I step back and look. It seems complete.
Ms. Johnson comes over and looks at it. She barely glances before saying, "Wonderful, wonderful. Fantastic job." She's forgotten my name again. I doubt she'll ever remember.
I leave it on an easel and walk out of the classroom. No one looks back at me. No one calls my name or asks me to meet them at their lockers. I keep walking. Soon I am beyond the reach of our cloistered middle school existence into worlds beyond. High schoolers pass by. None of them look at me either. They have their own...
Modelling had never been her idea. The vacuous stares, the hours in front of the mirror. Was it her fault her proportions were perfect for summer dresses? It was a life she escaped the moment she fled her mother's house.
She didn't pick the color of her hair. It didn't come on a shelf, stinking up the bathroom with it's noxious fumes, attracting evil eyes from other women who thought they knew what she was like simply from the glow of her yellow hair and the swing of her hips?
The pitch of her voice wasn't her fault. How did...
"Knives."
"Yeah. And?"
"Pepper. Salt. Ducks. Ivory, but don't tell anybody."
"Seriously? Knives?"
He handed me the duffle bag. "Knives. And everything you need to know is in there, too."
"Everything?"
"Everything. The molecular structure of Ferrous Oxide. The length of a stick. The speed of light under water."
"What about the temperature of Jupiters core? The average age of a bitch collie in its first heat? Foreign exchange rates for all currencies against Bhutan?"
"All of that. Plus the phone numbers of every Mossad agent, and their email address and blog addresses. Oh, and the starting lineup of the...
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
I thought it was true love then. I thought it would last forever. I was so in love. It scared me how much I loved him and wanted him all the time. Since then, I've forgotten what that feeling feels like. I try to remember but I can't. I can't replicate the butterflies I felt minutes before seeing him. The trust I thought I saw looking into his eyes. I imagined our lives together. I romanticized him and looked past things I shouldn't have. Its crazy to think at one time, he was my everything and now he's a stranger....
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...
I never loved Jesus I just loved singing. The way my body filled with adrenaline at the sight of a choir of candles. The deep sadness of wailing chords and the fire of my brain's holy spirit. The serious intonations of a preacher speaking without thinking of anything other than leadership, speaking about ears to hear, speaking about the blind leading the blind.
Was he a good man? I suppose he tried to be and I doubt I would ever have directly murdered someone who was trying to be a good man. That's why I left him. That's why none...
Gene loved the smell of leather. He loved the smell of Heather wearing leather. He loved Heather in leather and the smell and the idea of the smell and the smell of the smell always left him crazed and wanting. He couldn't help himself. He didn't know how.
Heather hated Gene. She hated the idea of Gene and the smell of Gene and the smell of the smell of the leather Gene always wore. She had hated him forever. She always would. She could never forgive him for that one thing, years ago. She couldn't even remember anymore. She knew...
Sometimes she walked the path alone. she was happy with this. She at birth was know as Alison, now she is know as Lamb. now Lamb was a simple yet complex person. on occasion she'll say thing that are deep for things that are undeserving of even the slightest words.Lamb sometimes even gives Stories to the mundane. Like the other day as she was walking she watch a paper bag drift about the lane, she named it jelly and said jelly was lost without it's family, but had to leave for some quest. Lamb didn't know but that's what she...
It was midnight in the Temple of the Light, the sun was shining, and the Guru Akiva was smiling up at the man with the gun.
"Go ahead, child. Do it."
The man glanced around. Nobody to see him, tall, trench coat, barrel of the revolver pointed at the serene little monk as he sat, lotus-style, in the pavilion.
"Nothin' personal, old-timer." he managed to grunt. He didn't usually speak to the mark, but this guy, well, he figured the old man deserved an explanation. "The Council wants war, you see. The Temple, yer planet, it's... uh..."
"Sacred. Yes. You...