She normally didn't speak up. She was the quiet, reserved type. The type who'd sit at the bar with her friends, and just silently listen to the conversation around her.
It was Julie that got her frustrated, though. Not just frustrated, angry. Julie was talking about the camp she'd sent her son to, one of those camps that promotes a more 'traditional' lifestyle. They advertised it as being 'moral' and 'healthy'.
The young woman had no children of her own, she was far too young for that. She worried that she was wrong for telling somebody else to raise their...
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....
Daring to be noticed for the first time in her life, she pushed her chair back and stood up. Jerome, her uncle's brother, took no notice of her. Her hands were cold and shaking. He continued eulogizing. "He was a great man, and there's no denying. We all..."
"No."
That got his attention. All of them, really. She clasped her hands together tightly, willing her voice to be steady. Jerome raised an eyebrow at her. "Did you have something you wanted to say, Candace? Why don't you come on up here and say it?"
She swallowed, hard. The idea of...
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...
Every day, the old man walked his old dog in the park. A chain fence separated the park from the road. Also, every day, a squirrel would come down out of a nearby tree, and run along the top of the fence. He came for the dog. Chattering, squeaking, he ran back and forth, incensing the dog. This drove the old mutt absolutely batshit. They had a conversation:
chatter chatter chatter
ROO ROO ROO
chatter chatter
ROO ROO
every day it was like this. The squirrel was doing it to torture the dog, you see. As the years went on,...
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...
She stood waiting by the binoculars. How sappily romantic was that? She shook her head at her own ridiculousness.
To distract herself, she gazed out across the city. The beautiful city she called home.
From here, everything was so clear and straight. The roads looked easy to navigate, like one could never get lost.
She had moved to this city four years ago. Following a dream, a memory. Some how she had stumbled upon him. And he was, real.
He was also no where to be seen.
She looked down at her wrist for the watch she didn't wear anymore,...
since the days have past, a girl of a young of her time has to run away as if she ever knew what was going on. She had always had a taste for running away from others yet she didn't know what to come, after a few years the girl came when i said her name but she would always want to be alone by herself in a dark cold room of the night. After a day or so had passed she began to come when she was told even tho she didn't know why, she thought that she had...
The children were not at school. They had better, bolder, brighter things to be doing. The teachers didn't notice. They never did.
They ran out while at break, amidst the confusion of supposed bruises and teases and stolen lunches. The gates were easy enough to get past. Each girl's hair was neatly done up with a hairpin, after all.
The sky was bluer once they got out, it seemed. So they ran, ran hard, ran free, ran wild. They quickly enough leaped through the confines of urbanity and into spaces never explored before, wild forests filled with strange creatures. Each...
My mother never told me you could. But I did. And it was amazing.
I.
Met.
Her.
Now, I know what you are thinking. Some hipster wannabe hooking up with a bespectacled BDSM loving freaky chick over rare Miles vinyl in a second hand record shop in the village. A match dot com advert. But no. Far less interesting than that.
Haribo and limes.
Yes, at salsa class there was a girl I had my eye on. I had already clumsily tried to impress her by doing card magic at her through a window one night as she sat with...