So, maybe she wasn't what a guy wanted in a girlfriend. She was loud, and rowdy. Always speaking her mind, blunt to a fault.
She didn't know what guys wanted, They just didn't want her.
21 years old and not one date, not even a first kiss. "Failure." She breathed.
"Did you say something, Charlotte?" Her mother asked, she shook her head.
"Nope." She continued to look out the window as her mother drove down the highway.
What was wrong with her, she didn't feel ugly. and she liked her sense of humor, but then why was she so invisible...
I'm with stupid. That's what his t-shirt says. the arrow points at me, because I always walk on his left. People read it and look at us and laugh. They don't know that he doesn't wear it for jokes and giggles. He means it. He always wears it when we go out together, which is only once a week. He allows me to do the weekly shopping with him. He makes the list but I have to carry it, because he always pushes the trolley.
Somewhere deep down I know he's a control freak and I should break away. Amy's...
He'd sat patiently on the threshold of the kitchen all afternoon. She'd dropped countless morsels of crust, of walnuts, chunks of apple and even some of her own snacks, the clumsy klutz. Yet he'd abstained, withheld, conquered himself.
Now she was taunting him -- he felt it deep in his soul. She'd left the pies to cool -- small round pies, aromatic sweet pies -- at eye level. His eyes. She'd gone from the house (where? did it matter?) and left him to conquer himself.
Taunting his resolve. He thought to his mother who'd trained him in her ascetic ways....
then it picked up, it picked up like the coming of an ocean born storm. Not a movement in the air; a few dark clouds separate. Aeros licks your face, sending a chill down your spine right to your sacrum, right down into the earth: grounded. Crystalized. Everything becomes clear yet remains fractal. You sat down next to me. Your thick accent warming me up on this cold afternoon. But your not present, your a another world away, its probably the middle of the night. Maybe your enjoying a midnight snack.. maybe your thinking of me too. And maybe the...
He likes his own room, but he likes mine more. He's five. Half the time, if he had his way he would climb back inside me. He can never get close enough. Half the time. The other half he's complaining. Scowling. "You're interfering with my personal space!" Like he's breaking up with me.
So when he stands there, waiting, in the corner, and he asks if he can share our room, our bed, our space, I do what any rational human would do. And that's to pick him up and hold him, smell his head, that getting-bigger head, and say,...
The car stalled. The roads were half washed out and the rain pounded like a blacksmith's hammer on the hood. The storms began a few days ago, but before that it had been a dry summer. After the first downpour, people started smiling and stopped fanning their faces. Life strained under the drops in vegetable and flower gardens.
After the first whole nights of dark heavy clouds, the constant grumble of thunder, people were still trying to be positive. Good for the forests, dry as tinder, they'd say. The river was too low anyway.
After a week and flooded basements,...
Sophie stood at the window, the curtains snug around her shoulders,trailing behind like a dress, or veil. The sun was dipping down behind the trees across the way.
He should be home by now, she thought, chewing the already ravaged thumbnail on her right hand.
She thought about the fight they had the night before. How she had held onto the seeds of those feelings for so long they had germinated and grew and soon the roots were twisted around with her insides, and the branches and leaves moved with her arms.
The anger had grown and become parasitic. And...
They gathered in the woods. Huddled together, shoulders pressed against each other for warm and support and that deep basic desire for some sort of human contact.
"It's good to see you again John," an unclean, wirey man nodded to his fellow and they clapsed hands.
"You too. Have you news?"
"None. There hasn't been much activity the past month." The man nodded grimly as he listened.
"One of our nests got hit, we lost a few, but the rest of us are fine."
"How about the rest of you?" The other members of the circle, three men and one...
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...
The anti-grav boots were worth every penny.
Shelly had saved for weeks, mowing lawns, delivering papers, collecting coins from every cushion in the house, to earn enough hard cash to buy them. Her mother had told her not to waste her money, that they were probably just galoshes with springs on the bottom, but the girl refused to be deterred. The magazine ad had proclaimed them anti-grav, and there was a Truth in Advertising law on the books, so they must be the real deal.
And she was right.
But not in the way she thought she would be.
Instead...