There's nothing like being in a parade to let people abandon their sense of self and do things that make them appear foolish to outsiders.
You may have seen this as a child and thought nothing of it. You may not have even noticed the people, marching lockstep, standing on top of highly embellished vehicles, or pulling desperately to prevent enormous cartoon characters from flying away. You may have just been taken in by the symmetry, music, and good cheer of it all.
Now, as an adult, there you are, dancing like a fool in full view of the entire...
Before the crone could lift the latch, the outsider entered unbidden; not something wisely done at a witch's door. The boy seemed to need folding to miss the oak lintel. Felt cap respectfully in hand, he spilled over the urgent threshold.
"Some rich master has stolen my Bess away from me!" he blurted out.
The old woman assessed him bending his way through the old wooden doorway. Green doublet. Old but smart. Yellow hose. Bachelor. Sixteen Summers. Mayhap a little more, but large - she smiled - in every respect.
He hadn't noticed the maid, half shoved behind the door,...
The Moon would never be the same again.
Sure, nothing important in its construction had changed. It was still the same old mass of rock hanging on an ever-decaying orbit around the larger mass of rock that we call home. But it was different.
Maybe the giant structure unfolding on its surface had something to do with it.
This mission had taken years to even green-light, never mind anything else. But now, we were here. Standing on the moon, with a base. It wasn't anything special, though. We were heading to Mars with a similar base the next week.
But...
What happens when life finally becomes too much to bear? He thought about it a great deal - but was unable to put hiself into those shoes. What happens when you feel death is more important than life? Or is that the wrong question to ask, he wondered. Perhaps the real question was: why had she decided that death on her own was preferable to life with him?
He had come home that day - an ordinary day like any other day - and been surprised not to find her in her usual place in the kitchen. Every time he...
In hindsight, the solution was obvious.
It was staring me right in the face the entire time but for some reason I had a hard time coming to terms with it.
It wasn't really his fault, in a way I guess you could say it was my fault. I was the one who always wanted to try new things and that night, he had been nowhere to be found. I jumped in with both feet, never once thinking about the consequences.
It was easy for me, I had no ties to anyone or anything. Well except for him.
He, on...
The paradox was that while we had been sitting in a cafe in Paris, waiting for the kick, our future selves had reprogrammed the jukebox to play nothing but St. Etienne. So we sat and we drank our tea and slowly, little by little, we became our own dream. The future died there amongst the earl grey and gilt picture frames, and with it, so did she.
She wasn't more than 10 when the meteor struck Beijing, the meteor we should have been there to stop. Huddled in a doorway, she died wrapped in red silk and fire. She was...
"Hello."
"What?"
"Hi."
"Who are you? No, wait. Where are you?"
"Look up."
"You're in the sky?"
"We are."
"You're..."
"Butterflies. Yes. Does this bother you?"
"To be honest, less than it should."
"We have been watching you. We saw that you were different. We chose you."
"Chose me for what?"
"The time is coming and we are here to warn you. To warn all of you."
"Warn us? What are you, some sort of prophet."
"We are of God, if that is what you mean."
"Ah."
"We bring you a message from the depths of chaos, the heart of...
Her cheeks were as pink as her dress, blotched with red that matched the little bows that tightly held her blonde hair up in two ridiculous pony-tails that resembled palm trees. Her mother did the dog's hair like that as well. Jonathan always wondered how someone could want a second Maltese instead of a daughter.
Was he being unfair? Probably. It was something he slung at Marie as their last fight as a married couple wound down. That fight he'd carried on with such spirit convinced there would be break-up hate sex, but that shot at her parenting skills effectively...
I carry you with me.
I carry you with me here.
Right here, in this tender spot
in this hollow space.
I carry you with me.
I carry you on the tip of my tongue
Just on the tip, so that I can
carry you with me here,
in my words, in my sounds
There. That word, that sound -
Said just as you would, just as you have
Because I carry you with me,
I carry you with me here.
Right here, in the downturn of these lips,
In that expression you wore had that carried with it a...
"What is it you have to do again?"
Richard pointed at the screen. "You have to get the butterflies to land on that tree."
"Which one, the one on the left?"
"No," he said, "the other one, the little one."
His son crossed his arms. "Dad, this game is so lame! I don't see how you could have played this thing. The graphics suck!"
"Hey, this is 16-bit resolution! You should have seen some of the old 8-bit side-scrolling games. The graphics on them were even worse, but they were all we had. And do you hear those sound effects?"...