It was midnight on the roof,the stars bright and shining, the moon full and gleaming. Sat up there alone I contemplated my own existence. As this speck in the whole tapestry of existence, can my life have meaning? Will I be able to understand all that life presents to me?
These questions plagued my mind for a few minutes, turning over slowly whilst I search for any answer, to questions I knew would be impossible to find one for. In the tranquility of the night, the mind often wanders to such matters. Within the idea of the unknowable, is the...
She sat waiting in her normal spot overlooking the city. He said he'd return to her one day, and though it hadn't happened yet, she wouldn't give up hope. He'd always been a man of his word, and a measly thing like death wouldn't change that.
When the accident claimed his life, ripped him from her, she thought she'd find a way to join him in the afterlife. But one thing he said before passing for good gave her hope. "Wait for me." She knew what he meant; where he meant. And so she waited every day for the past...
The day had dragged on. Lari looked around the street as she left work. She felt as if she had just ran a marathon with cement shoes on. You wouldn't think that being a marketing assistant would make someone so tired.
The street was full of the regular faces. People that she saw everyday, but never really looked at. Lari sighed as she waited for her bus. I need a vacation, she thought.
A young girl walked by, licking a dripping ice cream cone and holding a large red balloon. The girl didn't care that she had dripped chocolate down...
"What is a pension, anyway?"
She stared at him. "How do you not know what a pension is?"
He shuffled his feet, not looking at her. He mumbled something indistinct about not really having to worry about that sort of thing, what with his family, and the fortune (the fortune was probably now lining the public purse, or possibly a lawyer's office, depending on the outcome of the court case)
There were times when she felt the gap between them more than others. She took his hand - now wasn't the time to start comforting, there was no time for...
Taste was one of those things that was meant to be very personal, and yet everyone seemed to recognise bad taste.
The joke may have been ill-timed, but she maintained that it wasn't in "bad taste" - soon finding herself in the minority (one, in fact).
Fine. Fine, fine, fine - he would've laughed, if he'd been there. Then again, him not being there was the entire point.
He would've laughed at that, too.
It was a nice, warm day, and that was ridiculous - funerals were meant to be full of rain and the dark and thunder and the...
Becky hoped Tom saw what she had written before her teacher did.
Mr. Smith was notoriously tidy about the things in his classroom. Desks were wiped down once a day, not by the school janitorial staff but by him personally. In other classes she knew friends who would write on the desks, leaving messages for the students who sat there after them - a sort of school texting service between students without cell phones, but Tom took only this one class after her. Would he see her message? She could pass it off as a doodle and if he said...
I'd had so many plans, just before I went back. I was prepared to an insane degree. I'd spent days camping in the wilderness, gathering enough iron to create a goddamned magnet. I'd memorized the fundamentals of aviation, chemistry, nuclear physics. I knew all there was to know about rebuilding civilization.
And it had all slipped away, one memory after another, fading into a blur, after I'd fallen through the time vortex.
So here I am, trying to explain to some neolithic ignoramus how to make gunpowder. The most I can remember is that it requires a mixture of sulfur,...
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...
Gradually.
That was the secret, wasn't it? Build up their trust or indifference, either one would do, like in that fable about the mouse and the lion. First it was hello over the mail as they each made their way back to their separate apartments, next? Why, after months of chit chat, it was coffee shared in the buildings laundrymat. More chance meetings, more talk about incidentals, info on her fake bio. There was no need for him to learn of her unpleasant past. He would only get the wrong idea.
It wasn't really lying, not when she was honest...
I'm in love with a robot, thats all there is to it. When his parents tell him how to live his life, where to go to college, where to work, even when to go on dates, he just goes along with it. He makes me so upset sometimes. I know that he has brilliant ideas and knows exactly what he wants to do with his life, and yet he lets others decide everything for him. If only he would stand up for himself. I know who he really is. He is wonderfully funny, incredibly smart, and full of ambition. But...