You can count me out, I said. I am not doing it. No. I left this years ago. I have a life now, I told them. No more of this stuff for me- I'm out now.
Of course, they pleaded. They always do. But I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders in movements perfected over the years. Please, please, please! We'll give you anything you want.
Never any creativity, really. It was all the same thing. They were small. They wanted to be big. How did their little prods affect me? They were merely molehills aspiring to be mountains,...
The lamp wouldn't turn on and I had to sleep in the dark. I had to imagine what was lurking without light. I was afriad at first and then my eyes adjusted. My pupils opened up. In the morning the sun came in a few strands at a time and I realized that I was still alive and the monsters, goblins, all the things I'm afraid of didn't get me. The light doesn't have to be on to feel safe. Safety is still there with light. I listen to my dog snore and she snorts. She is fat and I...
When you dream you can dream in color and any color will do. The more vibrant the better. When I'm old i will dream in purple because I read a book once that said purple was an elderly color. When I was young I dreamt of popsicles and bubblegum the colors of the rainbow and pink hues. I remember all of my dreams giving them varying degrees of importance based on my age and how seriously I'm taking myself. Dreams about indiscretions are the best. I wake up and realize that I didn't do it after all. I didn't cheat...
The music in her headphones..."if you lift me up, and get me through this night, I know I'll rise tomorrow, and I'll be strong enough to try..." She stared through the mist and clouds wondering where she had gone. What had become of her life, why here, why now? Kaitlyn wanted to run away from life, love, because she really had neither. The Adirondack mountains towered over her, the chill in the North Country air was giving her bare arms a chill. Kait's brother died yesterday, 9/10/01, and today even more people, so many people died. She was glad to...
I jumped.
I know it was dumb but at the time I didn't really think I had any other choice. Besides, it's not like I really thought about it. I just did it. Just took that leap. Stepped off the edge without looking down first. He was coming after me and my instinct took over and I am now lying in the bed that I made.
Of course I had the choice of socking that guy at the bar, the one who chased me, the one weighing about 300 pounds and all of that muscle. Of course I could have...
Gradually, the ankle will become the hip, the hip will become the shoulder, because the parts become the whole.
The whole joins to other wholes becoming greater wholes.
Gradually, everything will unconnect, unbecome because of something somebody wrote down in his notebook. As then, gradually, we will reconnect and rebecome.
Gradually, you will realize everything is in your mind and nothing that happens ever happens
You're forgetting what happened and remembering what didn't
I'm now your memory and have given up mine
When you're gone
Will that be a blessing or a curse?
I lash out in frustration
But the strike is soon forgotten
And I'm the one left wounded
Twice over
You forget what happened
And I remember for you
And in doing so
I have given up the last pure memory of childhood
I'd trade, you know
You take mine, I'll take yours
But I think you'd find my memory
A bitter thing
You forgot
I remembered
What happened?
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. I am out of food, out of electricity power for the radio, and abandonded in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. I do not know how or what happened that led up to the plane crash all I know is that I managed to survive two weeks on the scraps I found in the plane and a nearby pond. This is my last statement to the world if anyone finds this, I am going to travel north...
My eyes were tired; I rolled over in my bed, and stared briefly at the moon.
I turned back to face my fan; the 90-degree summer heat only dropped to 78 overnight, enough to make me sleep in shorts and a tank top.
My phone buzzed and lit-up its orangy color. Message from: Alex. I clicked to read the message, and it was some drunken rambling. "Oh boy," I thought, "what now?"
Our messages would go back and forth with when we would meet again, to what each other did that day or night. That was the summer I owed...
The dystopia is a genre of fiction designed to teach a lesson about society by imaging a future society warped in some terrible way. The interesting thing about dystopian novels is their reliance on a single, antagonistic character to provide a terrible monologue of exposition to the horrified protagonist, explaining just how and why society went bad, and why the system must persist.
George Orwell's 1984 has O'brien, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has Mustafa Mond, and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has Captain Beatty, the remarkably well-read "fireman" who has turned his back on all that literature had to offer...