Drudgery of the everyday. There's really nothing else to explain it. Banality of sadism. John, standing at the dump, Alka Seltzer pill wrapped in a piece of bologna for the birds. Has he ever thought what a bird might feel while its innards explode? That's not really the point. He wants to know if it can work. If he can leave a wake of destruction with nothing but everyday objects.
He watches the bird gulp down the bologna and retake flight. He sees it hesitate, and pop, it falls from the air, guts hanging out of its mouth.
Adam, working...
He didn't think he was much of a cat person until he met Matilda.
It was a long, lazy summer afternoon in the local park. She was swinging gently on one of the children's swings, fingers interwoven with the metal chains, face turned up to the sun. He didn't notice her at first, lying stomach-down on the grass with his nose buried in a book. But his attention wandered briefly from the page and came to rest upon her slim figure and there was something about her that captured his attention.
She was oblivious. She arched her back, stretched her...
The lead ninja laughs. "You are a fool, Senzi," he says through his mask. "Never make a boast that you cannot back up with action!"
They have me surrounded, five on each side, and one nimbly crouching on the tracks behind me, ready to leap away once the train came too close. I had no such route to safety; the points of their katanas promised a quick death should I stray from the rails.
All I have is my own katana, and my pride.
The ninjas continue to mock and jeer. I will be dead in seconds, they think. I...
Leaving was the easiest decision to make, and the hardest action to take.
Clearly, it was better not to have to work for such a person. But on the other hand, if he left, he'd be leaving his co-workers to face her incompetence and maltemper himself.
What was he supposed to do? He had "Assistant Manager" on his resume now, it'd be easy for him to find other work. But over the past 6 months, he'd become good friends with a lot of his employees, who were all fun, smart people.
But, but he looked for another job. And he...
He looked into the surface and his heart stopped a beat, two beats then three at what stared back. His chest caved inwards as a slow smile stretched and rippled across a paler face than his own. The eyes were grim and long and dead and they beat him into submission with a starving stare before he kicked his own ankle and fell to the ground, dirt scraping pits into the palms of his hands. He licked his lips and looked above about him. The roof of the hut looked like the inside of a boat falling from the sky...
My dad believed the island to be the end of a search for a cure for mom.
The promise of a healer that would finally reverse the soul destroying illness that was taking mom away from us.
Dad didn't care anymore what it would take, money, hope, nervous exhaustion from the endless searching, trying, failing, crying. He had to give it one more go.
Mom wanted to go home as soon as we got into the hotel room. She always wanted to go home even when she was in our house. She could only remember her childhood house and her...
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...
Millions spent on public health are inflationary. This is why we should kill people when they're born. That's right. When a baby is born, you flip a coin. If it comes up heads, kill it. That's what they do in China, only they don't flip a coin. They say if the baby has a vagina, kill it.
And this is a little creepy for a six minute story, isn't it? I got the first line by opening a Kurt Vonnegut book to a random page and writing down the first line I saw. Everything flows from there.
The word flow...
It was his favourite shirt. But in the rush to leave, it had been forgotten on the line. She stared at it every day from her window. Today it was an especially bitter reminder as she stood at the window, mixing up a batch of cookies.
The cookies were for her son's funeral. The son who had worn that shirt day in, day out, until the day he left. The son who had climbed that tree as a boy, played hide and seek in that yard. The teenager who brought girls home to kiss behind the big tree when he...
She is running down a long road that she is not sure where it leads. It's a road deep in the country, there are tall dark tree's that surround her. Her heart is pumping through her chest, she can barely catch her breath. She tries to turn around to see if he is going to catch her, but she doesn't know where he went. The fear of him catching her keeps her going. She hears the sounds of the tree's leaves rustling in the wind and this sound alone makes her heart pump even harder. In her mind she...