Words were labels that he had never paticularly enjoyed. Words were lazy, letting you lapse into not thinking about them. Once you had the label for it, you could move on, not bother thinking about the object itself.
"Weird" was a label. It was a sentence. It was a write-off. A decision that he wasn't worth worrying about, not worth bothering with. They tried to pretend it wasn't, or at least some of them did - at least the cruel ones were honest. They didn't pretend they wanted to understand him. As far as they were concerned they did; they...
It's night time tonight, but it's not dark. At least the places we go aren't dark. They are darker than the places that you might go in the day, but not as dark as the daylight places are now. We taxi-ed here, but now we're not sure if it's the right place. It feels right, the lighting is right, but there's no door. A man is walking his dog, and the dog is finding places other dogs have peed and peeing on top of them. It could be human pee the dog is covering, too - people with newspaper blankets...
She opened the envelope and screamed.
This was not the day to be squeamish. This was the day her daughter would be returned. Unharmed.
The finger was the wrong size and shape. John, when he overcame his initial shock, told her it was plastic.
They had both made the decision not to tell the police, followed the kidnapper's instructions to the letter.
So why was the envelope sent? A reminder of what could happen or was there something else going on?
Whilst Megan was making a cup of tea, John wondered whether to tell her about the tiny photo he...
We spent the last 36 hours in bed ticking off everything from the list, blindfold food tasting, leather fetish, school girl, french maid, alien, headmaster, Orient Express, aristocrat and gardener, furries, blind date, highwayman, pirate, rock star groupie. traffic cop.
Miriam hoped that would let her off the hook, no more sex for at least a few weeks. She was fed up of always having to be someone else.
Did Steve ever want her from the start or did he always regret commitment and act like he had the choice of dozens of women?
Tall, black hair (natural) even in...
When Martin stood there in disbelieve, but she was deadly serious. "I understand that you have every reason not to trust me here, Martin, but I'm not kidding. If I bring you to the camp, you will never get that chance again. Your teleporter will be gone forever. So please, do what I told you. And come back." Martin thought about his brother all of a sudden, and how he always pranked him into doing something stupid. He felt the little scar on his index finger, where his brother tricked him into touching mom's iron. And he also thought about...
Vanquished.
She looked at the body of her enemy lying there on the floor. She knew she should feel a sense of triumph, but instead there was only sorrow. Sorrow for the lost years, the million memories that would never be, the milestones both present and future that would never be shared.
For you see, the dead body belonged to her mother.
Her mother had run out on her father soon after her birth, and the girl had wondered all her life what it was like to have a mother. Someone to make sure her hair was perfect on picture...
She cradled the faun's head and he went to sleep.
I had read the final line of the bedtime story about a thousand times, well that is what it felt like and each time Suzie reacted as though it was the first. It made me wonder about the magic words from the authors of these kinds of stories. Did they have any idea just how powerful they were? To instill such feelings in the children listening they could hear the same story over and over yet always hear something else?
Often when my eyes were too tired to read, I...
They were right in front of him, huddled on the stage. Fred checked his cell phone and saw the show started in ten minutes. If he didn't have those marionettes in his possession before then, the world would end. Or at least this theater. But since his wife and daughter were in the audience, it might as well be the whole world.
"Nice try, Fred," a voice sounded behind him. Judy. She, the hater of all things puppets and puppet lovers, had planted the bomb in one of the heads. "But if you move, I'll put a bullet through your...
The darkness was approaching. The reds and oranges of the sunset, creeping together with the blackness that occurs when it's time for the moon. Contemplating life, reaching for answers. Like, "why did I leave home," "how did I watch him pack the car and drive away?" and others. Soul-searching. The sound of crickets, the rustling of small animals. I was scared, but not of my surroundings, just of what my late 20's had become. A joke, a hot mess, a scandal, some lies. I bet that's what people were thinking of me anyway. A job I hated, a life I...
Becky hoped Tom saw what she had written before her teacher did.
Mr. Smith was notoriously tidy about the things in his classroom. Desks were wiped down once a day, not by the school janitorial staff but by him personally. In other classes she knew friends who would write on the desks, leaving messages for the students who sat there after them - a sort of school texting service between students without cell phones, but Tom took only this one class after her. Would he see her message? She could pass it off as a doodle and if he said...