The water was clear but her conscience was not.
Carla gazed into the crystal goblet's depths, the sparkling liquid reflecting the sunlight that filtered through the kitchen's old fashioned windows. It was one of the things that originally attracted them to the old, refurbished barn. The glass irregular, thicker at the bottom, letting the natural light unevenly through its depths, like the sun seen from underwater.
Carla smiled at the memory. They had been happier then. Happy and in love and carefree, despite the financial uncertainty of starting a new life together. But they had scrimped and saved for their...
Heather had never found her talent.
The smallest amount of knitting made her arms feel like they'd fall from her shoulders. Her paintings looked like they'd been crafted by a toddler. Even decoupage, just gluing paper onto things to decorate them, seemed beyond her reach; in every project the images were wrinkled and unattractive. What was she doing wrong? Time and time again she struggled to release her creative genius, the one she had been told lived inside each and every person, but evidently she preferred to stay hidden deep inside.
Standing on the bridge, she watched the churning waters...
They were listening.
That's what my mother always told me when I enquired about the two men sitting on the bench in the park.
Every Tuesday we would find them there, sitting as still as statues, seemingly staring straight ahead. My mother told me that they were blind and that that was why they never seemed to be looking at anything in particular.
She said that they listened so much because they couldn't see; that they took in double as much information through their ears. They were drinking in the sounds of children playing and dogs barking and couples walking...
Sasha stretched as she woke, the cold early morning air stinging her skin. Looking around, it took a moment to figure out where she was. The woodland near the playing fields. She had never come out this far before. She should hurry back before anyone realised she was missing. There was no way she was going back to see Dr Williams again. He gave her the creeps. There wasn't anything wrong with her anyway. She knew her parents despaired at her stories, but they weren't just stories. Why couldn't they see that? They were every bit as real as she...
I had to bind myself together. I could feel pieces of me falling away, an arm, my left toe, my sense of grace under pressure. My lips struggled to speak as my tongue became unattached, my teeth loosened in my gums. My heart threatened to beat itself right out of my body, and I feared that it actually would.
The curse of unbeing is a cruel one indeed. I thought this as I wound the linen around my eyes, working to keep them in my skull. I wondered what I could have done to anger someone of such great power....
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.
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...
The contours of her form were clear under the light shining through my window. She was laying there nude on my couch as I drew her. My eyes, flicking back and forth from the paper to her. My hand, gliding wildly across the paper in motions similar to a snake whipping it's way across a desert. I had asked her to model for me. Not because I have a crush on her. Not because I'm trying to date her. But because her body is so gorgeous. It flows with every move she makes, twisting and bending and flowing. She lays...
The sepia girl smiled at me as I tucked her photograph back into my wallet.
I'd found it several years ago, inside a book in a box on a table at a garage sale. I hadn't ended up buying anything from the sale, but I'd taken the photo. I suppose you could say it was stealing, but I've never thought about it that way.
She seemed lonely. I was just taking her from a life spent between pages on the Ottoman Empire, with me. I travel a lot, and a part of me wanted her to see the world.
I...
When he went to the pet store Mark Anderson thought it was going to be just another day. He was going to pick out the goldfish for his nephew's birthday and head on his way. Boy was he ever wrong.
It started as soon as he walked in, the cashier was giving him a very funny look that Mark couldn't exactly place. The pets were even weirder. They all looked as though they'd been through hell and back, but Mark, startled as he was, kept looking for that goldfish. If only he'd left then.
He got to the aquarium section...