I had long grown accustomed to the light that shone off her face like mystic white porcelain when the darkness of night surrounded us that was not from the glow of candlelight but was rather produced by the screen of the laptop she balanced on top of her thighs.
As the steady tap-tap-tap of the keyboard under her pretty-but-agile little fingers lulled me nearly to sleep, I took in a deep, fulfilling breath and sighed with the pleasure of knowing that my beloved wasn’t just any woman – she was a writer.
Upstairs Apartment
I touched myself for a bit, listening to the rumbling of the couple upstairs. Then I heard her scream and the thumping stopped.
Conflicted
He resolved that he should just find someone to live all his life out with him and be his physical (if not emotional/mental/spiritual) source of comfort. Then he immediately resolved that that was like taking a person like a drug to ease the pain of reality, and that he didn’t believe it and hadn’t believed it even when he first thought it.
Denial
He was often heard lamenting his metabolism and the fact that he could not lose weight. Yet it was difficult for people to make out exactly what he was saying, since this often occurred while his mouth was full of fried green tomatoes.
Life’s Equation
Positively believing that we are in the primes of our lives, it is only when we multiply and create offspring that we truly see what the adding of years has done to us and realize that our entire equation served as the means to a product comprised of us yet entirely different. Now that there’s no way to subtract the years and start over again, I am left to wonder if my tiny part in the equation will be remembered down the road long after the calculations are complete, or if all my factors shall fade away.
Impossible
When she fell very ill, she wanted to go home, and would have gone home. But the fourteen hour flight back seemed as unfathomable as staying around, waiting it out, and carrying on.
A Scent, a Memory
“How about this one?” Jeremy asked after spritzing the cologne onto a paper tab and holding it right up to my nostrils.
“No!” I shouted almost too immediately, thrusting his hand away, but my memory had already whisked me swiftly away back into Frederick’s strong arms that held me firmly but swayed me delicately back and forth, back and forth to the subtle music of the cold wind that rushed through the celadon fields of the Falklands in a way that made individual blades of grass take turns reflecting the sun’s iridescent light, and as we stood there on that rocky cliff overlooking the edge of eternity, tears clinging desperately to our cheeks but ultimately plummeting to their death, he begged me please oh please don’t go.
Anonymous
When traveling, she loved the big cities without the best museums or theatres. There was something very comforting about generic urbanity: streets crowded with disgruntled locals late on their way somewhere else, the seeming superfluity of two of the same shops appearing on the same block, and the convenience of cheap cafes.
Beautiful Distraction
As Abigail peered through the banisters at her older brother and his friends and listened to them discuss the latest technological breakthroughs in science and the most pressing current political dilemmas, she wondered why she hardly heard young ladies murmur words like those, but then she laid her eyes on one of her brother’s friends – standing there like Michaelangelo’s David, only broader, and with better posture, and muscles you could practically feel with your eyes and, speaking of eyes, his were constructed of cerulean velvet that matched the color of the sky just after the last sliver of sun has tucked itself under the horizon, leaving only the memory of daylight swirled around in a vast sea of everything that is mysterious about night. Abigail twirled a piece of hair around her finger, speculated as to whether or not this specimen of a man had seen her – noticed her – and then her heart took in a poisonous concoction of love, lust and adrenaline that sent her whirling with urgency back to her bedroom to divulge every last detail of the man she had just witnessed on her diary’s hungry, anticipating pages.
Unintentional Patriot
Anytime she was in Italy and ordered a cappuccino after ten a.m., the barristas heckled her mercilessly in their mother tongue and said amongst themselves she must be German. She always just barely restrained herself from explaining to them that she was not, in fact German, but rather she came from America: a land in which no one had the power to arbitrarily regulate what you could and could not drink at any given hour of the day.
Death of a Planet
“In a never-ending quest to manipulate their planet to better suit their every selfish desire, the Earth-dwellers attempted to cease the eruption of all volcanoes by pumping all of the core’s magma out into space,” Professor Ylyvys explained to his eighth-grade class about the ex-planet that had become infamous even to them, nine galaxies away. “They never fully understood the aliveness of their planet until they drained its life-blood, which killed not only Earth but also everything and everyone on it.”
Patience
She was saying everything he didn’t want to hear. But he hadn’t stopped listening.
Not Impressed
After Jon took his seat on the train beside the knitting old woman, he raised his hands and showed her his long black claws with a fang-filled grin.
The old woman put down her knitting, opened her mouth and pointed at the blood-covered train conductor who lay screaming between her massively wide jaws and she laughed with a girlish titter when Jon got up.
Alone
Go on and murmur sweet nothings to the deep void of your heart in the bitter reality of your new existence, for there is no one left here to love you. You killed them, all of them, and no matter which realm of afterlife their train is bound for, you’re stuck here alive in your own personal hell on earth – alone.
Photos
He was completely exhausted and falling apart when he reached home. Although his first thoughts of the trip were painful impressions left by strangely uncomfortable moments, he felt contented when looking back over the photographs he had taken and could only attribute this to the inexplicable effects of nostalgia.
Consequences
The local high school stated that the current economic crisis necessitated a shorter school week of longer days. With four empty, unsupervised Fridays a month, she predicted the teenage pregnancy rate would skyrocket.
I < 3 Centrelink
I less than three Centrelink; thank you for your taxes. P.S. Your taxes taste like McDonald’s.
Toilet Love
Using someone else’s bathroom is like having sex with a stranger; it’s unnaturally intimate. Not that I care.
Not Ready
“You’ve got to be a bit more like me,” Walter’s friend told him, “and get a stiff upper lip.”
“That lip’s about to be a lot stiffer,” Walter answered, “right after I punch you in the face.”
Heathen
They ate chocolate in Bruges, cheese in Parma, and paella in Seville. At the end of the trip, they both agreed none of these was really markedly better than when they had eaten them at home.