July 2008
15 posts
Remember when you came up with this great plan to cut yourself just to feel _something_? Only, after you finally got the rasor out of your mom’s leg shaver you chickened out and so instead you went into the little secret hiding place you made in the back of your closet and cried yourself asleep? Ok. That never happened. But remember how you figured all that out. That you would like that to...
They never just went bang. That was the problem with them. They always sizzled or beeped first and that was not nearly as satisfying as a simple staccato report would have been.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, there was no need for the bang. It was just a simple little burst of sound that augmented the whole proceedure. And it was kind of scary. But mostly, it was...
“It’s not that simple,” I said.
“Oh, this modern age,” said she.
I am sitting on an overstuffed love seat. It feels freshly uphoulstered, but not new. The fabric on the cushions has the faintest smell of bleach. She, my therapist, is sitting on a well worn wicker rocker. It’s upholsterery— a couple of threadbare seat cushions, is obviously not new, and...
Dr. Rivers leaned back from his terminal, flipping the pen across his desk and spinning the thumbwheel to make the screen whirl back and forth. “Yeah, See. There’s nothing there. It’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s a crime.” “Sure it is, Pete,” said Robert Grinder; “They don’t do have of the great stuff we do here.” I looked across at my...
Water dribbled across the yard, slowly slopping across the gardens and flooding out through the mulch and landscaping. When it hit the large flat concrete surfaces it traveled more easily— less organically— and faster too. It was at the sidewalks, Rose Kingsford thought, that we shall put in our boats. The sidewalks, she hoped, would carry her ship, the supply barges that followed it,...
Marion looked down at her hands, which were dripping with blood. Maybe she’d pressed a little too hard. Yes. that was it. She pressed to hard. She just needed to get the blood cleaned up and someone would fix this for her. She just needed to get the blood cleaned up and find her phone and it would all come out ok. She just had to call. Her heart raced and the bottom of her feet felt...
Monkey on my leg, I tried to stand brave and tall as the swarm enveloped me. It was hard. I didn’t want to be left behind, but traveling via the swarm was so weird and uncomfortable. A countless number of pearly beetles swing around me, enveloping me as they traveled in a cyclonic fashion. I closed my eyes to try to keep from freaking out about it, but as soon as the bugs tiny metallic feet...
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said, standing above me. I shook my hand feebly at him, reaching, clawing for a way to get at him, to hurt him. To break him. It was pointless. “It was pointless,” he said, grinding his boot on my temple. I could bearly move my hands; I twisted and grasped but I was spent. My arms didn’t move where I tried to place them, and my...
“What happened? Who did that? What happened?” She asked again and again, only less enthusiastic each time. “I don’t want to spend the day,” finally she siad. “You don’t want to spend the day where?” I asked. “You don’t want to spend the day where?” I asked again. “I don’t want the clock to ring. I don’t want the...
“Roses have never grown like this on this plat of land before,” is what I would have said, had there been any roses growing. I’d spent most of my morning getting geared up to be impressed and overwhlemed by the sheer volume of roses my students had nurtured to beautiful, living works of art on the abandoned plat of dry, dusty land I had left them in six months prior. As part of...
The dust was blowing in streaks across the dissheveled blocks of cement that served as sidewalks along the pow-wow bowl. A man and a little girl stepped out; her hand reached up and grabbed his finger, and they walked along. Across the street, and over the field of crushed and mangled white clovers, a set of girls watched them cross the street. Nobody smiled. Nobody laughed. Everyone loitered....
Space travel had always been possible, easy even. You just had to get over the initial difficulty of ascending the earth’s gravitation. Some ancient people of what are now know as the south americas mananaged to do it by constructing what ammounted to, esentially, a very long ramp.
To these people, the challenge of traveling to the top of the earth was no less a multi-generational effort...
They had a Wii on the shelf of the IronWood Michigan Super Wal-mart. I saw it. I looked at it through the glass. It was so cute and innocent. It looked up at me with it’s little sad Wii eyes and begged me to take it home with me. “I already have a Wii,” I said, more to myself than to the Wii behind the glass, playing with the other consoles. It stopped and scratched one of...
It was a g-sharp on a g: held indefinitely. The buzzing and cracking of the failed streetlight outside his bedroom window hummed at a discordant g-sharp on G cord. Nearly impossible to ignore. UNless you were Public works, it would seem. Francis Carmina figured he probably ought to complain; it wasn’t reasonable to expect someone would just come along, hear the baleful chord, and fix the...
