Birds. I hate badminton. Eye-hand coordination was never my strength.
"You'll have fun," Fanny told me.
I hate how the little birdies fall apart if you step on them. Which I always do. They're easier to miss, fallen in the long grass like puffs of dandelions.
"Tell her to play," Fanny told her brother. We avoided eye contact. Like we always did when she was around. Our secret.
"You'll have fun," he said, not looking at me. "I'll let you win."
I didn't want to beat anybody, least of all him. I wanted to fold him in my arms, cradle...
As I look into the sky, the moon rises from its slumber showing its beauty in the night sky. The stars sit close to the moon, closer than before. As the lights in all the houses turn off and the children hop into bed, I see a star. A start like no other. Speeding like lighting towards the moon. I question myself, 'is it a star?'. The 'star' hits the moon spinning it off track. I look down at the wharf, the water surrounding the land has frozen. The tides no longer come crashing in. I stand and stare at...
While walking in the city, the 2 friends asked each other where they should go for dinner. They decide to go to a fancy restaurant and order some steaks. They ordered it with gravy and some mashed potato. The boys mind was running wild. He was thinking of how his friend looked very pretty and how good they would look together, as a couple. The girls mind was also running wild vise versa. As soon as they finished their dinner, they decided to go to the lake. While walking to the lake, they didn't talk whatsoever. They were silent, thinking...
Elspeth closed her eyes and desperately tried to focus on the frantic noises coming from her headphones. The general static briefly gave way to a hideously drawn out scream, followed by a voice she recognised as belonging to the captain of her unit.
"Fire at will! That is an order, sergeant! They're coming in!"
The note of panic was unmistakeable.
When Elspeth finally opened her eyes, she knew why. The sky was filled with terrible, shrieking pink wings, and every piece of air seemed to want to attack her. Summoning her last reserves of strength, she desperately raised her plasma...
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...
Holly scrutinized the first sentence of her novel. It was odd how not reading it for months had given her a wildly new perspective. When she was writing it, she'd been too close to the material, she hadn't been objective, hadn't made herself consider the fact that she was wrong in anything that she did. There were mental grooves worn deep in her mind that only now were swept away like footprints in the snow.
It ... sucked.
The ecstasy of seeing her work in print was instantly deflated by how awful she judged it to be. A single sentence...
The room was white, that much was certain. Its brightness was intoxicating. Two men stood over a small table, they were draped in white lab coats and held brown clipboards. Their arthritic hands jotted and scrawled down various notes and blurbs, and they occasionally looked up from their clipboard to observe what was on the table. The table was round, and it had three legs that were in contact with the white floor. At the center of the table was a small white mouse, belly up, red eyes staring into oblivion. The creature was dead. It had been dead for...
the colours were too bright and he couldn't make out what the picture was. Joe liked to go the the gallery on a Thursday night because they opened late and he could visit there after finishing his stint as a bike courier.He squinted at the painting in the modern art section and wondered if his bid to seem interesting by going to an art gallery would ever pay off. He spotted a sad- looking girl standing by the darkened window and debated what his opening gambit should be, most of the things he had tried on his previous visits had...
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...
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,...