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...
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,...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway.
She was crouched over an open laptop, her scowl lit up by the screen as she stabbed cmd+R repeatedly. The browser blinked frantically as it reloaded the same white text area on the same light blue background over and over and over again.
"It's past midnight in the U.S.," she muttered. "Why hasn't the prompt been updated yet?"
She scrolled down the rest of the page, cmd-clicking every link until the Twitter page popped up.
"GODDAMMIT," she cried, 'THEY'RE ON THE WEST COAST."
She felt stupid. Stupid? No, she felt worse then that. She felt bipolar and insane and hormonal.
she shouldn't have lost it like that, now he thought she was a total freak and not in the good way.
The kind of freak, you ignore their texts and messages, the kind of freak you tell your friends, "Stay away, that one is totally nuts!"
She was so angry with herself, angry that she couldn't just leave well enough alone, that she just HAD to speak her mind.
She liked him, but then that one little thing; when he asked about her....
"Stop. Look around you. What can you see? The nearest human is over ten miles away. You are alone. Quite possibly more alone than you have been your whole life. There's a physical aspect to this feeling you're having, this aloneness. It's relaxing. Take a moment. Feel yourself relax. Feel your heartbeat slow. Feel you mind de-clutter and expand into a space no longer populated by others. Feel those invisible boundaries dissolve."
The voice paused and Karen became conscious of the slow drum beat that she must have been hearing for some time. She could hear the rhythm of her...
The building appeared one day with only a white-haired gentleman who could have noticed. He didn't however, because he was too busy unwrapping a chocolate bar on the wooden bench he sat at every Wednesday. So only the wind grew unsettled with the sight of the 2-storied Japanese pagoda that shot into place in the middle of Central Park with only a sleek "pop" to give away it's sneak-up appearance.
Almost immediately, a black cat jumped from an overhanding willow tree into the window framed with yellow lacquer slats of wood. The man continued to peel away at the silver...
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...
There was blood on my pillow. A lot of blood. A ton of blood. Where did it come from? It seemed to be dripping from somewhere. I looked up. The celing was dry. I looked around, I felt my own face, hair, ears, nose...all dry. What the h*ll was going on? Then, I heard something. A step. Two steps. Steps moving across the wood floor near the staircase downstairs. Was this the source of the blood? Was it the cause of the blood? Am I next? I was not injured, but I was still terrifyed. Suddenly, something came bounding around...
The canvas of black engulfs the sky. What once was light is now night. The eggshell-white circle, the great illumination of midnight, is painted on the empty expanse, plastered in place to wane and wax. Across the night, the small dots twinkle and shimmer. In a dance of celebration, they tumble across the sky, taking a ride through the night. And, all around, all around is the night. It's just us and the night, and, all that is right happens tonight. n this spaceship of civilization we cross.
It was cold. Freezing, really. There at the stoop, on the street, glowing in red. Dark, straight hair raking her face. She shivered, stood and walked down the street. To me, this place is foreign. To her, she knows the environment like the stories her mother told her. She walks down the road away from the doorway. Where they threw her out. Spit on her. But now she walks down the road trying to keep warm. She coughs. The shivers shake her again. The cold day drops her onto the street, rejecting her and the brightness of her clothes. The...