"Travel light, but take everything with you," he said, his sky eyes looking off into the distance, "you never know when everything will leave you."
I suppose it didn't matter to me anymore, whether or not i took my life with me. there wasn't much there, really, just pieces of broken hearts and crystal tears that hit the floor. His words still echoed through my hollow body, the remains of bones crumbling beneath every sorry heaving breath. "Why wasn't I good enough?" I had asked myself, but I never knew. Perhaps it wasn't me....Perhaps it was you. Perhaps it was...
Absent for years and then he shoes up and wants to pretend he was never gone anywhere. Catch up, he says, get back to how things used to be.
Used to be, I told him, we,d wake up at dawn and start working. Then the drought came and the animals starved and died and then Pa snapped his back falling down from the hayloft. And then Ma just about folded in on herself until she was just this little thing that the wind could have picked up and taken away, and then one day it did.
But you wouldn't know,...
Sometimes, the best cure for loneliness is to actually be alone. Which is actually kind of hard to do, considering there are something like 6 bills people on the planet. You have to actually try.
Alone is different from lonely. Alone is a choice. Lonely is a sickness. My sickness has lasted two years, six months, eleven days, and I'm to the point where I must get better, or die. So I put on my black "fuck off" jacket, and put my headphones in my ears, and I made a choice to be alone. And I walked. I walked all...
I clung to the mast as the sea tossed them from wave crest to furrow and back again. This was not what I'd thought it would be when I volunteered to document the tallship's maiden voyage.
The curse of the weatherman'd struck at the worst of times. The forecasters had confidently predicted firm winds but that the real storm would happen far south of the ship. They'd proudly proclaimed fair weather for the day's sailing with winds at our backs and sun overhead.
I wondered what they thought, staring at their radars and maps, tallying numbers, crunching data. Did their...
The children were not at school.
When the bomb went off, Mrs. Stevenson's grade four class was on a field trip to the museum. Luckily for them, the museum had a bomb shelter underneath, paid for by a very wealthy and very paranoid patron.
The parents all rushed to the school, frightened out of their minds. All the other kids were delivered safely to their families, but all the parents with a fourth grade student waited anxiously for their children who never showed up.
The principal tried to comfort the wailing mothers, while the fathers were standing around angrily, blaming...
Trivia.
The whole day, every conversation, made up of trivia.
In the hairdressers, as she was washed, chopped, primped and preened, a plehora of trivia punctuated the air.
Holidays (of course) and the weather (predictably). The latest reality show shockers (nauseating) and trivia about cat hairs (surprisingly).
Over two hours she knew all about the hair stylists horrific corns, her allergy to peanuts and passion for Jimmy Choos.
Trivia.
But trivia has it's uses.
Especially when your stalking your husbands latest fancy piece. She would soon be dead.
She peered over her laptop screen, wishing that during her youth she had plucked her eyebrows into a thin line like her mother's - they always managed to make her look more stern than she every really was.
Right now, she would have given anything to be able to pull that off.
Somehow she'd managed to get the class quiet and at least convinced them into acting as though they were doing their work. But it had been a hard battle.
It wasn't that she viewed her entire career as a teacher as a war, just this class, and a...
Daring to be noticed for the first time in her life, she pushed back her chair and stood up. "*ahem* Ladies and gentlemen, i do believe an error has been made." she said. everyone looked in her direction, and she could feel her cheeks burning. Her english was soft, lilting, with a formal accent no one could place. "Mr. Devon was there on the night of December 13th." she said, growing louder so she could be heard by the entire courtroom. Even the judge was afraid to breathe. "The evidence presented suggests a robbery, does it not?" Celine said, nodding...
Freddy knew once he'd started to hallucinate he was Napoleon that he'd smoked a joint too far. Or Allison had sneaked something strange in there. His mouth tasted of ash and flecking leaves.
We're all eating cake! he shouted. He couldn't hear very well in his left ear, it seemed to echo there. His voice was strange. Tiny, as if he were a mouse.
Agatha, who was currently drinking blood from a wineglass, told him that was the wrong thing to say. He wasn't Marie, now was he? And even then that wasn't what she really said.
Freddy didn't care...
She made her way through the brambles, trying not to ruin her dress. Harmony was in here somewhere, as were Peace and Hope. They called her 3 evenings ago, saying they were trapped. She had responded immediately to the call and ran to Serenity for help. She just told her to follow her instincts. As she made her way, she thought about her previous identity, the piece of her that had been erased. Suddenly, she saw Harmony, tied to a tree with a wolf growing closer. She pulled a stick from a tree and threw it at the wolf. It...