Please do not ask me to write some fluffy SciFi romance. Nothing will have changed by 2070. I will probably still be alive, I will probably still have this fucking job.
Remember when you hired me, based on the screenplay in my application? I worked hard on Zilly and Jack. For years, my every step was fueled by the thought of Zilly and Jack seamlessly executed on a Broadway stage. (A production, I mean, not a beheading.)
"Such wit!" you exclaimed. "Such cutting-edge quirks! We love the way Zilly listens to movie soundtracks while she studies BioChem! Dun Dun DUN!"...
"Tis a penny," said he, and bent to retrieve the copper coin from the sidewalk. Holding it between gloved finger and thumb, he inspected the date with a squinting eye and dropped it into his vest pocket.
"Aye, twy twirrly twee, a penny's enough fer you an' me," he sang and performed a pirouette for the passerby.
A woman, richly attired and ambling along with an aristocratic gate, stopped to consider the man as he continued to spin in circles. A member of the upper crust, she lacked that innate mechanism, honed by the lower classes, which steered one away...
She blew out the candles on her birthday cake, and the world we knew was extinguished. The next day, streamers and half-deflated balloons still taped to the walls and ceiling, Dad came home and pulled Mom into the kitchen and they spoke in whispers.
Jenny looked at me and snuck up to the television and turned down the volume, so we could hear was they were saying, but Mom knew and stuck her head in and told us to go down to Grandma's for the afternoon.
We walked down the block, turned right at the corner store, left after two...
Loved him for an evening.
Sienna had a way of loving them that way. In one evening her compassion for the man at her side transcended adoration.
The men usually left quickly, a blur of parties, cigarettes and alcohol. She was happy enough that way, and of course so were they.
The man in the red hoodie was a bit different. About ten years younger than her if she cared to admit it. As slim as her, with large, dark, cow eyes. Sweet as pudding and she let him linger a week.
Apparently had found religion recently, tried bringing her...
The dapper man picked up a penny. Having stopped, he was hit by an unsuspecting driver who failed to see him get skewered by the starting handle from the high cab of the grocer's van. At first I smiled for having placed the coin, specially bought at auction 68 years from now. And then… absolutely nothing happened.
When SciFi authors tell you of the Grandfather Paradox, don't believe a bloody word. I'd spent a fortune, and most of my adult life pushing the boundaries of Quantum Symmetry, SuperStrings and a host of other areas of Science and Technology. All for...
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...
i wanted more tattoos
watching the brother and girlfriend get their's didn't help
but the funds weren't in order
the timing wasn't right
ryan talked me up-
gave me more ideas- made me crazy with anticipation
the elephant
the neatest idea yet
the elephant skeleton
done in blue.. from white to navy blue
want want want
but.. must wait wait wait
the elephant dragged it's feet
and as for now
..is dragging still
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...
In these parts, they could not afford trains. Instead, they strapped the Jews and leftists and gypsies and cripples and social undesirables onto sleds on the back of a Volkswagen and hauled them to the camp, which was really a slapdash cardboard affair. The guards were lazy and disinterested. They really didn't see a point in the whole thing, but they did their jobs nevertheless, smoking cigarettes with the more gregarious prisoners. They resented the prisoners and beat them - After all, they thought, why should I have to waste my life standing around guarding these people that the Reich...
It wasn’t a specific look, or anything she said exactly. It was the things she didn’t do that gave it away. The way that she didn’t automatically include me in the conversation, the way she didn’t look to me when something funny happened, the way she didn’t move up to get more space but stayed, leg pressed against mine, reminding me that she was there.
All the instincts we’d developed about one another over the many years we had been friends were now kicking into gear and compensating for all the things we couldn’t say, not with all these people...