"there was blood on my pillow and a noose in my heart"
These country singers were getting downright moros, good though. I flipped the dial on the radio looking for a talk station, always helped to find a little of the local flavor, keep me grounded or at the very least feeling like I was grounded. I was play acting at this and many other lives and I knew it but kept it up.
The telephone poles ticked away - wooshing peripiphialy.
The great desert southwest of my heart was blooming with the rare cactus flower of love.
In a...
She was the most delicate girl in town - pale skin stretched tight over a skeletal face, hair the colour of fresh milk, body tall and angular. Her eyes were of the softest blue, her cheeks flushed pastel pink, her lips like an English rose. Fragile, barely there, more ghost than anything real: that's what people said about her, that's what they thought when they passed her in the street. But as delicate as she was, as insubstantial, there was something very real and present in the way that she held herself and in the manner of her walk. One...
She opened the envelope and screamed. This was what she had been waiting years for, the answer to her quesitons. As sobs racked her body, Casey could tell from her reaction that this was not the news she had been expecting.
"She's not going to talk to you?" Casey whispered, moving closer to comfort her friend, now whimpering face down on the bed.
Angela hiccuped softly," She doesn't want to see me."
Although the search for her mother had been fairly easy, just a few clicks on Facebook, Angela was not prepared for the heartbreak that would come when her...
She always eats oranges in the morning. Awake at 6.30 and out at once to the fruit stall below her window. The sound of the traders' early morning banter is hazy in the grey veil of October dawn and the lines of fruit like a crown of brightly coloured gems awaiting her selection. Two precious oranges in a brown paper bag and back to her third storey apartment. When she slices into the dimpled skin of the orange its juices swell onto the kitchen counter and onto her pale fingers. Her hands are laced with the citrus scent for all...
The water was clear as she looked out over the bridge at the river flowing past her. It was as clear as the choice that she knew she had to make. She had to leave. She would not kill her baby. The child didn't deserve to be born to a father who didn't even want it. She could feel the baby kick inside of her as she tightened her coat. He had been really angry when she had told him about the baby - he'd even hit her. She just couldn't go back and risk both of their lives.
She...
"Birds are terrifying because they used to be dinosaurs and they are just waiting for us humans to stop remembering that fact. Waiting for us to turn our back. And then, just when we think we're safe, BAAAAMMM! All those cute little sparrows and robins and doves turn into raptors and shit - but now they can fly too, so there is nowhere safe. Seagullsaurus will shit on us and then swoop down and gobble us up as we stand there, freaking out about getting shat on.
"Imagine all the pigeons in cities growing razor sharp fangs and an unquenchable...
The city was empty. The skyscrapers during the day looked powerful and full of promise. At night, they just looked like pieces of art. The hustle and bustle of New York was beginning to bug me, for the first time ever. I was going to walk far, but I'd see someone. So I stayed in my quiet neighborhood, passing by restaurants and apartment buildings. "Being alone was possibly the worst thing that has ever happened to me." I thought to myself. From then on, that's all I could think about. That sentence rang in my head like a dinner bell....
With a roar of displaced air and grinding gears, the blast shields protecting the gun emplacements retracted, and the defensive batteries opened fire. A river of hot lead and explosive ordnance spewed forth at the oncoming creature.
It barely stumbled. What didn't explode harmlessly against its armored carapace whistled by as its eldritch powers deflected the bulk of the barrages.
Attack helicoptors and missile-laden jets zoomed by, but they were mere gnats to the attacker. It lumbered ever closer to the fortress.
General Davis grimaced as a swipe of its claws downed an entire Blackhawk squadron. It wouldn't be long...
She opened the envelope and screamed. Sweepstakes? Her? She never dreamed it could happen, but there it was, after countless magazine subscriptions to periodicals she never intended to read: Guns and Ammo, Creative Quilting, Fantasy Football Insider. Piles of these damned things lined the hallways and rooms of her small, two-bedroom house.
She didn't intend to read the magazines, but at the same time, she couldn't part with them, just in case, just in case one day she could sell them or donate them or look something up in one of them that might, just might be of some importance...
Here are words that don't quite form a story. I'm typing them because I'm compelled to write for six minutes a day as a creative warm-up. If I don't, I get antsy; my palms sweat, my skin itches, I hallucinate. Ok, that's not entirely true, but I do enjoy this activity, and I find that it really helps me "prime the engine" for a more focused day. I work at a radio station, and my job is to write scripts for those goofy things you hear between songs that identify the station. It helps to have a good cup of...