Pointing skyward, his finger aflame.
"Can you come here a minute?"
Trying to catch the attention of surf but drawing only seagulls, which landed on his fingertip and looked around stupidly in the low sky of November.
My whole life is a finger on fire, and wrong things coming to help. A man wearing a hat. Some flotsam. A ship in the dead of night, a drunken captain
Shit.
Bob hit the switch again.
I'm not too surprised because he's the biggest klutz I've ever had the misfortune to know. It had to happen the one day I forgot my tethers.
I took a quick look around. No nearby trees to grab. The neighbour's dog was starting to lift. That *was* surprising. That bitch was huge.
The dog, I mean.
I was about 10 fet off the ground now and slowly accelerating. 'Bob, you wanker. Can you hear me?'
He stuck his unshaven face out the window. 'Wot?'
'You hit the switch again, right?'
'Wot switch?' He stuffed...
Her first Christmas back at home was a terrifying event. Someone named Aunt Martha kept hugging her, crying. She said the strangest things. She asked Shelly, "Do you remember me? You were just a baby the last time I saw you." Of course not, Shelly wanted to say. I couldn't possibly remember you if I was a baby, she thought. But this woman obviously loved her, like all the other people here.
Not like he loved her, but they did. They tried, bless their hearts, but it wasn't the same. They told her he was bad, that he took her...
The hillsides have been finger-painted
with Larch trees turning yellow
like smears from a child's hand
that Mother Nature will bleach away within the month
I stare, thinking there must be a pattern to it.
Birds eating seeds from cones and dropping them in flight?
Early colonizers after a fire?
Unwilling to believe in beauty without structure and reason
Dusk arrives with its gift of quiet
As if hosting it here in this small moment of time required recompense.
A perfect moment of stillness
before I turn to go inside and life's motions begin again
You know damn well the head is in the box. You know damn well how this movie will end. But her legs are across yours and she shaved. They're smooth like you could have only guessed, because in winter she was all jeans and tights.
You've been hovering with your hand on her knee and she's so into this damn movie that you've seen one hundred times. She hasn't mentioned that she thinks about sleeping with Brad Pitt, but you see the way her eyes get when he comes on screen. She has yet to give you those eyes, but...
The young man stared down at the small book, his middle and index fingers pressed down to keep the pages from turning as a breeze wafted over him. It was a strange book full of nature scenes and Japanese people in studied poses. But, what really caught his attention was the bare-skinned, almost European looking woman peeking out at him from a curtain. Her gaze seemed to pierce him and he almost felt that he could reach in and pull her out of the page.
"Hello." He blinked. The woman on the page spoke again, smiling at him. "Hello there."...
It was Andy from the grave.
"Can you speak up?" Caroline, distracted anyway by something on TV, couldn't understand him.
"I said it's Andy. From the grave. That's the muffling, the grave."
"Well, it doesn't help you're such a mumbler anyway. Wait, do you mean you're actually calling from the coffin?"
"Not really," said Andy, "but I am dead somewhere. I don't feel like I'm in a box. I feel like I'm in a cloud."
"That could be the coffin. I saw it," Caroline remembered, "it was plush."
"That's nice."
"Listen, did you want something? I've gotta head out in...
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...
I couldn't sleep with her next to me.
It's one thing to want to be a bigger man. It's completely different to assume that you are.
My life thus far, untainted by ill temper, prejudice, greed, even religion, had ensconsed me, rolled me out to greet the world. I was the man who fought for the powerless, from the playground to the courtroom. I was the man on the covers of the local newspaper, the man who shocked the nation when my pale hand, wrapped in the dark grip of a powerless woman was held aloft.
I would die for...