She opened the envelope and screamed. She could not believe him, she simply could not believe that he was still persuing her after all this time. Even though they were living miles and miles apart, he still insisted on writing her. He was the reason that she had left their small town for a big life in Paris. Why couldn't he just leave her alone? Why did he always need to have her? She couldn't understand him. But, as much as she hated to admit it, she was still in love with him. The timeless quote, "Absence makes the heart...
Giving in wasn't an option anymore because I had given in too many times before.
I'd taken it time after time - too many times before, and this has me broken. I'm broken, broken from you.
You've simply abused me, in the finer way. The finer way where not all the cracks show, in the way that I can hold them in so that they are only something I know. In the way that only I will know when I see you again, and the cracks come stabbing on like a nightmare.
Now when you're feeling down, I won't risk...
Sandy was impressed. Her son, John, had never thrown a ball back like that before - so hard and fast that it bypassed her completely and flew over the wall at the bottom of the small garden they shared. "Nice one, Johnny!" she yelled. "Let me go and get it, I'll be right back!"
She yanked open the wooden gate recessed into the red brick wall and entered the narrow alleyway at the back of her house - and all the other houses like it. She looked left and right and spotted the ball rolling away from her, towards the...
Think warm thoughts.
Everyone hears about the other problem. Spontaneous Human Combustion, like it's some mysterious force. Ninety percent of the time, it's just a smoker who nodded off in a polyester easy chair. As if it's some big mystery. The other ten percent, you have your idiots that accidentally got soaked in lighter fluid, people trying to fry things, and other morons. Investigators act like it's so mysterious, but that is just because they don't understand fire. How it works, how it feeds. It's a bunch of pseudo-science, like a medieval doctor trying to cure people through bloodletting and...
When we reached the top, we were so dizzy from the thin air we'd forgotten why we had to climb and headed back down the mountain.
At the bottom, clear-headed, we remembered why we had to climb and headed back up the mountain.
This continued for the rest of our lives.
Ridiculous. I've tried to write to you probably 30 times since you moved away. I have unfinished letters, words stuck in my head, of a million different ways to say the same thing.
In April I wrote a letter to you in my head on the car ride home from the mountains. Then I went home and typed it up; deleted it, then pulled it out of the 'recycle bin' on my desktop.
Now it's January, the only thing I ever sent was an 'I Miss You' card with a dog on it that looked incredibly sad and I have...
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.
Surprisingly, I don't mind all that much. It's much calmer out here in the abyss. There's a strange peace that comes with being nothing. Or, rather, not being. There is a difference, you see.
Because I am not, I am able to not be wherever I like. And I am not in the middle of everything.
While I was alive, I loved stories. Stories were incredible things. I would look for them everywhere-- music, movies, books, newspapers,...
May crept silently - or as silently as the fallen leaves and cracking twigs would allow – towards the old house. It was one of those places that every kid knows; full of mystery and the promise of ghosts, ghouls, dead bodies, mad old ladies in wedding dresses, or maybe just nothing, all of which was exciting in its own frenzied way.
May would not normally be any where near the house in usual circumstances, but truth or dare at a sleepover was a serious business and since, at eleven, the truths were all about boys and love and kissing,...
Let's play a little word association game. I'll start. Are you ready for the word? I'll wait.
Ready now? Okay.
Potatoes.
No, now you say something else. Let's try again.
Potatoes.
No, see, you just repeated my word again. This isn't an echo game, you're not supposed to be the Grand Canyon. Let's try again.
Potatoes.
Okay, seriously, say what comes to mind when I say the word potatoes! I know, obviously the word potatoes comes to mind, but you have to say something else. Because that's how the game works! Come on, son, you're better than this!
What's that?...
"I want that and that and that" said the blond girl in the dark woman's pennycandy store. She wore an old dress and brought in a quarter, all in pennies. The woman, an Armenian, was her best friend Marie's mother. It didn't matter that she was. She was still frightening to many children, with her dark thick brows and the scowl. The long silver yellow hair and the odor of meat that is just beginning to sour.
"You have enough, get some more" said Sonya. "Marie is upstairs doing her homework. You shouldn't bother her", she said to the girl...