The mannequin stared at me again, just like it did every morning.
It was the same this morning as every morning. My route would pass in front of the shop; the same steely look from that dummy. I didn't want to admit it to my older sister, but there was something about that look that made me completely afraid. "Come on, you!" she said. "Stop your dawdling, we're going to be late again, and every time we're late, it's all your fault. Come on!"
I glanced over my shoulder at the mannequin once more. I was sure, this time. Something...
'It's the largest ship I've ever seen.'
"It's the only ship you've ever seen."
"This is why I don't watch movies with you."
"Oh, look at her, look at her pandering to the camera - "
"She's an actress, it's her job."
'This is the beginning of such an adventure!'
"This is the beginning of such an awful film. Why are we watching this?"
"Because I like this film, and you're my sister, you're meant to at least try to like things that I like."
"Surely, as your sister, I am meant to pull your hair, steal your clothes, make...
The dream had been wonderful, yet it would never be real: she knows, even as she wakes, in the taste of bitter almonds at the back of her throat.
She tries to still herself completely so she can relive it in the morning haze. There was a boy-- no, a man-- and he had called her somewhere, taken her somewhere--
She breathes. In, out. In, out. Maybe there's something in dreamcatchers after all.
There had been a man in the dream. That is certain. There had been a man in the dream, and he had--
The fan drones incessantly. She...
"Light. I feel light"
"I should think so, you lost about half of you."
I struggled to open my eyes, afraid to see what had happened. The last thing I remembered before the darkness was the light, the bright light that had surrounded and suffused me, that had seemed to consume me. A hand waved in front of my face, and at first I was certain it wasn't mine, couldn't be mine. I had never been that skeletal, I had always been a rather large man.
"Easy there, you just did something stupid or amazing, and you're rather week. We...
She found the key on the internet.
It seemed silly, a little, to buy a physical and tangible thing like that to open up a locked trunk in a dream. But it was necessary, she was sure. She'd been trying to get into the trunk in the bedroom of the house of doors - the house she returned to over and over again in her lucid dreams - for years. For as long as she could remember.
The trunk, solid and wooden, banded with brass and locked. It was impenetrable. She'd tried peering through the keyhole, picking the lock, everything....
The man in the yellow shirt entered the elevator and pressed the lowest button, which was marked 'B3'. The light next to the word 'DOWN' lit up, and down we went.
"Down?" I exclaimed in confusion. "I don't want to go down. I want to go up. I pressed 31. Why is the elevator obeying you and not me? I was here first."
"It likes me better," said the yellow-shirted man.
"Why would it like you? You're ugly looking and your shirt is stupid."
"How do you know what an elevator thinks is ugly? Maybe it likes my shirt."
I...
In hindsight, the solution was obvious. Of course it was. It always is. But at the time it seemed like an impossible thing, a thing that would never be solved. A thing that would haunt her and taunt her forever and ever amen.
The crossword in Mrs Grey’s daily paper may not, to others,especially perhaps her husband, have seemed like much of an importance, but to her it was everything. It was the thing that, for just an hour or so each day, made her feel clever. It made her feel like a proper human being instead of the tired...
Pointing skyward, his finger aflame.
"Can you come here a minute?"
Trying to catch the attention of surf but drawing only seagulls, which landed on his fingertip and looked around stupidly in the low sky of November.
My whole life is a finger on fire, and wrong things coming to help. A man wearing a hat. Some flotsam. A ship in the dead of night, a drunken captain
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...
"Do you think we'll be there in time?" Annette didn't care but she felt as though she should say something to break the awkward silence in the car.
"No." Paolo answered. Annette waited for him to say something else. He didn't so she just continued staring out the window, watching the world pass by outside the car.
They had been traveling for two days, stopping only briefly at a run down motel on the outskirts of some city to catch a night of sleep. Yesterday had been Annette's birthday but the occasion passed by without so much as a balloon....