"Yes, I know that she murdered someone. A terrible accident, if I do recall."
"An accident? She killed her husband when she was 25 because he was fucking his secretary. Remember."
"I do remember, but she repented and now is attempting to live a peaceful life. Can't she have that?"
"Why do you love them so much? They are disgusting, and I hate being here. The only we reason we had to leave was because you loved them more."
The earth shook for an instant, as the old man moved his king.
"Lucifer, I will not have you speak about...
Once in beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, studying the minute details of the back of her scull, while her mind twisted through the rails of reality.
One moment Beijing, 2010. The next moment Cairo in the 1940's, then London in the Victorian era, fast as electricity moved down her synapses and shattered through her mind, she was gone again. The great australian plains. The Transiberian Rail. The nineteen hundreds, the dark ages, the Triassic period, the great black wasteland that existed before existence, and in...
The children were not at school. Where were they? Unkown. I am an English teacher at a high school near Houston and, like any other weekday between late August and early June, I was expected a classroom of childen in front on me. Not on this day. The bells rangm yet I heard niothing. I saw nothng. Heck, I didn;t even smell anything! I walked out into the hallway and talked with the other teachers. Nobody had any students in their rooms. I then saw all the princiapls talking with angry words and loud voices. They didn;t seem to know...
We speared our forks on the tablecloth stained with soy and spice and duck sauce as the waiters took the picked-over "Chinese" dinners from our sight. The restaurant catered to American tour groups whose beef and corn tastes fall too unrefined for authentic foreign dishes and who long to travel thousands of miles just to conjure a memory from the hole in the wall Taiwan Garden down the end of Mulberry Street, across from the courthouse.
As our servants sprinkled the remains of our feast in the dumpster like fish food to the swarm of street children eager for their...
Spinning.
As I drift towards the ground, I spin and the world spins around me. The blues and greens and browns flash past, a kaleidoscope around the carousel of my descent.
The spun silk canopy spinning with me and giving an orange glow from above as the Sun's rays find it in the blue, blue sky.
The Earth rushes up, faster now. Still spinning, I begin to tense. Remember the instructions.
Relax.
Let your legs go limp.
Tuck and roll.
The spinning stops with a thud.
"I am getting so tired of this jerk being thought of as the best reporter in town" Dan muttered to himself, "but I'll show everyone that I believe in the news somehow". Dan looked across from the news room to see everyone praising bob, the jerk, then suddenly the ground started to shake and throw everyone to the ground. "An earthquake" bob thought, "this is finally my chance to unseat that snob". As dan grabs and runs outside,
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...
"One scoop chocolate one scoop..." the blonde girl behind the counter moved almost mechanically as she expertly balanced four scoops of smooth ice cream on a giant waffle cone.
"And some sprinkles, please." The girl cast a tired glance in the direction of the little curly haired boy staring up at her expectantly. A smile made its way onto the girl's face as she dusted the last scoop with colorful sprinkles and handed it to the boy. His eyes lit up as he looked at the wonderful treat in his hands.
"Don't drop it," The warning came from over the...
Until now, she'd never thought of herself as pretty. Even this morning, she hadn't really thought of it. A white dress, sure. A veil, sure. Kitten heels, yes. She had told Marjorie that she didn't want her make-up done.
"I've been doing all right for forty years," she said. Marjorie just looked at her and then looked away without saying anything.
Marjorie was pretty. Everyone thought so. It wasn't so much a matter of thinking, even. Empirically, she was attractive. But she wore a lot of make-up.
This morning Marjorie wasn't there. Wasn't there to watch her pull on stockings...
Taste. The middle, forgotten brother in the family of senses.
They don't have helper dogs or monkeys for people who can't taste anything. No one is working on smaller and smaller devices to amplify or stimulate tastebuds.
You can either taste or not and no one really cares.
The one good thing about not tasting anything is you can win all kinds of money on the playground by eating things. Things that might seem disgusting.
I was the richest kid in elementary school. I'd takle bets and then down worms or bugs or the digusting ham and peanut butter sandwich...