Light. Warmth. Heat. Fire. The smell of autumn tickled her nose. Earthy and soul reaching. Leaves swirled and the moon glowed overhead. The air carried a chill and as they discarded their clothes they drew closer to the crackling fire. Barefoot, their feet danced on fallen leaves. They held hands and circled to the right for seven skips then changed direction and danced to the left for twelve beats, then right again and left. Their chanting grew louder and they surged foreward, caught up in the moment, excitement and wonder overtaking them. One didn't join the circle but stayed apart,...
The footprints in the snow suddenly ended. Or rather, the snow ended, suddenly and strangely. The footsteps continued, singed into the dry winter grass. Black footsteps continued, an at an even pace, all the way to the dunes.
At first, I thought that they would disappear at the sand, but as I got closer, I saw that they had continued, but the sheer heat had melted the sand into glass. Glass footsteps, glittering and shining, clearly the shape of a human foot, worked their way over the dunes, without any seeming regard for the angle of the dune. I climbed...
"What's that you say?" the captain growled into his phone, "Pirates, in our neighborhood?"
He called out to his men, "Raise the flag! Ready your weapons! If they want to be pirates, they can prepare for battle."
The men went about their business, but the usual bounce to their steps were gone. Their captain had spent a wee bit too much time watching Peter Pan as a lad, and they were paying for it
.
"What weapons would you have us use, cap?" asked one soldier.
"We have no cannons and no plank, are you crazy?" muttered another soldier.
The...
Yeah yeah. We're here. Uh huh.
Well, we had this idea. Not totally sure it was smart. Yeah. Timothy is looking at it right now. No, no, it's a black flag. Pirates. I know. I know. I told you we weren't sure. How did they react? Not well. They kind of ... panicked, I think you'd say. Jumped over board. Uh huh. I think if we were starting from scratch we'd probably think it through a little more closely. No I know. The problem is they thought were were the pirates. Well... Okay, let's agree to disagree. Yes it was...
Pleasure. Burn. They're the only two words on the whole page - in the whole book if he was honest - that he had read and actually remembered. The rest was a jumble of names, bad descriptions, inplausible mixes of action and consequence.
Pleasure, the word just rolled off the tongue, almost like a cat unfurling itself and stretching lazily, purring as it spots some new distraction.
Burn, more akin to an explosion, though with the same purring quality, it flooded into his ears a lot more passionately than pleasure did, filled his mind with images, tortorous landscapes with dark...
No one had ever heard the wind blow like this before. It rushed through the delicately carved holes of the sculpture, Driaz's final piece. Made of metal and glass and plastic and wood, it looked like some insect eaten tree, the haunted remains of a mighty forest. It was shot through with holes, some tiny, some massive, some which threatened the very structural integrity of the piece, especially as the wind was blowing through it.
No one really knew why Driaz's Will demanded that his piece be set up way back in the desert like this. It was certainly a...
On the fourth day of the invasion, the defenders opened the gates of the zoo. Let those bastards contend with lions stalking them, rhinos charging at the sound of gunfire. Make them fight in a storybook, where hawks might dive down on them, and elephants would trumpet victory for the city.
That was the idea certainly. But these were zoo animals, most born in the zoo far from any jungle, and the rest had not stalked since they were young and foolish. They yawned in the heat of the day and wondered when the man with the feed would come....
She cradled the faun's head. She listened to its soft breath, listened to its complaint, listened its petition. But what could she do? What judgment could she give that would hold in the face of her ever-shrinking kingdom. Every year she shrunk, every year there were more men, and every year there was less.
At night under the moon she called her sisters, who had all once been close, close enough to be one, but now far and spread. They came if they could, sent emissaries if they could not. They talked until the edge of the sun, bloated and...
I was there the day that the idea of nation ended. When the black flags went up next to the reds and blues, the stripes, the stars, the figures, and all the rest. It wasn't just the black flags of course, it was the greys, the oranges, strange symbols that might not have even been human, but expressed a very human idea, "This is mine."
It seemed to happen all at once really, old boundaries didn't matter anymore, people were now brought together by an idea, or ideas more accurately, no longer separated by false lines drawn on old maps,...
Days like this embolden me
To comment on the quality
Of 6ms's frustrating UI.
The problems with the pagination
Require no imagination
To fix, and also I must wonder why
Some days I cannot find a prompt
(Or anything that rhymes with prompt)
And my reliance on the site is waning.
Don't get me wrong, I'm here to stay
Or else I'd surely go away
But sometimes it can be quite aggravating.