I had been running for just over an hour, almost breathless. Whose idea was it to train for this marathon anyways? I've always liked running, but never really enjoyed it, you know? There are only so many routes you can take. This time, I decided to say screw the concrete jungle, I'm going to take this somewhere different. So I took to the hills, as they say. Not gonna lie, it was much more interesting than running on pavement. The damp grass under my shoes, the crunching of the twigs, all that good stuff. I stopped at the top of...
Homeless, the art installation won first prize. John Wentworth had planned to ruin the artist Kitty More. She used his idea. The one he told her about during their snakebite drinking days. The ones when they both woke up with hangovers worthy of bad poetry, the agony of headaches.
John posted intimate, embarassing photos of her. Lovers amateur sex tapes. Recorded snores and farts. Millions of hits. She retreated from the public eye, she always had low self esteem.
But he never thought she was the suicidal type.
I'm dead. Really dead. Not in the "there'll be a twist at the end and I'll be saved" kind of way. Just dead.
It occurred a while back, and while I was living, I thought it was pretty unfair. Most people get 60, 70 years of life. Enough people got 30 or 40 years of life.
I got 25. By the time you're 25, you're only finally getting your last degree, your first bit of experience, stepping over that last big stone in your path before you enter the real world. The one where you earn enough money to do...
I have come to dread the raven's caw that signals moonrise. It is the dread noise that warns me of worse to come, when I can feel the change come upon me. I beg this of the sun, do not set, do not leave me. Leave me alone with myself and the thing that I carry within me.
This is my anti-aubaude. Leave me with the rest of humanity, walking on two feet. Leave me to tools, to society, to love and all the rest that makes us man. Keep me from hunger, keep me from rage, keep me from...
I couldn't sleep with her next to me. Rigor mortis set in long ago, and her arms tented the blankets, letting far too much cold air underneath for me to ever get comfortable.
Move the body? I couldn't. Decay bound the corpse to the mattress, and removal would ruin the fine bedding.
I loved that mattress.
100 feet away, and we still couldn't talk. She sat there behind bars on a rotting metal cot while I was wearing designer jeans with a designer purse, just to visit her in jail.
I stared at her through the glass, and she hung her head until the guard whispered to her that someone was there to see her. Slowly raising her head, she looked toward the plexi-glass visitors room; the room where we could watch the prisoners like they were in a zoo or something.
She looked up at me and gave a the smile you give that still...
My name is Joseph Buxton and I am a terrible person.
The audience stared open-mouthed at me as the blood welled around the wound and covered my hands which were clasped over. I wouldn't normally do this, try to save a man's life, but I felt I owed him something. As he bled out and stained the cuffs of my shirt, the useless audience just stared on unmoved.
I felt his heart slow to a stop and watched the life drain from his eyes. He was still now, it was over.
I rolled up my sleeves and flagged down a...
"You did not eat the cake?" Pog levelled her gaze on her husband. "But you proposed to me that very day."
"And you have thought all these years that I was only with you because of a silly spell?" Will laughed.
Meg cleared her throat. "Happen I am still here tha know. They are very good spells, but in truth they only really give you the love you deserve. Always a cost to these things… Beyond the silver, that is." The old woman eyed the young maid conspiratorially.
"A lesson that is not mine to teach, but one you should...
Some mornings, when the sun rose just right, it was almost like nothing had happened. This was one of those mornings, a bright red dawn. I climbed out of my truck, zipped up my black hoodie and stretched to the sky.
Maybe it was all a dream? Surely it hadn't actually happened. I had gotten drunk, partied too hard, fallen asleep in the truck just outside of town, and now I could head back, and home would be home, and the residents would be people I knew and not those things.
I had nearly convinced myself of this happy thought...
In the morning, he'd wake up, stretch a bit and roll up his things into a small bundle and be on his merry way. There was a gym nearby with public access to the showers, where he'd wash his clothes and hang them to dry on a curtain bar somewhere as he brushed, shaved, showered and took care of his other personal grooming.
After that, he hopped on the back of a trolley and got his exercise for the day walking from the trolley stop on the edge of town to the orchard just a mile down the road. He'd...