One rainy street was much like another, it turned out. It didn't matter where in the world you were, whether it was city or town - it was the same.
People acted the same. They hustled and bustled, tugging coats around them, hoping that collars could be turned up and their necks could be saved from uncomfortable raindrops. Some - prepared ones - had umbrellas, using them as a more sophisticated method (supposedly). They wore smug smirks - until they bumped into one another.
Nobody had perfected walking down a street of multiple umbrellas.
They all rushed, eager to escape...
100 feet away. Or 30 meters away to be more exact.
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Sisyphus
Last seen: River Styx
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King Aeolus
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Feb. 29th
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Merope @ Ephyrae
Corinth, Greece
9 months ago
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Mount Olympus, Greece
1 day ago
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Ephyra
4 hours ago
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Tartarus
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River Styx
5 minutes ago
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I liked Erica, but Daddy didn't. She did everything for him, like the man on the advert said she would, and it had meant I wouldn't have to anymore.
She had mousy hair and it fell around her pale face in curls. She always smiled at me with her pretty eyes and high cheek bones, and at Daddy. Though he would never smile back.
Erica was always sweet and loving and kind, just like Mummy had been.
I still feel sad when I think of Mummy sometimes. Especially when I happened to brush Erica's skin. It was cold. Not like...
When the colors first started disappearing, no one noticed. After all, the first to go was chartreuse, and no one ever used chartreuse. Almost no one even knew what chartreuse was, most people thought it was a purplish-red color anyway.
So when a few bottles of French liqueur went grey, no one could tell, it might have been a trick of the light and the glass. A particularly terrible shade of salmon, popular for a brief period in the mid-40s was next to go. But most examples of that were already buried beneath years of garbage, or hidden behind five...
Back in his days, John was the sharpest lawyer in town. At the office we used to call him the "Samurai". He used to step into a court room, with a sword for a tongue, he would win over the jury, and he'd win the case, before you even noticed that it started.
So when he took on the case of the murdered child as the defence, the media was all over him. I remember him cancelling a meeting, because there were so many camera teams around him, that he could not move his car. When I asked him why...
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...
She sat staring at the skin of her hands. Her eyes traced the many lines, imagining the skin to be the brown, scorched earth of deserts, thirsty for life.
The wrinkled skin gathered above her enlarged knuckles, reminding her of dried fruit.
She continued examining her hands, wondering how the finiteness of life had come to suddenly feel so tangible.
Her veins somehow looked foreign. Her age had caused her veins to become like strange, throbbing, river-like threads of yarn, sewn to her flesh, invading her hands.
She rubbed the underside of her index finger against the rough surface of...
Majestic words like maelstrom, preponderance, warbling swirl through my creative whirlpool, pulling in pieces of conversation, tail-ends of admonitions, the lilt of swearing. I live by the calendar, fitting my days into the squares, x'ing the boxes at midnight.
Friday is the wave that crashed but hasn't withdrawn to the sea. I'll compose this in the spiked surf.
The world is a thin, hollow place.
One wrong step, and you break through the shell, and you go tumbling, tumbling down.
It is oft repeated to students that an exam is not the be all and end all in their lives, that many opportunities await all in this bountiful land of plenty.
These words are reassuring, it gives hope, and puts your life into place in comparison to all the many other people in the world, with no opportunity to even sit an exam. In some ways, it makes you feel lucky for your high, pedestalled position.
Until you...
The drugs were beginning to wear off. Minute by minute the butterflies, those glorious, evanescent, friendly butterflies, were fading. She pressed the earpiece of her headphones to her ear. Pink Floyd were sounding like a noisy nightmare. As she gazed out across the valley, with its endless vista of trees, trees and more trees, she came down to earth with a bump. She should get back to work - artificial props might give her a brief respite, but she had a deadline to meet and a quota to make. Sighing, she pressed stop and slipped her headphones down round her...