"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...

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He hadn't wanted the light there.

She had insisted - there was light on her, light on her voice, lifting her up, letting them all see her. He was playing too (had a solo during one of the songs, actually) so why shouldn't they see him?

He'd tried to protest that it wasn't traditional, and she'd just given him one of those looks, the one that made him certain that if ever (...when) she did get signed the record label wouldn't be able to force her into one of those moulds they seemed so fond of.

He'd stood his ground,...

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£18000 was how much it was going to cost to get him out of jail. Such is the price for public indecency in front of the queen.

It wasn't even that it was so...indecent. It was more along the lines of public infantilism. We'd both been to London before, and we had done all the touristy things, all the things that young men with wild oats were desperately in need of doing, but this time, Adam took it too far.

Adam, he of the propensity for humping things, took one look at the Royal Guard, and in a moment of...

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"This is it?" Leila said with a wrinkled nose, her hands were clasped behind her back as she slowly approached the animal.

Myron stared at the blue ribbon sitting in a bow on the back of her head, eclipsing her dark brown tresses like an enormous butterfly. His eyes traveled down to her feet and the way her calves flexed as she walked on her toes around the creature.

"I wasn't lying, was I?"

"Dunno," Leila replied, and she hopped on a crate, her lanky, boyish form backlit by golden rays. It shone through her hair, making it more like...

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Sunday was when we went. Dad wanted to leave on Sunday so we could avoid the McDonald family, who spent every Sunday molting on the front lawn. Last year, Mr. McDonald's head fell off. He grew another one the next day. Only now his hair was green and he could shoot laser beams out of his eyes. Also, he shat turnips. But enough of that.

We climbed into the station wagon and turned right onto Fallinott Street. The street was named after Lucas Fallinott, who lived in Detroit. He invented the toothbrush in 1762.

As we drove, we saw Mr....

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I stopped running and gasped for breath. My brother caught up to me and dropped to his knees in exhaustion. My hand traveled silently to the weapon at my waist. I stood behind him breathing heavily.
"I'm sorry brother, but I can't share this time." In one swift motion, I brought the metal down on his head. His body crumpled in front of me and lay motionless.
The audience stared open mouthed at me. The thundering applause filled me and my brother sprang up from his crumpled heap on the stage floor and grabbed my hand for our final bow.

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She stared down into the shallow pond from where she stood on the banks, and sighed. There was world just below the broken surface of the water, a world that she longed to understand. The lillypads floating on the surface seemed to hide their world from hers, but she knew better. The world below, it was alive and well. It was something that she could feel, from the tips of her fingers, up her arms and across her heart, and all throughout her entire body.

All she had to do was jump.

Though the pond was only a foot or...

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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...

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It was inexplicable that two latino, hipster twenty-somethings from East Los Angeles would talk like 85-year-old Jewish retirees from Queens, yet that was how it was.

"Pull ovah and ask fuh direck-shuns," shouted Isabel.

"I know where I'm going!" Ricky replied with a Yiddish accent that seemed to come from nowhere. "You always do this! You always want to undermine my AUTHORITY!"

He exclaimed very loudly, mostly because he was hard of hearing and couldn't monitor his own pitch. Isabel was silent for a second, silently mouthing words to herself. Then, as if in an afterthought, she said, "You just...

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(To read Part 3, follow this link: http://sixminutestory.com/stories/somewhere-better-part-3.)

"Choose as you please," said Someone Good. "Surrender to the breeze, or fight for control. Which do you value: predictability, or potential. The known and the now, or the unknown, the good?"

As the air whipped in gusts around her, gripping her, twisting her, she struggled. Within herself, she wrestled for a choice. Would she allow herself to be carried up by these winds of change?

Somehow she knew that this was a defining moment. It was here, in the borderlands of Somewhere Better, that she could either fight her way back...

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