The maple leaves will change and fall with a certain grace - November will begin.
Carla read that sentence in her Literature textbook over and over, and the thought that kept running through her mind was, 'Who edited this book?'
That wasn't entirely true, but her internal monogue ran along these lines. Was she the only tenth grader who knew that semicolons connected independant phrases? Older people complained about how texting was ruining the language, but what difference did that make when a text book author, in what she assumed was an edited textbook ILLUSTRATING the language, couldn't even catch...
Dear Diary,
I'm SO sick of everyone going on about how their lives are such a bowl of cherries! I am SO not going through rainbows and lollipops right now. i am about to face one of the toughest decisions of my young life. My life isn't a bowl of cherries and no one else even tries to care. it's just " ME ME ME" all the time. Like my best friend. All she talks about is herself. how she's going off to camp and ontario and stuff and how she got a new baby cousin and stuff. finally, i...
He set the plate before her. Two slices of charcoal blackened toast, plump stoneless cherry jam, no butter or spread. It wasn't punishment for climbing out the bedroom window to staying out late again. It was all they ever ate after mom died. They got through a loaf of bread a day.
She no longer cared what happened. All she could think about was Ross. He cooked her pumelled bloody steak, creamy mash with chives, grilled tomatoes covered in mixed grain pepper from a silver pot. Loved her with food, milky coffee and kisses.
Next week she was going to...
The mob held torches like flags, upright and proud, ready for battle with the onion factory. Sons, mothers, daughters, friends, marched on toward revenge. They threw their torches onto the large building, sending smoke signals for miles, saying "we're in charge here!"
For weeks, the town smelled like onions. At first, people sniffed their clothes to make sure it didn't come from their home cooked meals "People" here meaning the people who didn't boycott onions altogether. Most people substituted elephant garlic or onion powder, or just went without the taste. One girl started vomitting at the sight of onions altogether....
NEWS FLASH: INDUSTRIAL TRAIN CRASHES JUST FEET FROM THE FINISH LINE! What is to be one of the most significant milestones in American history has ended in tragedy. The goal? A race between a stage coach and an steam train in an effort by the train companies to represent the significance of steam and coal versus a 6-horse stage coach on the gravel road.
Thankfully- no one was terribly injured, and though the train derailed, it had done so only a few hundred yards form the finish line. With the stage coach trailing behind by more than 3 miles. Though...
We are plagued, wretched, cursed...
doomed to be followed by the multitude, hounded by paparazzi, our flesh peddled to feed the teeming multitudes who wish to consume every morsel of our existence.
Our every action scrutinized, our every facial expression or turn of phrase. Is it any wonder we act so... so... is it any wonder? Put any normal person under this sort of microscope, they would doubtless appear as insane as ourselves.
Of course, there is the whole nasty business of inbreeding. Keeping the gene pool pure? Hardly. Rather limiting it to royalty has caused countless genetic problems; our...
She heard it calling out to her. Her clearing in Yellowstone -- it was whispering that it longed for her presence. And on this day, when she felt like the world was collapsing around her -- its edges bent and frayed and its fringes burning up in smoke -- she dragged herself there up winding paths and wild trees.
While most people saw Yellowstone as a national park, she saw it as her backyard, her sanctuary, her refuge. She had a clearing there, all her own, that bears in the hundreds of years they'd been there hadn't even found. But...
As a child my Mother has always told me to make something of myself. She'd push me into doing things I really did not want to do.
"Learn the piano!"
"Take up dance!"
"You will act!"
Order after order. I wasn't any good at any of it really. So I just gave up quietly in my mind and pretended to care.
For Mother there wasn't any point in just being alive.
"You must be living!" she'd shout whilst doing something boring and mundane like peeling an onion.
I didn't get why she was so determined that I do something. I...
Headphones on, gazing far out into the horizon, the tops of the Adirondacks at her feet, flowing out into the valley like waves, going for miles. He was behind her. Her father had fallen on the path up to this point. He had clutched his chest and complained of shooting pains down the arm, but she hadn't listened. She was at that age, the precipice of adulthood teetering before her, and she was certain she no longer needed to listen to her father, not about this, not about anything. But when they reached the crest of the hill, she looked...
Look up and see what's falling. Out of the clouds, the explosion already dispersing on the wind. It seemed almost to be in slow motion. So slow, it could almost be going backwards.
He glanced around and wondered if anyone else saw what he saw. The street went about it's business, as if nothing had happened. He wanted to scream, Look up and see what's falling, but he couldn't push the words from his throat.
The first box hit and exploded only a few feet from where he stood. And another and another again. Explosions all around him, thankfully none...