The city was empty. It was early Saturday morning, the sky was grey and rain fell lightly. Almost imperceptibly. This was his favourite time. It felt like the entire city belonged to him. He would wander down abandoned streets, look into windows of the closed shops, sometimes he would even sing out.
He started humming loudly as he walked. A pigeon heard him and thumped his wings and took off, landing a few feet away.
He hopped over a puddle next to the curb and sang out load. "They call me mister Pitiful, baby that's my name."
This is freedom,...
"Mister Cloone?" said the sergeant as he sat down. "You know why we're holding you, right?"
Cloone shrugged and leaned back. "Fascism? Something something smokes?"
Sergeant Miller took off his own glasses. "We're stopping you here at the Richford/Quebec crossing because you were smuggling Cuban cigars into the country. Why would you do that? You didn't even try to hide them."
"It's the Hemingway in me. Cuba. And 'fuck the system'."
"You think that smuggling cigars makes you Hemingway?" asked Miller.
"I think it's a good start," replied Cloone.
"We have the boycott in place for a very good reason....
If your parents are going to name you after a song, there are a few things they should think about.
For a start, it needs to be a good song. Actually, no, it needs to be an actual name. Nobody wants a kid called "You know what they do to guys like us in prison."
But it still needs to be a good song. A really good one. Not some one-hit-wonder.
And it should be subtle. I mean, "Penny Lane" - that's obvious. "Layla"? Not so much.
Maybe I'll change my name to Layla, when the forms come through. Or...
god finger-painted the sky in blue, and glued on layers of fluffed cotton for the feel of it. he carefully arranged macaroni noodles below it, forming the shapes of volcanoes, of funeral pyres. he was making a field. he imagined sun ripened workers tending his pasta land, sweating and itching, and he made it so. they did not have time to wonder who created them. god was thoughtful enough to give them mountains to look at. he was proud of that. he took his artwork home for his mother to see.
The results were in, and the guy she voted for came second. She wasn't one bit surprised. Kate was never the lucky one.
At school, her younger sister was the academic one, and of course this was the attention grabbing trait where their father was concerned. Acheivements, medals, gold stars, good grades. These were the things that made a child great.
Kate was bestowed with other virtues. Naturally blonde hair, a pert, rosebud mouth and breasts at fourteen. Her male attention had come from another place altogether, usually behind the science block under the watchful gaze of Gary Spivey and...
I stand on the fine sand, gazing out to sea. We stood here before, didn't we? You and I. Younger, then. Innocent perhaps. Lovers learning about each other in those early days.
The time we spent on this beach was perfect. Like an advert on TV for far flung luxurious holidays. Our own private paradise. We didn't want it to end, did we?
A man walks past. Dressed in green trunks, he glances at me. I signal to him and buy. He's feeling lucky now. Selling watermelon and coconut is not easy at this time of year. I feast on...
Sal knew it was too late the minute the whistle blew. That train had been keeping time in Millersville for twenty years and when its screech filled the air, everyone knew it was one in the afternoon. An eclipse could turn the day to night and no one would doubt it was in the PM if the train sounded. Heart racing and pulse pounding, Sal made a desperate dash down the road, passing the stable and skidding to a halt. "Now there's an idea." If some idiot wanted to leave a saddled horse loosely tied to this hitching post just...
There was a comma where a semicolon should have been. This drove her crazy. She thought of actually shooting herself in the head but that would have required a 3-day waiting period; besides, she hated guns. So she kept going through the papers, red slashes here, smiley faces there. But many more slashes than smileys. Soon she just started making slashing smiley faces. Her students wouldn't know the difference, she thought.
After all, they couldn't tell the difference between simple punctuation so how could they get her irony?
John, her favorite student and best writer in her Senior Classics class...
"Well shit, that didn't work," the conductor said.
He walked around the wreckage, pulling out passengers. Women, mostly. The men waved off his advances.
One gloriously attired woman emerged from a smoldering welt of torn metal as though she were departing at Poughkeepsie. Nary a scratch or displaced hat-feather.
"You are the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on," the conductor thought. What he said was, "Ma'am."
The day was still high above them, children kicking rocks along the tracks. The conductor scratched under his hat and wondered, well what the hell now?
A man sitting in the...
There once was a man who live on Richmond street, he died a few years back. Took care of his elderly mother who used to shave her head and named her pet cat Winston Churchill, she had a few pet birds too. Anyway, the man was a Musician. He used to park his van down by this old run down building in the center of town and sit with the door open playing his guitar. He wasn't the greatest and he wasn't the worst, he just really enjoyed what he did. I forget his name but I haven't forgotten the...