The daring were punished. They were punished with exactly what they wanted, and found out the paucity of their imagination and desires.
It was near midsummer when the djinn arrived in Baghdad. He promised to each person, exactly what they wanted, the one thing. There were no rules, no catches. This was no monkey paw to wish upon, but a djinn in all his smoking glory, blue fire leaping from his eyes and his ears, red lightning visible from his mouth when he spoke, and a long rumbling thunder when he laughed at those that came to make their wishes....
1943
Population. 1943
Even painted over, the 2 was still visible if you looked at the sign at an angle. And the previous 1 if you were real close, but from a passing car, residents or the occasional visitor to Sleepy Falls would see, if they were paying attention, that a new resident now inhabited the town. Ted wiped his brow with his customary cotton handkerchief and reseated the dusty Sheriff's Hat.
"It's not straight." said this week's Deputy, who decided to punctuate this pearl of wisdom with an increasingly annoying, yet habitual spitting out the passenger window.
The fact...
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...
There was blood on my pillow. I flew out of bed as soon as I noticed it, but I could not remember where it had come from. I began to panic as I stared at it and tried to think about what I had done.
Was I attacked?
Was I drunk?
Was I a party in pillow-related homicide?
These questions whirled through my head until a sudden noise nearly knocked me over with fright. The phone was ringing. I worried about who might be calling, and simultaneously tried to collect myself. "Hello," I said, "Who ith thith?"
These words alone...
She had read somewhere that there were lands beneath the seas, that it was where wishes hid themselves ("Fishes, you mean fishes."), that is was where dreams lived, that it was where pearls of happiness lived.
Pearls were the perfect metaphor; beauty and perfection, born of irritation. Born of an age of suffering.
They had stopped believing in mythical lands that lived beneath the waves, and so she stopped talking about them - there was a look in their eyes that she remembered, the same look her mother had been given.
Mother had tried to take her to the land...
“Over here! It’s over here! I’ve found it!” yelled James, pointing frantically at the area to his left. “Honestly, there’s gold over here!” The shout seemed to fall on deaf ears. After months of searching the island for the treasure, and getting nowhere except lost, no one got too excited about so-called finds anymore. They would wander over in their own time, and usually they would kick at the jewels lying on the ground, or in the hole, or under the tree roots and declare them to be fake.
James, as the youngest on the expedition, still held out hope,...
Gradually, that was how the world where it was okay to be a geek, a fangirl, a dork, herself, came into being.
It started with an acquaintance who knew the animated series who became a best friend.
It grew with a sister who accepted everything and opened her eyes to new worlds.
But it finally became real to her when she met him, the boy who pushed her fringe out of her eyes and led her onto the dance floor when she was sad. Who had moved closer in the fog and who had taken her hand without asking. The...
Hats. Of every shape and size. I love them all. You may call me crazy, or you may not. I love them all, of every color and make. I make some, I find others. I keep them all by my side, and drink my tea as I study them. Who am I you ask? Some strange Hatter? Well to be more precise i'm a MAD Hatter. Yes that's correct. I am a bit mad, but who isn't? Hats just so happen to catch my fancy, and I love to make them. I also collect them. I can find you a...
In 1921, he flew from the Great Rift Valley. No one believed him, of course. They knew a man could not simply spread his wings and fly. Because a man had no wings, and that was really the point of it. But he insisted he had done it. “Just because no one saw me,” he said, stretching his arms up to the sky, “Does not mean it didn’t happen.”
No one was convinced.
“I flew,” he continued, “From one side of the rift to the other. Over the canyon. I soared above the ground and floated in the sky.” He...
Monica Mistaikov
I stood on the old wooden bed I always slept in. There was always a window up high and I would always look up to it at noon and see the clock chime. There were so much out there waiting for me to learn. I wanted to go out there, explore the world, make friends. But I couldn't, because I can’t. Where I am from is a powerful city, Nastavbriki. This city, we have to protect it with our lives so no rebels come. But my anonymous parents dropped me to an orphanage when I was very...