Swing.
Pump your legs, stretch your shoulders back, breathe the joyful rush of air, and swing.
Lift your front leg, lean back, transfer your weight towards the ball, and swing.
Grab a partner, shake your hips, move your feet, and swing.
Mind your temper. Think back to happier days: swing sets and baseball games and high school dances.
Be calm. Forgive. Consider the consequences. And if that fails...
Say your prayers, keep your dignity, savour that final sensation of the rope around your neck, and...
swing.
100 feet away. That's where I was when the car crashed through our fence. I was watering the yard, and I thought I was watching the kids, but I had my back to them. We live on the highway. Four acres stretch out behind us. Plenty of space, I figured. But the last owner built right up against the road, the better to show off the building. I wasn't looking. I wasn't thinking. There was Bill, eight years old, all skin and bone and muscle, and he's teaching six year-old Jenny how to toss a football, only she can't quite...
I sprawl out across my book-strewn bed. The window is shut tight, the words on the page are swimming, and the beat of the neighborhood "get together" pounds at my scull. "William Shakespeare is by far the world's most widely known and appreciated playwright..." The textbook sits next to me, seeming to take up my entire bedroom. I can't focus on anything with all this stupid music. I reach for the mug of cold coffee sitting on my bedside table and pound it back. I grimace at the cold bitterness as it slides down my tongue. The clock reads 3:17am....
Sarah felt a little guilty. This wasn't her bed after all. But to each his own. This isn't some pink kiddie playgroundworld where cotton candy feeds you until your next meal, and mommy and daddy are there to catch you when you scrape your knee. In this world, houses are foreclosed, children are taken away by Children's Services, and husbands beat you after a late night out with beer. If you're lucky, he passes out before you have to fight him and shout NO. In this world, anything is possible, things you couldn't fathom happening to you as a 7-year-old...
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....
She rolled onto her side, the duvet rustling, pulled back to reveal a slender leg, almost too slender for a young woman of 24. Her eyes opened slowly. The expression on her blank, disinterested face was a striking contrast to the expectant face of the girl kneeling next to the bed. The little girl clasped the woman's hand in both of hers and shook. Pulling away, the young woman disappeared back under the covers.
"Mommy! Mommy, wake up today, okay?" Pleas were answered with silence. There would be no waking up that day.
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...
That is one big rock. Or a whole buttload of really, really small rocks. If you jumped from the top of that rock, and I mean off of it, not just up and down in one place or like a little kangaroo or something, but really just ran and jumped from the top of that rock and into the air and then aimed yourself toward the edge and launched yourself off of the rock and began to plummet toward the ground way, way, way far below the rock, then you'd be falling a long time, like even longer than this...
I don't know if that was a good idea. Who knows what would come of it? Maybe nothing, maybe something. It wasn't like writing that note was a spur of the moment kind of decision. It was something that I'd thought about doing a million times before. Of course, I'd always thought that I would have used very different words and say something entirely different. I hope I was wise, but I can't tell. I feel like I was just a little girl using grown up words. I don't know if that was a good idea...
He wandered a lot. Not usually while he was home, but when the time presented itself and he was in a new location before starting a new job, or before he was scheduled to leave. Staying in one place was too suspicious at times, though some places took his 'look' in strides, gave him attentions, asked him questions. That was no better sometimes. So he made wandering a pastime of sorts.
His focus mainly centered on terrain. Particular landscapes could prove resourceful in the heat of battle if he were to ever return there. Monuments, gardens, parks, fountains. The environment...