When represented on a flat surface, a right angle can appear acute or oblique.
"Carry the wreath, Henry, your mother is waiting."
Father's terse words spoken from the side of his mouth, muffled by his coat's collar and the stub of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He fancied himself a small-town Bogart. He was the only one.
Two days past christmas and we're out before dawn, getting decorations.
"For next year. Don't worry about it," he says, pulling the flask from the inside pocket. "Carry it another few blocks and maybe I'll give you a sip."
He drinks and staggers and coughs. The butt falls from his mouth and I crush...
.that's when my life changed forever. Not only did i just shit myself, i was staring at the body og my bestfriend through the window of my car and she was dead. DEAD!!! what am i gonna tell her parents? Oh god, what am i gonna tell my Grandma? She'll be devastated! I know how much she loved annie! I know!!! Oh well i better get this over with.
I get out of the car and go to annie's body. THen i drag her to the river and push her in. Wait... was i not supposed to do that? Will...
I found the small book when we had to pack Grandpa's things so he could move out of that old house, and into an old people's apartment building. Mom said it would be better for him there, people could watch him and take care of him. Better care than she could, she said.
I said I could do it, but she said I had to go to school, and I never even walked the dog before he went to live on that farm we see on the side of the highway between our house and Grandpa's.So how could I expect...
Lost without a hand to hold, Shelly, looked both ways down the street. Dropped down from the curb into an alley between fender and bumper and peeked her dark brown eyes along the concrete corridor.
A dark station wagon rolled by, riding heavy and low. Momentarily, her reflection stared back at her in the tinted window, haloed in the streetlight. A brick caught in her throat and she swallowed, but it wouldn't go away.
Shelly turned stood there, arms out, resting on hood and trunk and swallowed and gulped and shook her head and bounced up and down, hoping the...
She blew out the candles on her birthday cake, and the world we knew was extinguished. The next day, streamers and half-deflated balloons still taped to the walls and ceiling, Dad came home and pulled Mom into the kitchen and they spoke in whispers.
Jenny looked at me and snuck up to the television and turned down the volume, so we could hear was they were saying, but Mom knew and stuck her head in and told us to go down to Grandma's for the afternoon.
We walked down the block, turned right at the corner store, left after two...
You get so used to one set of reality that you don't really consider that another one could exist.
Which is a very pretentious way of saying that feelings change without us even noticing it.
It's only when I'm reminded of the intensity of feeling that I notice that I am simply not feeling it anymore. What once felt like lifeline and lifeblood is now just a passing memory. A potentially entertaining thought process, but not worth obsessing over. Barely worth my time.
It's simultaneously comforting and distressing, to know that such intensity can be felt one moment but in...
It was difficult getting to people to understand that actually you wanted to be in the cage. That the cage was the safest place at the moment.
The rest of the world had gone mad - or at least, it seemed that way. Maybe the world had always been like this, maybe there had always been something in a stranger's eye, maybe there was always something in the rain that made it taste funny.
Maybe the drugs were wearing off, maybe he was finally waking up to the reality. Or the drugs were taking effect, maybe he was devolving (he'd...
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...
Nothing worse than weak coffee to start a Monday morning. I don't know how many times I've had to tell her, it's 2 scoops per cup of water and even then you aren't going to get a jolt when you drink it. I use three and a half scoops per cup of water and that right there is a coffee that will wake you up and send you out the door. No sense in drinking coffee flavored water, now is there.
So I poured out my cup and felt her eyes staring into the back of my head and I...