Moon was bright pink in the sky. All we saw was a flash and all we heard was a huge loud ZAP! A laser beam of some sort hit the Moon and now it's pink. The rest of my team of researchers and I can't explain it. It's just pink. It's probably the guy who shrunk the Moon. It would make sense. But what kind of science can make the...