Price of a roll of Kodachrome: $5
Cost of the Canon camera: $200
Wage per photo published in Life Magazine: $25
Price per bushel of corn: $2
Day's wages for detasselers: $0.25
I was trying to count them. The little bastards kept moving around, making me lose track, infuriating me to no end. I had been awake for almost thirty hours and sleep was no closer than it had been twenty-nine hours ago. Even my imagination wouldn't collaborate in sending me into unconsciousness. Goddamn sheep.
Sheep and sleep were two very similar words, I decided. I instantly sought to catalog all the words that rhymed with sleep. Bleep, steep, reap, peep, seep, weep, beep, keep, jeep. Meryl Streep.
The original verb still eluded me. It would be a long night (and day).
Elisha, let me tell you, I love being out here. Hearing the ocean roar like it do, by golly, it's like the glorious music of the spheres.
Drowns out the screaming of our victims, too. Why they have to scream like that, Elisha? Don't they know we're just helping them reincarnate into the next evolution of the species? Damn ungrateful, ain't it.
Whats the matter, Elisha? You don't look so chipper all of a sudden. Are we out of fishing line? We need the lines to be thick and taut, so we can hang them upside down until the blood...
The pistol was cocked, ready to go. I was going to show him. I was angry, no, furious. He cut me off! In this city, that's somehting you just don't do. In my neck of the woods, driving like that could mean you migght be at the end of the line. I thought anout it, I mean really thought about it. Did I want to do this? My life would change forever, and so would other people impacted from the results of my actions. I decided to uncock my pistol, put it back in the glove box, and keep driving....
That was the last thing she saw.
It was headed straight for her chest, a glittering blade, and she saw it in slow-motion. After that, however, all she saw was blackness.
The killer straightened up after her last convulsive shudders were over. He wiped the knife almost as an afterthought on his torn jeans. His face betrayed no emotion. He walked away slowly but deliberately from the crime scene, over to a payphone. The street was deserted, the sky, blank. Slipping his hand in his pocket, the killer took out a quarter and placed it in the machine. He dialed...
I woke up hung over, my head throbbing. It felt like mini-jackhammers were destroying my frontal lobe, something I am sure the Scotch took care of last night.
The room was unfamiliar, but I had seen it plenty of times laid out in some IKEA or Sears catalog. I was on the bed with an Oak, maybe Maple, night-stand next to it. The room smelled, not good or bad, just different from my bedroom. Clothes covered the floor in front of the closet, where I suddenly saw my pants. A desperate roll to my side brought back the mini-jackhammers.
The...
"Vanquished."
"No, the word you're looking for is 'vanished.'"
"I always get those mixed up. I also get the words 'camel' and 'camera' mixed up, too."
"Don't fret, it gets easier with practice."
"Thanks for the stupor."
"I think you meant 'support."
"Oh, right."
"So, when do we get to stop pretending to be humans?"
Sheila tsk-tsked as she massaged the Ben-Gay into Devin's shoulder. "I told you to leave the shuttlecock practice alone for a few weeks," she scolded.
"I was bored," protested Devin. "I'm an athlete; I can't just sit around all day poking at my Facebook. It's bad for the soul."
"Well," Sheila said, kneading the muscles, "you'll be totally off this shoulder for a few days now. You're lucky you don't need a cast." She stood up from the massage table, walking over to the microwave. Inside she'd heated up a herbal tea, and she removed it now and brought it...
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,...
Immoveable objects.
She'd presumed that they were just an illustrive device - the nemesis of the unstoppable force. It hadn't occurred to her that, actually, they did exist.
Why they existed in a forest was another matter entirely. It wasn't exactly clear (well, the object was, that was why she couldn't see it) why an immoveable object should want to be in a forest. Was there something about forests that made it such a rich environment, suited to objects that resisted force?
Walking around it didn't seem to be an option - immoveable and apparently large. Impossibly large. It was...