There was blood on my pillow. Prom tomorrow and I was still bleeding from the tooth extraction. Four wisdom teeth removed. And I was off to prom.
My date was an ex-boyfriend. We were desperate for the quintessential high school experience. Desperate enough to hook back up again.
My dress was a hand-me-down. Less Pretty in Pink and more High School Reunion. I didn't know how to sew, so all I could do was attempt to cut off the ruffles. Blue taffeta--not my best color.
The handbag was from my grandmother. White sequin and plastic pearls. I tucked the syringe...
We danced until the mimes came home. It was Halloween and the mimes owned the bank. They ate the bank because the bank was made of chocolate. There was no place to go. It was snowing.
So Jenny, my dance partner, grabbed one of the mimes and tore his stomach open. Blood and gore flew everywhere, but that wasn't important. What was important is that inside the mime's stomach was a warm motel where we could stay. The proprietor of the motel was Hulk Hogan. He rented us a room for $5 plus a bag of pretzels.
In the room...
When he said he'd take me far away, to a world I'd never seen, I had expected more than this.
"You're just seeing the scaffolding."
"What is there that isn't scaffolding? It's...there's nothing else there. It's hollow. It's broken."
He covered my eyes with his hands, pointed me in a direction and hissed "walk" in my ear.
I had presumed this was going to be a date. Clearly I was incorrect.
I could feel the ground beneath my feet alter, and suddenly everything felt different - I was enclosed, and yet not enclosed at all (there was light spilling in,...
Words like knives, thrown back and forth across the room, like a death-defying circus act.
Husband and wife tossing sharp insults, from the couch to the kitchen doorway. Neither landing anything deep, glancing wounds, already scraping scarred tissue.
Neither really feels anything for the other anymore. But the dance, the battle, the contest keeps them together. Light reflects of the blades as they flip and fly.
Thud into walls. Plink against the floors. Bounce of their scaly armour of experience, disdain and dull hate. It aches in their bellies. They think it might offer some release, against the mounting pressure....
The room faded away around her, the bed, the dressers, the walls and windows, disappeared, faded out, until the only thing he saw was her standing there. A sheet twisted demurely around her body. Hair falling haphazardly. Chin tucked in slightly, eyes looking up and beckoning with each slow flap of her eyelashes.
Nothing else existed, just her and him and the unbearable distance between them.
The sheet shifted, her leg emerged, bent at the knee. She spun slowly to face him. Walking forward, unbuttoning his shirt, kicking his shoes off and into the white void surrounding them.
The emptiness...
Balanced on the line, he told her again, "Put it down!"
"No!" she screamed, spittle frothing at her lips. She waved the knife menacingly towards the rubber coated power line.
"You don't have to do this," he said. "Let's just be reasonable about things."
"Reasonable? When have you ever been reasonable? What's reasonable about quitting your job and becoming a tightrope walker?! You've wasted all our money chasing this stupid dream!"
Down below the crowd gazed up expectantly, silently. Sweat dripped down from his face, gliding noiselessly past his shirt, pant legs and feet, drifting in the air currents down...
In the Kiliswa village, status depended upon how many bricks you could carry at once. If you put down any of your bricks, even for a second, you would immediately be pounced upon by your rivals.
It was a harsh life. It wore at you, carrying gigantic piles of bricks everywhere you went, day and night. Only the strongest survived; the rest perished.
Among the strongest were Ja and Na, twin brothers whose parents had died from carrying too many bricks at once (a twin pregnancy was especially hard, for the mother must carry her additional weight AND her bricks...
It was so completely and utterly disgusting. the boys were throwing the book round the room while she fumed and screamed at them. the other girls teamed up to stop them. after they were kicked out of the classroom and punished, they just joked around and acted like it was all fun and games. after that incident, that was where i stepped in. i went to the library and wrote down every book in the database that concerned dealing with bullying and peer pressure, then brought it to the teacher as a list of references she could look to. but...
When I was twelve I went to sea, aboard a small ship. They hired me to clean and sweep and feed the men, in exchange they said they would take me across the ocean to the new world.
A week or two after shipping out, a storm rose on the horizon. The wind she blew and rain she fell and waves crashed into the sides.
The captain went first, and then his crew, leaving just me and another, a drunk.
The sails were torn, and the bow was pierced, the hull became full of water. Neither of us knew how...
Kid Boxer's dad was an alcoholic and sometimes when he was liquored up enough, or liquored up in just the right way, he would bestow upon Kid Boxer his hard-won, deeply questionable wisdom. Towards the end, Kid Boxer's dad was drinking a lot, so the advice was coming fast and furious.
One thing Kid Boxer's dad liked to expound upon was the idea of going down swinging. "Fuck those pricks. No matter what, you have to go down swinging. Nobody can fault a man for trying, as long as he went down swinging." It was all pretty much like this,...