It was really just a matter of survival. Keep going and keep going and eventually, soon if they were lucky, they would reach a village, a town, a bloody great city with skyscrapers and McDonalds and satellite TV. All right, maybe that was taking things a bit far, pushing their luck to the extreme, but it was a beautiful daydream.
"You all right back there?" called Hitesh loudly, despite his cracked, dry throat, trying to make himself heard over the rushing, roaring river that the canoe was racing along.
Ash nodded, realised Hitesh couldn't see him, and carefully leant forward....
Fourteen fish
bunched
like a silver
artichoke
They are traveling
farther
than their fathers
who never
left the river
Their futures
are
in lemons
and
bread crumbs
The year was 1986, when Madonna was telling her father not to tell her what to do, and life changed beyond my own imagination. The holiday had been planned for ages, but I had no desire to spend two terminally tedious weeks camping with my younger sisters. I had Mark, with his dark hair and warm lips, and I couldn't bear to leave him for a fortnight. He might fall under a bus, or worse, fall for Jayne Marsden and he stilletto heels.
It was cold, and soulless. It was mechanical, drunken and above all else it was heartbreaking.
I couldn't beleive it when I saw him in the crowd after all these years. The proverbial one who got away. It was even less imaginable that he would be the one to reach out to hold my hand, that he would be the one to pull me into his arms just as our song began to play.
The tickets for this concert cost a fortune, I had stayed up all night just to get through on the phone. I had brought a date...
He ran into the room, his heart pounding, and his clothes soaking wet. He was breathing heavily. I turned round from folding the laundry and looked at him quizzically. "What's wrong, Stefan?" It wasn't like him to run for a bus. It was so out of character. "Damn, thugs," he said and plonked himself into the nearest chair. "Stole my phone, my Ipod and my wallet." I dropped the shirt I was folding and went to him, enfolding him in my arms. His accent still had the power to make me weak at the knees. He hadn't been in the...
£18000. The figure flashed through his mind as he drove to work. Quite a sum but not above what many were willing to pay. He wondered if he should up his price, expand the business. He smirked as he parked and pulled on his gloves, He checked his watch and took his time getting his tools from the back of the car. Calm, assured, he had every detail planned so on the job he didn't have to think. He wondered who it was today. He checked his notes; female. He briefly considered what she'd done to piss her husband off...
The mob held torches like flags, upright and proud, ready for battle with the onion factory. Sons, mothers, daughters, friends, marched on toward revenge. They threw their torches onto the large building, sending smoke signals for miles, saying "we're in charge here!"
For weeks, the town smelled like onions. At first, people sniffed their clothes to make sure it didn't come from their home cooked meals "People" here meaning the people who didn't boycott onions altogether. Most people substituted elephant garlic or onion powder, or just went without the taste. One girl started vomitting at the sight of onions altogether....
" Pow pow pow, shit!"
Silence has taken over. The ahots fired have stopped and a thud is heard above. Ten minutes later there is a knock at the door. His knock is more of a sequence knock like a code. "Julie?" The woman behind the peep hole is covered in muck breathing he okay and wiping sweat from her brow. Finally the door is opened. " I told you this is a secret knock you don't call my name you knock back in the same sequence! Idiot!" Julie and Hannah have been stranded in their grandfathers complex for days....
Flan in the face, flan in the face, flan in the face.
A wild grin stretched across his face, an expression of pure exuberance, of joy and abandon, just before the pie tin splattered the gelatinous goo all over his tweed coat.
The students were gathered outside the lecture hall, sprawling in the hundreds in the oppressive heat. Here and there, groups had clustered beneath the maple branches, trying desperately to stave off exhaustion. They had been at it for two days already: the most notorious sit-in in America's higher educational history.
As if to further puzzle the wayward boomers...
"I don't care if I get wet!"
Eric snatched at her hand, but Angel quickly pulled away. She let her hand extend beyond the umbrella's translucent canopy, its special shielding against radiation and chemical contaminants having been turned off despite Eric's warnings.
"You can't do that!" he cried.
"Why not?" she said. "It's been years since the fallout. Why use this stupid shield anyway? What difference does it make if things APPEAR normal?"
Tears streaked her lover's face, but he said nothing.
Disgusted with the futility of it all, she hit another button on the handle and turned off his...