It doesn’t happen like in the movies. There are no storm clouds, no lightening flashes, and no ominous music. There certainly weren’t any when it happened to me. I had walked home from school cheerily, with a childish innocence I foolishly took for granted. The door to the house seemed to welcome me. My sister, Margaret, was sitting at the kitchen table reading a book. She didn’t even look up as I passed her, grabbed a banana from the bowl, and headed up the stairs. The door to my room was ajar, and I nudged it open with my elbow. I stopped. Horror. It was Root Bear, loyal teddy, best friend. His legs were torn off. This had to be the handiwork of the family dog, Chewbarka. I lifted Root Bear tenderly and looked deep into his brown furry face. His mouth hung open. He must’ve been in shock. He would be though. He had lost a lot of stuffing.
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Abilene looked back.
From the hill it was nothing but a deep, black smudge, like God dragged a thick piece of charcoal across the land. The city was still coughing up clouds of oily smoke and, if she looked closely, she could see points of red flame beckoning for her to return.
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I am perched on the corner of his bed. Watching the open doorway, everything outside is bathed by a yellow 40-watt bulb from the kitchen. The toilet flushes with its characteristic clunk clunk slosh. Rolling my hips to the left, I pull my black skirt a little higher on my legs. Adjusting my shirt, I pull up my red bra to increase the visible cleavage. My silver chain necklace, with a tiny heart pendant, hangs perfectly between my breasts. I hear Jay’s footsteps, and soon he is standing in the doorway. Slowly swinging my hair over my right shoulder, and blinking three times, I blow a red lipped kiss at him. He stops in his tracks, and inhales sharply. (more…)
Some of the kids at school called my bear dumb. I knew better, because I, along with my best friend Katie, was one of the chosen few the bear talked to. Granted, he rarely responded to me and often stared at me with a glazed, blank expression on his face (this was before the dog chewed off his eyes), but I took his rather laconic behaviour as a sign of unusual depth for a stuffed animal. After all, at least he wasn’t insufferably talkative like that stupid Liza Meh Teddy in my sister’s stuffed animal collection. (more…)
Harry frantically dialed the numbers on his cell-phone like a baby mashing buttons on a toy, all the while swerving about the road like an escaped convict who’d just acquired a vehicle. His veins were pulsing, his eyes frantically smashing themselves into the sides of his temples looking for reasons as to why it happened. Luckily for Harry, none of the usual beer-gutted traffic cops had taken the time to wake up and pull him over for doing 80 in a 50 zone.
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I was working on the report that had been dogging me for the past four months. It was a simple job, really. There was no need for it to be so taxing, yet I couldn’t seem to focus. I was a consultant for a company that advised various fast food chains. I would calculate the savings incurred by slicing tomatoes to x thickness instead of y thickness. I also reported the results of studies conducted by my company’s chemists. The chemists would figure out how many additives, emulsifiers or fillers could be added to a product before it lost palatability. The results were turned into equations which could be used to create cost efficient recipes. I’ve always been good with numbers, so the job of efficiency expert was both easy and satisfying for me. I liked the process of reducing everything to its most necessary parts, but an unfocussed inertia had come over me in the past few months. (more…)
It has been years, I know–
They came again, those damned milky clouds, rolling in to swallow the sun, and they dropped that damned rain over our heads, over our hearts, over, and over again. I thought of escape, but couldn’t leave. I couldn’t abandon my home, my life, to the endlessness of March and the rain that comes, again and again. (more…)