Imagine you're sitting at a table and the drunk version of you sits before you.
What would you say to one another?
Would the drunk you tell you the truth, admit to all the honesty you bury deep within or would the sober you manage to quell all of the clarity with your denial and issues?
And which one is the real one at this point? You spend more time with alcohol than you do with the voices in your head these days. So if your friends were to join you at the table, which of the two of you...
I am the apple of her eye.
All of them in fact.
I have five aunts, and a mother.
Mom calls me the Little King, her little Emperor, the man of the house. Where is my father? I don't know or care.
My aunts have always been there. Mom defied everyone when she got pregnant, as far as I know my aunts have never been courted.
They are my court. They laugh at my jokes, they bring me snacks, they make me cocoa, they run my baths. When I write stories they print them and paste them in a book,...
"What's that you say?" the captain growled into his phone, "Pirates, in our neighborhood?"
He called out to his men, "Raise the flag! Ready your weapons! If they want to be pirates, they can prepare for battle."
The men went about their business, but the usual bounce to their steps were gone. Their captain had spent a wee bit too much time watching Peter Pan as a lad, and they were paying for it
.
"What weapons would you have us use, cap?" asked one soldier.
"We have no cannons and no plank, are you crazy?" muttered another soldier.
The...
Leaving was the easiest decision to make, and the hardest action to take. I had to get out of the Martian prison and home for the past six years. John, the guard bribed to allow me to escape and take secrets stored in memories I could expose back on Earth.
A ship was scheduled the next day which would take me on the long journey home but modern technological advances meant I would get back to London sixteen hours later.
I regretted leaving behind my friends, knowing their fate but someone had to expose the lies about the great new...
I've been taught to play it safe since I was a child. Everything always slipped out of my grasp. And I never seemed to mind. Then you managed to come into my life and make scars that, even decades later, will remind me of the love we had. Can you fathom how beautiful that is? I held onto you tightly because you were the only thing that mattered. Please don't say that my love was suffocating you. I couldn't imagine loving you any less. Maybe we were too young to understand what we had. Maybe I was too naive and...
They crouched to peer beneath the stairs; a small boy and his even smaller sister.
"What are we looking at, Jack?"
Jack frowned and shushed his sister, pointing conspiratorially at the darkness between the slats of the steps.
They stayed that way for several minutes, scrunched up tight, necks disappearing into shoulders, rocking forwards on their toes.
"There, Arianna, look!"
He pointed towards a patch of darkness that had begun to twist and swirl in very much the way darkness shouldn't. Two yellow eyes blinked and stared back at them.
A voice like poison treacle spoke into the silence.
"It's...
Monica Albott had never been beautiful.
Sure, she had been cute, pretty even, but never beautiful. She said this over and over, because she believed it and because it was true, but all she ever heard was, "oh Monica, you're just curvy!" and "I wish I were you!". Nothing anyone said ever helped. And so slowly, little by little, the hamburger she at on Friday's for dinner became bread and lettuce, then a tomato and vinegar, then nothing. Her usual coffee in the morning became skin milk and no sugar and her usual snack after school became a salad instead...
Sal knew his time was running out, a runaway train heading straight for him but he had nowhere else to go.
"So... will you?" he pleaded, kneeling before the woman of his dreams, heart- quite literally- in his hands. Ever since they had met at the runaway shelter, they had spent every waking moment together.
Lucy gazed, not at the engagement ring with the heart-shaped diamond, but rather at the train hurtling toward them both, it's lights illuminating her would-be fiancé like a spotlight.
"What, are you crazy?" she hissed, pulling at her boyfriend's arms, leaning back with all her...
I held it at arm's length. Three feet long from blade to hilt it, the replica Confederate cavalry sword is beautiful. It is etched up and down the length of the blade with scrollwork and in two places with the letters CSA. My heart trembled as I held it loosely, admiring it. I couldn't believe she'd sent me this sword. It is a beautiful birthday present.
I jumped off of a building once, and landed on the next one. I had to. The building was crumbling from the foundation up because one tiny sliver found its way across the massive concrete block and decided it was hungry. So it expanded and soon enough, the building was shifting, leaning on the right and then switching, crumbling more and leaning on the left.
It was a leaning tower and I had to jump from the sinking building if I wanted to live peacefully. Not all of jumped, though. Some wanted to stay, saying it was their home because...