He sat in the truck parked on the gravel drive, his arm hanging out the window, a cigarette dangling from his finger. The radio was on and Bon Jovi's Bed of Roses was blaring.
She watched him from the behind the closed screen door.
He lowered the visor so she wouldn't be able to see his reddened eyes. Def Lepard's Pour Some Sugar On Me came on next, and he tweaked the volume nob. He could tell she was still looking at him.
He finished his cigarette and flicked it out the window. He took a long drink from the...
When I took Peter his final cup of coffee of the day knowing that tomorrow he'll be somewhere special instead of his smelly flat, I had a strong conviction that I had made the right decision, even though it was unlikely anyone else would understand. That's because they didn't have the knowledge I did. Secret. Life changing. Extraordinary.
In the morning we walked downstairs to the waiting car, Peter was chatting merrily unware his life was going to change forever.
Meanwhile I was perplexed why I couldn't open the door to my padded cell. Peter would be scared in the...
He hadn't wanted the light there.
She had insisted - there was light on her, light on her voice, lifting her up, letting them all see her. He was playing too (had a solo during one of the songs, actually) so why shouldn't they see him?
He'd tried to protest that it wasn't traditional, and she'd just given him one of those looks, the one that made him certain that if ever (...when) she did get signed the record label wouldn't be able to force her into one of those moulds they seemed so fond of.
He'd stood his ground,...
Captive. Surrounded by watr, the woman could not breathe, could not fight, could not even open her eyes. Her waist was bound and her feet were weighted and she was sinking. Soon to be erased.
The man in the boat had asked her one last question before he rolled her out. Now, sinking like a parachuter, she did not think about her little boy at home, or her parents (they would be so sad), or all the things she would leave behind. No. Her last moments, the last grains of sand in her proverbial hourglass, and Mari was thinking about...
We are there. We are in the shadows, in the gaps, in the spaces between words. We are in every moment where you pull away, where discretion replaces narrative, we are there.
We are there in the knowledge that you do not write all things that happen, we are there, waiting in the wings, filling in the gaps, in the spaces.
You did not write us - you never write us, nobody writes us (and who would read us, who would read every banal moment, every second, what soul could stand the painful inevitability of one moment following the next...
"Ugh," Shiloh said, rolling her eyes over the steaming cup of coffee that she had been holding for the last twenty minutes.
Her boyfriend Micah looked across the table and couldn't help but let out a very quiet laugh. "What?" he asked, still laughing as he did.
"Don't what me," she replied softly, shaking her head as she took a very long sip of her still piping hot coffee. "Don't, Micah. You know exactly what that ugh was for."
After Micah had graduated from university with a degree in chemical engineering, he had convinced himself that he didn't want a...
Heavy midnight. The crawl of the planchette under our fingertips. The triptych was coming alive. One creature sprang from the painted panel. A beast, horned and elephantine, illuminated by the moon through the cellar window.
It spoke to us through the board:
“Extradimensional bovine dreamfeeders graze upon fronds that sprout from the heads of sleepers. These dreams—long, lush, iridescent fancies rooted in neuronic soil and flowering up into the night—are their food.
“The beasts lumber through a meadow of musing at night, their jaws drooling plasmic sludge, their snorts ruffling moppet heads from across the chasm of dimension. They pass...
"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...
I counted the Braille dots on the "DOWN" button for the 43rd time.
Then I counted them for the 44th time.
And the 45th time...
No longer satisfied with simply counting the dots themselves (there are always 18), I was now counting my counts, which, at least, were never the same, though always increasing.
Have you ever been stuck in an elevator? Neither have I. I am inexperienced with this. I don't know what I'm supposed to do while stuck in an elevator. I don't know what other people do when stuck in an elevator. I don't know what Jesus...
There is no point to seeing the forest, all you can ever see are the trees. And the trees are not the forest. You'll never comprehend the true size of the forest, for it is the world. You'll never understand that the forest is everything, and everything is the forest. You are the forest too.
So do as our people have always done. Wander, wander through the dappled sunlight. Wander, wander through the glades and covers and hidden places. Wander, wander without direction, because there is no direction. There is only forest.
Find the place that is your own. You'll...