When I swam across the ocean to my new home, I never guessed that I would meet the man of my dreams, or all the hassle we would encounter. As a mermaid, I was promised at birth to the son of another wealthy family that lived like mine. Humans were off limit, although it did happen every now and again, and caused terrrible rifts within the community.
Jack was so handsome, striking green eyes just like mine and long wavy hair. First saw him fishing at the pier when my hair got tangled in his line. What a surprise he...
This fallen world or the next on. It is hard to be entirely sure of anything; gravity, what to have for breakfast, whom one should marry - fuck
kill
We stick our heads out too far and we expose ourselves in ways we could not have guessed at the beginning when we were warm floating. We forget how to float when we learn how to swim and sometime soon we will learn how to drown - or let go.
This fallen world or the next one. The choice is just as banal as it sounds. But some nights it is...
"Hello."
"What?"
"Hi."
"Who are you? No, wait. Where are you?"
"Look up."
"You're in the sky?"
"We are."
"You're..."
"Butterflies. Yes. Does this bother you?"
"To be honest, less than it should."
"We have been watching you. We saw that you were different. We chose you."
"Chose me for what?"
"The time is coming and we are here to warn you. To warn all of you."
"Warn us? What are you, some sort of prophet."
"We are of God, if that is what you mean."
"Ah."
"We bring you a message from the depths of chaos, the heart of...
There once was a woman from Kenya
Who grew a voracious gardenia
A plant that ate men
With a touch of cayenne
That the woman decided to send ya
I don't know when I stopped believing in unicorns and rainbows. But I know I was a kid. A very troubled kid. Life wasn't as easy as it should have been for a child. Everything was bigger and scarier. Especially the things and the people that were supposed to make me feel safe and protected.
Home wasn't safe. I thought it was. I thought we were the Cleavers. My parents were perfect. My mother worked hard. She kept a beautiful home and prepared perfect meals. She kept her kids in line and made sure we were all just right before...
sitting on the I see my family crumbling before my eyes. I have achieved my goal, revenge for what they have done to me in my childhood. They took all my friends and everything I was passionate about all away from me, so now I am returning the favor. There they are, my parents kneeling down as they are being beaten to the ground and watching everything they love fade away. this is the way things work now. I am the dominant one and they will suffer at my feet. They have brought this on themselves and I will never...
They gathered in the woods, but that was not enough to save them, as they were mistaken for trees, cut down and shipped to a lumber mill.
One of them was fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be made into thick planks; most of the rest were sadly torn apart into sawdust and mulch. But that one continued to live, in great pain, as he was violently sawed and assembled into a large, polished grandfather clock.
They attached to him some cold, foreign bits of metal that moved jarringly. The ticking of the gears against his aching frame was unceasing; day...
her bedroom wall was a collage of every valentine's day card, folded secret note, doodles, drawings, things her friends had written before their father's got a job in another city and moved. Streamers, deflated balloons, pressed leaves, plastic flowers, candy wrappers, subway, bus and concert ticket stubs. Polaroid pictures and regular rectangle pictures and pretty much anything else a teenage girl might come across in her lifetime of movement.
The detective went over every piece thumb-tacked, taped or stuck to the wall, writing in his little notebook.
"Usually they just run away for a few days," he said. "Then they...
"why cross at all?" was the first thought. "why cross, or pass, or walk, or tread, or sprint or anything else of the sort?"
the sun was even lower than when the first thought started, oranges now completely red, soon black.
"or, why not." the next thought. "who am i to rethink, or revisit, or retry, or reimagine, or reexamine the path now before me?"
to my left, infinity. an unstoppable openness. to my right, the past, from whence i'd come. dust.
finally, twilight. but with my final choices, no regrets. only then could i step out in front of...
He could remember the first time he saw that statue. It was one of those things you simply never forgot, like a first kiss. He remembered the first time he saw that statue, smiling majestically down at him from its pedestal, Lady Liberty welcoming him to the country, letting his heart swell up with a strange, newfound pride. He supposed it was the moment he'd become American, even before the papers had been stamped and Ellis Island had given him and his father the okay. It was certainly the first moment he'd felt American.
He'd gripped the banister of the...