Big Stories in Two Little Sentences
The pitcher threw, the batter swung clumsily, and the bat flew from the player’s inept hands and soared across the crowded stadium at frightening speed.
The spinning rod flew into the stands and the panicked spectators rushed for safety, except for Jim, who looked up from his new video game three seconds too late to see the flying bat moving towards him and at that moment Jim painfully discovered that the new IPad 2 does not make a good shield against fast-moving projectiles.
It’s not that she meant to hurt me, she just didn’t care – to this very day she hasn’t apologized. First she carved her name in my heart, then she broke it; I love her still.
There were times, when she would catch the faintest whiff of fresh air, that she could remember with startling clarity the nights spent out on the lake, riding around on the boat, Maura’s hand clasped in her own as they looked up at the stars from their pallets on deck.
But the lake was gone, along with the boat, Maura was as good as gone, with no idea what had been done to keep her safe, and the only memories she had to look forward to making now were how far they could torture her with hard labor and hard blows before she merely phased out of existence.
I thought he loved me. Turned out he didn’t.
He held her to him and sobbed. When she woke up she wouldn’t remember a thing, and it was all his fault.
You died in my arms. I died in yours a hundred times.
The success of former school bullies sometimes really gets to me.
Then I think “hey, maybe they’ll get cancer and die in horrible pain” and I feel a bit better.
Over a long period of time I slowly, and much later than the others, realized that the world is not a perfect place and that life is full of suffering. Ever since Ive been walking lighter and talking quieter.
I really do feel for you.
Not pain, but what I imagine pain to be like.
Her love for him was as strong as an ocean current, like a riptide pulling her farther away from him and then bouncing her back, only to have him break her heart again with all his infidelities, until she could no longer take it and in a sudden burst of clarity knew what she had to do to inflict an equal, if not greater, amount of pain on her beloved.
So on October 15th, she married him!
As the sun set on Jacaranda St, Mrs Jones cut sponge cake into squares and dipped each piece carefully into thick chocolate paste and rolled through the coconut, just as her mother once taught her. But as the shrill of the kettle peaked to a new high, Mr Jones collapsed in his chair, his biscuit falling into his coffee: he was gone at last.
As the shadows made their way up the mountains of the Eastern Kentucky town of Hazard on a muggy, August Friday night, the four handsome boys, all of high school age, reached for a beer from the back of the shiny, black SUV.
Four hours later, as the EMT’s pulled the last of the four boys’ lifeless bodies out of the twisted heap of metal, four pairs of parents sat on their living room couches in their comfortable homes, completely unaware of the pain that would soon come their way.
My hands wouldn’t write what I wanted them to, so I went at both of them with the largest hammer I could find in the house.
As I slipped in my own blood and fell towards the floor, it occurred to me that the pain I felt was more satisfying than any poetry I’d ever scribbled down on the blue-lined tear-streaked pages I called a journal.
I feel my teeth try to bite the wall while i silently scream.
I love her.
He stood there at the bar in great pain staring at the back of her beautiful long red hair, desperate to get her attention but the noise from the rock band being so deafening it prevented any conversation, leaving him no recourse but to forcefully shove her away from him.
Now that his foot was freed from underneath her bar stool, he could begin making his apologies.
She was barely seventeen and had seen more pain than most. But when he looked into her eyes, all he saw there was gratitude.
All Naku writes are lamentations because she can’t cry, so she lets her characters do it for her.
She wishes her characters could tell her it’s all right.
I didn’t realize that I’d given myself that many paper cuts while filing today.
And then tonight I put on some hand sanitizer.
“This way,” I said— leading her through the inferno. When I turned around to check, all I saw were flames engulfing the exit.
The world is beautiful with tears in my eyes. What could it be without?