Chuntao was an anxious young girl, short and dumpy, who for money spent her mornings delivering leaflets advertising pizza to households in her part of Beijing. (For no money she spent her evenings playing the trombone.) It was a tedious and tiring job, and time would drag. One rainy day she reached the doorway of a house which perched at the top of an enormous stairway. Breathless and sweaty, she tripped on the doorstep and dropped her leaflets. As she bent down to gather them up, the door opened.
"Who are you and what do you want?" asked a man...
The sound reverberated through the streets. The sound of the mob on the move. Fear clouded her mind and she acted on pure instinct, she had nothing else to work with. She ran.
Had she been able to think clearly, she would have been surprised about her instinct to run, always considering herself much more of a fighter, but run she did.
Down alleys, through gaps in fences, turning often, doing everything in her power to escape them. Everything but use the gift, the curse for which they were hunting her.
She had been hiding her abilities for so long...
That movie was so straight forward, The doctor was the hero and everything just fell into line.
I know
I like a little twist I mean it's just not entertaining otherwise
Yep
Look you want to stop off somewhere for a drink or..
Or?
She shoved her hands in the pocket of her hoodie and turned toward the alley.
It's been years she thought, probably best to leave all that in the past. Still a twist, something exciting. She moved further into the dark cramped space between the buildings.Not looking back, knowing he would follow.
The Moon would never be the same again. Not after the things I saw, the things I knew that were hiding there. I could never again look up at night without a shudder, without averting my eyes from the horror of it.
The Moon's sickly light, reflected sunlight turned mocking and wrong, crept in through my shuttered windows. I had taken to taping them up, afraid to go out at night, afraid of what might be there.
They walked down on moonbeams, those horrible things with too many angles, walked down and fed. I remember the first time I saw...
The seven of them gathered around the long dinner table and silently shuffled the serving platters clockwise. Mechanical arms held, then spooned and dropped food, taping the edge lightly against the plate. Then back in the dish and passed the person to their left, and they received from the right.
Pitchers of iced water sat sweating in the middle, surrounded by short glasses, and borders by salt and pepper shakers and piles of napkins.
When all the plates were filled and the serving dishes stopped moving they leaned their heads down and a silent prayer ran from the moving lips....
I walked into the restroom, and relieved myself while reading PEOPLE'S MAGAZINE. I got the latest updates on Bradalina, or Angpitt or whatever, while I was taking a dump. As I walked out my mouth gaped as I found out that Jenifer Aniston and Tom Cruise were hooking up.
TEXT:
OMG! JA and TC ARE TOTALLY HOOKING UP LOL!
L8R!
I called my BFF Malissa and told her about the latest update. After we talked for a while, she sighed and told me she really didn't care. I told her to start caring about things that really mattered in life,...
Holly scrutinized the first sentence of her novel. It was odd how not reading it for months had given her a wildly new perspective. When she was writing it, she'd been too close to the material, she hadn't been objective, hadn't made herself consider the fact that she was wrong in anything that she did. There were mental grooves worn deep in her mind that only now were swept away like footprints in the snow.
It ... sucked.
The ecstasy of seeing her work in print was instantly deflated by how awful she judged it to be. A single sentence...
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 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.
She had read somewhere that there were lands beneath the seas, that it was where wishes hid themselves ("Fishes, you mean fishes."), that is was where dreams lived, that it was where pearls of happiness lived.
Pearls were the perfect metaphor; beauty and perfection, born of irritation. Born of an age of suffering.
They had stopped believing in mythical lands that lived beneath the waves, and so she stopped talking about them - there was a look in their eyes that she remembered, the same look her mother had been given.
Mother had tried to take her to the land...