Everyone was on board for the show. They had their fly gear and their hats. I, of course, forgot my sunglasses.
"No problem," mama said, "just squint!"
As we lined up, I squinted at the audience. It never ceased to amaze me that the entire population of a town would stop what it was doing to watch our show every week. But they did. All fifty-four of them, including the dogs.
I was getting antsy. This week, I was the leader! Never before had a child led the show! I wasn't nervous; there's no room for nerves in show-biz. However,...
He heard two doors smash and with a loud screech and a blinding beam of light, the door to the back opened. He expected the three masked men to open, but found a woman instead. "Is your name Martin?" "Who are you?", he asked. "I'm no one, until you tell me your name." His eyes almost fully adapted to the brightness and he could now see her clearly. She was wearing all black, except for a jeans jacket. She seemed to shiver in the cold, and he couldn't help but notice, that she's kind of cute.
Sam pulled the tuque tighter around his ears and hunched into the wind. Spring, hah! With no snow to melt, there was no way to tell the difference between today's nasty wind and yesterday's blistering sun.
He banged his way into Tim's and leaned a little too close to the muscle mass in front of him, seeking warmth, if not comraderie. The dude turned, looked down into Sam's wrinkles and coughed. Once. With phlegm.
Sam stood firm and bumped into the plaid workjacket when the line shuffled forward.
When he heard the words, "Large double double...and a Boston Cream for...
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,...
Quantum leaping isn't always fun. Not when I end up as a woman. Find it unnerving especially as all I was hoping to do was to channel the skills from one of my parallel selves.
I needed to cook a three course romantic dinner and knew that there must be a Galloping Gourmet self somewhere out there, expert on wines, the best cut of meat and good at table decoration.
Jasmine, was not at all what I wanted, especially as she was a concubine to an extremely ugly Prince, even though she did know how to cook. She was his...
The key couldn't break.
Forged by the hand of fate
In the fires of adversity
Her love would mold
The white-hot metal
Into the shape it was meant to take
Then
Cooled by her touch
Quenched with desire
It would unlock
Anything
All I could do was stare down at the text book and pretend that I was listening to the class going on around me. I just wanted to be free again. I flicked between the pages and the past documented in the battered book. I wonder if when those sailors set out that they even thought for a glimmer of a second that their whole adventure would be covered by a short paragraph in a 10th grade history book and a photo that barely even grasped what their lives were like and how tragic that journey was. I knew that...
Bocci. Bocci ball. Bowling on a lawn. That's what I was doing in that old photo. But strange. Usually you bowl with other people. Usually there's markings on the ground, a target ball to shoot from. In the photo, I'm just standing there in the middle of the lawn, facing the house. My house? God, I don't know whose house that is. It could be a field house, or a club house, and I'm playing bocci, a game I don't know how to play, have never, as far as I'm aware, ever played before in my life, and I'm hunched...
The following is excerpted from IrishAbroad circa 2000:
Flashback .Sunday morning 11am...Woke up to the sound of me oulwan bawlin up the stairs..."Will ye get bleedin up, and go and get me the News of the World outside the church for jaysus sake, out til all hours last night"....Me head was bleedin spinning...I could never handle those rock shandys. I was rackin me brains tryin to remember what happened with Suzie, Phil, and Mags, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember...The waft of Kearns` sausage’s wrapped in batch loaf smothered in lashings of grease was what greeted me...
I was at home with my wife when we heard the noise start. At first just quiet thumps. Then louder and louder. I had her hide in her room, the door locked.
I grabbed my axe. By then I could smell something off. Something rancid and foul. I shouted, warning the intruder. This was my home and no robber or murder was going to violate it like this.
I tore through the house, screaming for him. No sign of him. And the noise had stopped. The kitchen was empty. The hall was empty. I ran back to our bedroom. The...