Deluxe. Platinum. Gold. That is the key to success, she said to the audience, wine glass in hand. Everyone broke our clapping. She smiled, made a short, stunted half-bow and left the stage. She passed through the crowd with elegance and with purpose, deftly sidestepping those stumbling drunkenly about and avoiding any pitfalls into small talk and conversation. They smiled as she passed, vaguely recognizing her, but not exactly sure what her name was. Passing by a waiter, uniform and immaculate amidst it all, she left her wine glass on his tray. It was only a pleasantry, after all. It...
She opened the envelope and screamed.
"He's coming to get me!" Keri shouted, "Zachary's coming to get me!"
Keri wanted nothing more than to leave her life in New York and move South to be with Zachary.They dated briefly, he proposed, she said no, and that was it. It wasn't just that she said no, he wasn't entirely serious and she was only 18.
Keri married Jack a few days before her 25th birthday, and she was completely in love with him. She never forgot Zachary, even on their wedding day. Zachary, or Zak as she called him, was her...
The only thing that felt worse than being left alone was being left alone at nighttime.
It was 2004 and Keri was 18; visiting Zak's downtown apartment after he finally kept a promise and picked her up to see him.
On his mattress on the floor - crumpled blankets, the two of them in t-shirts and underwear.
He got high, they watched MTV until 4am; in between he ate Cheetos and asked Keri to marry him. He always, always, talked about how beautiful their children would be. How could Keri say yes when she was 18? How could she say...
"Don't touch it", he said, "Danny is going to call."
"How can you be sure?" Marcus asked
"He said he would, now sit down and relax. We just need to wait".
The phone sat silent for a few seconds both of them staring intently at its small features, the chrome casing, the fingerprints of the thousands of times it used by others.
"He's not calling" Marcus said softly
"Dammit man, you needs to relax, he said he'll call then he'll call, just wait." Leon paced out his words to making every single syllable count. He was looking past Marcus at...
Framed by white-washed plaster walls, she was a sharp contrast to the beige and grey of the street surrounding her. She reached up and brushed a stray lock of black hair from her forehead, looking over her right shoulder down the street. She was waiting, and her eyes scanned the oncoming traffic carefully, searching.
The young man across the street had stopped walking when he noticed her, a sudden burst of brilliant red against the subdued building. She never looked over at him, never stopped looking down the street at the oncoming mass of bicycles, cars, carts, trucks, and people...
A breeze is a current of air
A portent that hasn't a care
For the cold that it causes
...
..
Please forgive me these pauses
The author was killed by a bear
When the father arrived home to his squalid, Lower East Side tenement building, he was exhausted. He paused at the door to pose for a Jacob Riis photo, and then trudged though the entryway. The grit of coal from the furnace in the oil refinery still covered his face. This, despite the fact that we worked on the docks hauling fish. His apartment was in the rear of the building: a cramped, filthy space overlooking a pile of rubbish that the realtor had described as a “quaint fixer-upper with a partial city view.” He approached the door, removed a rat...
I remember my Nans pension book. The smell of the paper and the ink. I would hold it to my nose as I walked to the post office. Nan would pre-sign it and Mary, the post mistress, would happily cash it.
Then, at the main counter, I'd purchase Nans usual forty Number Six Tipped and fizzy cola bottles for me. It didn't matter that I was only eleven. In our little village everyone knew everyone.
Eventually the pension books were replaced with the new banking system, something my Nan never quite got the hang of. My trips to the little...
The sound reverberated through the streets. The sound regenerated through the beets. The sound remunerated above the seats.
Then, the sound transubstantiated inside William Butler Yeats, who became a poet.
The sound instantiated outside the session scope, ultimately causing a null pointer exception. The sound invigorated the soccer players and re-elasticized their cleats.
The sound was of a kitten who had received some treats.
I don't know what the hell this is. I think I'm having an off day.
The Potentate surveyed his creamsicle tower smoothly. "Good good," he said in his nasally voice. Rubbing his hands together with childish glee, the balding old man dove face first into the treat and began to lap it up as his guards looked on with a mixture of amusement and derision.