So, give me more details, sweetie. No, not that kind of detail!
Where'd you go? What'd you eat? What'd you wear? Come on, babe, we need more, more, more!
Did he pay? Wait, I need to light up...ok, go. Credit card? Flashy. You're kidding - champagne? On a first date? Seriously flashy.
Ok, so what next? Did he leave a tip? No way, cheapskate! Bet they remember him there anyway.
And where'd he take you? His flat? What, the old "my mother's staying with me so we've got to go to a hotel" line? You're kidding - no-one really says...
Charles didn't know what to think. The heat on his cheeks hurt too much, but he didn't like it when the flame disappeared. Jenny was the one holding the camera. She told him that they could all share the candle. It was one flame for the entire group. A moppet party, dad called it, because it was not their birthday.
Mom was sick. Charles could only think of that. She'd pale cheeks and skin stretched over her face, and her hair tangled and black and her mouth a gaping, gawping hole. She didn't even recognize any of them when they'd...
"Tell me what you did. Tell me what you did yesterday."
She was at the bottom of the stairs in her own house. She was alone, but she knew she wasn't. The lights were off and it was dark.
"I was home. There was nobody there, except him."
She put her foot on the first step, and slowly pulled herself up. When she reached the second floor, she put her hand on the railing to steady herself.
"I felt like I was going to pass out. It was because of him."
She walked into her bedroom, looking nonchalant though there...
“We were thrown overboard, casted onto the waters left to our demise! They captured us, tortured our very souls mercilessly with wicked demands! ”
“No, I saw you guys, you had parachutes, and falling in the water were totally your own fault.”
“But we were held hostage, left in a God-forsaken tower all tied up with (mostly) nothing to eat or drink! Only when rays of the forgotten sun poked through the crevices of the sturdy wooden door, were we forcefully fed with the remains of frogs and sour wine!”
“Oh, you mean the balcony? Isn’t access to the torch...
I clutched onto the flowers. Today was the day. I am only 19 but I am getting married right now. My father was a rich businessman and my mother died when I was very young. My father than re-married and she married a beautiful Parisian woman. You may think she is a beauty but she is a pain in the arse. She treats me like rubbish. "Go fetch me my earrings," she would call out. But one year later after marrying my father she died suddenly.
My father couldn't bear this again, so he sent me to an orphanage. I...
He was a great runner. Clare ambled along at the back, jogging along, lost in a daydream as usual. He steamed ahead, focused on the finishing line. He had lapped her once already; she had felt the wind pick up, the footsteps thumping on the ground, then he'd passed her in a blur. The other girls were right behind him, wanting to be the first ones to be with him when he finished.
There, he'd finished, she saw. The girls were surrounding him, praising him. One even dared to reach out and push back a stray lock of hair. Clare...
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...
When the father arrived home to his squalid, Lower East Side tenement building, he was exhausted. He paused at the door to pose for a Jacob Riis photo, and then trudged though the entryway. The grit of coal from the furnace in the oil refinery still covered his face. This, despite the fact that we worked on the docks hauling fish. His apartment was in the rear of the building: a cramped, filthy space overlooking a pile of rubbish that the realtor had described as a “quaint fixer-upper with a partial city view.” He approached the door, removed a rat...
My feet ached, but it was well worth it. There was blood on one of my insteps, the left one, and when I walked around the floor I tracked her blood around with me. The room, nothing more than an abattoir, had fit the bill perfectly. There was the pen I'd led her to. I said nothing more than, "You'll like it. It's the spookiest little spot." And she had crawled inside without the least hesitation. And as soon as she did so, the smile left my face, and the grimace reappeared, and I thought, "This is for all those...
Before the crone could lift the latch, the outsider entered unbidden; not something wisely done at a witch's door. The boy seemed to need folding to miss the oak lintel. Felt cap respectfully in hand, he spilled over the urgent threshold.
"Some rich master has stolen my Bess away from me!" he blurted out.
The old woman assessed him bending his way through the old wooden doorway. Green doublet. Old but smart. Yellow hose. Bachelor. Sixteen Summers. Mayhap a little more, but large - she smiled - in every respect.
He hadn't noticed the maid, half shoved behind the door,...