Rose stopped short, skidding slightly along the crumbly, dusty mountain path on which she had been jogging, happily listening to her music, enjoying the warmth of the day on her back. She blinked a few times, tried to catch her breath, and then walked back a few feet to where she had thought she had seen the strange sight, the one that had stopped her morning run rather abruptly.
And there it still was. Two enormous pink butterflies playing together in the sunshine, flitting back and forth, their wings glinting, both beautiful.
Rose watched for some time, unable to believe...
Back in 1943
Everywhere was tyranny
It seems the perfect time to me
To test my backwards time machine
If Hitler dies, what happens then?
To future women, future men?
Perhaps we've come to pick the locks
To history's temp'ral paradox
I was going to the store to buy figs when the kid with the long brown hair ran past me. She was running so fast that her body was on an angle... like 45 degrees and her hair was raking back. There was a big piece of wood stuck to her back.
I bought my figs and then I started the arduous walk home. The girl ran past me again and I was able to stop her.
"Why are you running so fast?" I asked.
"Because of the wood stuck to my back," she said. "It is infested with termites."...
There was a comma where a semicolon should have been. This drove her crazy. She thought of actually shooting herself in the head but that would have required a 3-day waiting period; besides, she hated guns. So she kept going through the papers, red slashes here, smiley faces there. But many more slashes than smileys. Soon she just started making slashing smiley faces. Her students wouldn't know the difference, she thought.
After all, they couldn't tell the difference between simple punctuation so how could they get her irony?
John, her favorite student and best writer in her Senior Classics class...
The sun set. My boat had stopped drifting. The Delaware River between New Jersey and Pennsylvania was calm. The rain stopped, the crickets chirped, happy with the still summer air. My bathingsuit was finally dry. The only problem with that river is not having shelter on either side from a rainstorm. I watched the residents of the river banks put umbrellas over their heads while grilling. Some took their dogs and children inside. The teenagers laughed, and had mud fights. The rain stopped, the grillers closed their umbrellas, the dogs came out to play, and the teenagers stuck their feet...
It was my "life's work," that's what they call such a thing, but it makes it sound so organised, like my life was something i contolled and I sensibly chose each morning to get up and expend my earthly energies on this tower. "You must have a lot of self-discipline" people say to me when I meet them at parties and we discuss our lives as though we see them clearly, as patterns of behaviour about which we can make broad statements. I try to answer, as best I can, saying something appropriately self-effacing.
What I'd like to tell them...
We were eating tuna fish sandwiches on the green outside the palace. The sandwiches were soggy but we ate them anyway. The sky and the water were dusk. "It's dusky," I said. "No," she replied.
We ate the soggy sandwiches as we stared at the sky. When you're lost in thought, your sense of taste dims. Staring at the sky and down at the water, I could feel my taste buds run up to my eyes. I could almost taste the sky.
I could tell you I tasted the water, but it just tasted like water. Soggy.
"There's a deer in the hallway!" yelled sixth-grader Emily Sagashi as she opened the door to the fourth graders' classroom.
As a mass, the students threw themselves at the door. Stumbling into the hall, they clamored, "Where is it? Where?" But Emily had already ran down the stairs. Now she could be heard yelling the same thing to the third graders.
Normally the teachers would gather the students back inside, but the promise of a wild animal storming the halls was such a surprise, and so unusual, that the students took off in every direction. All Emily had said was...
Bombs were the last thing on his mind. Literally. Jim was struck dead-on in the head by a warhead, and, naturally, it killed him instantly.
But when Jim regained awareness, it was in a huge warehouse, cordoned off into a long line; others were standing in single-file, inching slowly toward what appeared to be some sort of bank teller's window. From the looks of the line, however, he didn't think he'd be getting service any time soon--the line doubled back on itself at least fifteen times.
Hours passed, people crept, and he eventually got within ten people back of the...
The first day of school and he was already in a fight. Mark sighed as the three seventh graders approached him from three different directions. His electric blue eyes took in the boy in front of him, a lanky kid with a bulbous nose and mean eyes. Beside him, another boy stood with his arms crossed over his broad chest, a sneer on his face. And behind him, Mark knew, was the last boy, a slack-lipped teenager with dull, incurious eyes.
“Lunch money,” Skinny said, holding out his hand.
“No,” Mark replied coolly as he sat back in his black...