"Well, if you don't feel like telling me her name, at least tell me what she looks like."
She's perfect. Skin as unblemished as the first snow fall, dark blue eyes that always dance when she sees me, brown hair that shines in the moonlight when we meet in the garden behind her house. Her voice is smooth, young, and playful and I love her. But if they knew who she was... Who knows what they'd do if they knew that the one I love is a Capulet? I'm Romeo, for goodness sake! The son of Lord Montague, enemy of...
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” Smith quipped. “The Tempest. Act four…”
“…Scene one. And it’s ‘on’ not ‘of’.” I retorted. “It continues. And our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
Smith snorted. “Ever the pessimist. And yet.” He paused for effect. “I propose to travel forward in Time by one second.”
“Smith, you can’t. Except by the traditional route. Which just takes one second to do. Except we are moving in Space-Time. Not just Time. Only light can do that without feeling the time pass.”
Smith shrugged. I tried to explain. “The Earth spins 460m/s....
He set the plate before her. It steamed, smells of carmelized meat and cinnamon wafted up to her nose. "This is my lust."
He still spoke with inflection, they had not dined upon his theatricality, his sense of timing, his desire to surprise. There was an order to these things, and while he still had that order, he would continue. The assembled guests mumbled their appreciation, though Dowager Harriet was still chewing through the last bites of his shame.
When the Boddhisatva-to-be had announced this meal, the good and great had tittered that he had finally lost his mind. Spent...
”Beware the Bwgan Fawr.” the old Vicar sighed. “Every chapel has to have its ‘Ysbryd capel’…”
“Its chapel ghost?” the younger clergyman replied. His pronunciation was still more ‘gog’, more Northern, than the man he was replacing felt comfortable with. Too… foreign. If such a phrase could be used for a fellow Welshman.
A shame, his body was found the morning after his first Midnight Mass. Just outside the chapel door, lying as if it had carried a great weight across the threshold, and then collapsed with the release of his burden. A heart attack, they said. Strange in someone...
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....
"Rush! Hurry! We must get off the street before anyone realizes we've left. "
"Mummy, why?"
"Because I said so."
"Because he's bleeding, Mum? Is that why?" I grasped the edge of her suitcase, let it carry me along, my feet nearly leaving the ground. Breathless, visions of things much different from sugar plums. Blood. Screams, a distant siren, the smell of cordite. Done. Rush! Move! NOW! Hungry, what, no time. Leave the cat.
Down the stairs, falling, falling, falling out onto the cobblestones. Scent of mum's sweat mixed with tobacco, and the stench of death. Train sounds. Off to...
Jesus, this guy. I only wanted a ride to the temp agency, and he was all, "sure, I got a sweet set of wheels in the parking lot." So after I finish up my application for the Donut Hut -- fucking powdered sugar in my hair, I'm not taking this hat off all day now -- we go out to the lot, and it's like, it's his GRANDPA's car right there, a Packard or some shit. The seats are made of red leather and they squeak like I've farted when I get in, and there's cigarette burns on the edge...
I cannot be old as were, but I'll be as old...
No springs, no machination, no burn, can retreat the circle
but the circle will come round
--not old as were
Along the shore they did not remember
Walking until their flesh and their ligaments
Wasted
No mercy for the parched
And she stood staring from behind pa(in)
And he paced
And he destroyed
And he ripped--because
This is not the girl I wanted
This is not the girl I knew
This is not the girl I ordered
Custom made behind a pa(in) of glass
Darling or darling oh darling...
I'm in love with a robot. Thing is, she doesn't even notice. She doesn't even have any feelings, whatsoever. Her positronic net doesn't have the capacity for joy, or anger, or love.
Naturally, this poses a problem.
How do I tell her about my feelings? She knows the dictionary definition of love. But she doesn't know the meaning. I have no idea how she would take it. Would she just acknowledge it, and then continue on with her work?
The worst part is, the fact that she has no emotions is part of the reason I love her. She can't...
Chaz and Elinor tear-ass through the forest, hands raised ineffectually above heads, sodden shoes slapping on undergrowth, alternately laughing and yelling "Ow. Ow. Ow!"
The hailstorm pelts them from above, chunks of ice the size of large coins, not nickle-and-dimeing today but quartering and Susan B. Anthonying. Chaz gets a Kennedy fiftycent piece to the top of the skull and takes a header, facefirst into the soggy pine needles below.
"I think that one actually trepanned me," he shouts.
"What? Get up!" Elinor hauls him to his feet and they keep running.
The tent, they're sure, is just over this...