Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. A nice day, bright, the sun moving between tall building willfully. The young girl stared at the sidewalk, waiting for another band of light to finish marching across. Her hands played with the material of her gown, absent-mindedly. She was hungry, but ignored it. Now was not the time.
At last, shade, and the girl stood up, and gently emerged from the doorway. This shadow was fat, and growing fatter, as the sun made its inexorable way. She took a step, and then another. At night,...
Framed by white-washed plaster walls, she was a sharp contrast to the beige and grey of the street surrounding her. She reached up and brushed a stray lock of black hair from her forehead, looking over her right shoulder down the street. She was waiting, and her eyes scanned the oncoming traffic carefully, searching.
The young man across the street had stopped walking when he noticed her, a sudden burst of brilliant red against the subdued building. She never looked over at him, never stopped looking down the street at the oncoming mass of bicycles, cars, carts, trucks, and people...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway.
The warm dirty mist saturates every poor. Across the street relentless construction of new industry raged on erasing the remnants of an older time.
The girl tries to imagine the world as it was, as she has learned in her history books. But now only progress and drives her world. She can not hear or picture the silence or the wildernesses she imagines and longs for. She grows weary of the diminishing magic of the unknown.
She listened, intently. The night was quiet, and she might be alone. Then again, she might not. The girl in the red gown wished she were somewhere other than Beijing, huddled in a doorway in the night. But where would she be, if she could choose? Back in England, probably. There, she would be fearless. There, dangerous men would not be chasing her across the city, seeking to recover an ancient idol - really, it was an ugly thing, wooden and splintery. She wished she knew what all the fuss was about. James had wanted it, though, and so she'd...
Everybody slept at eight. You had to sleep by eight. The air grew still as the sun went down, such was the way of the savannah. By the time darkness had enveloped the world, the constant patter of feet heard throughout the day disappeared.
Once in a while, one of the goats would make a noise, otherwise, it was dead silence, like a drawn breath- the night was listening. Huddled inside their rooms praying were the superstitious, trying to ward of Dimka son of the soil, who it was said came for human sacrifice around this time.
Silence, the air...
She wanted to hear the whispers in the next room, but the pleading to her ears were also unheard. She stretched up onto her toes as if height would give her hearing a greater advantage.
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing. Go away!" she frantacilly whispered, ushering her little brother out of the room with her eyes.
She suddenly heard footsteps approaching, and she pressed her small frame against the wall as to not to be seen. The red drapes of the gown following like an obedient shadow.
"If that is what she wants, that is how it will be."
The...
Most times we just picked on the same couple of boys. they were easy to spot and easy to make do whatever we wanted them to do. I suppose that we never thought about the fact that we weren't proving how strong we were by picking the weak ones. I suppose we never thought about much at all.
But that day I decided that I wanted to pick on someone bigger than me. Someone who seemed a lot like me, and them. When I found him he was alone but in just a few minutes we were surrounded by kids...
She clutched whatever she had to her chest. Whatever dignity. She thought to herself. I cannot, do this. But she remembers what her mother had told her. You can, you can. She knocked on the door once, but backed away, out of the doorway, and leaning against the wall. She heard a door open, and then close. While the rain closed in on her, as she stuck out her tongue and let it fall. She could barely hold in the laugh. She took a deep breath and tried again. She knocked on the door slightly, and this time, waited for...
She told me never to open my mouth, never to talk. She said I am nothing, no one, and not even a mere object. But I did, I gave my self an excuse to talk, as I bulleted down Quincy Lane, and ran into the cemetery on North Boulevard. I walked over to the tombstone that represented what ever life I had. What ever excuse I had to be a happy person. For the next hour, my teardrops fell on the stone. And quietly, under my breath, I read the words engraved in the stone.
IN REMEMBRANCE OF TOM E....
Cuthbert was a fairly average Crocodile, with the expected number of teeth and glinting eyes like two marbles set in his swarthy head. He was not a particularly happy Crocodile though, as he was kept in a pen in a tourist attraction, where he was made to jump fifteen feet in the air to obtain his dinner, which was invariably a raw, plucked chicken on the end of a long pole. He found this predictable, boring and undignified.
So, one day, like any other. When the crowd gathered to watch his feat, cameras and phones poised to record him springing...