The city loomed below us like a boil
waiting to be lanced. All I could hope was that the pilot thought in
different metaphors than I did.
“Good night,” the poem said.
“Is that the best you can do?” the
prose replied. “You might as well tell the reader that it a dark
and stormy night!”
“It is,” the poem said, cutting
brevity down to the absurd.
No one realized how broken the healer
was until he revealed that he could heal the wounds of others but not
the simplest of his own.
Sometimes it feels as if we are all
huddled in bus shelters waiting for buses that never come while those
to places we are not going pull up one after another, depositing
strangers oft with familiar faces who all laugh as they get on or
off.
“No one talks quite enough, I find,
about how much it costs to be kind.”
I used to pretend I had secrets from
you, just to hide from myself how much of you was a mystery to me.
You are the one .exe file I cannot
open.
I used to trust physics until I
realized how often the warp drives failed on Star Trek. If the future
can’t be safe, how do we expect to reach it at all?
Phil discovered that the only time he
didn’t need to wear glasses was when watching porn. This was, he
felt, not something he could explain to his optometrist.
“But I love you,” he protested.
“All 99% of me.”
“The Occupy movement failed,” she
said. “And marriage is not an occupation.”
And he explained, then, how she was
Israel and he was Palestine - and the other way around as well - and
he was still describing geopolitical realities when she walked out
the door.
I delete the ending to every story I
write because life is too messy for proper endings.
I waited for you, as scared as the last
pimple on a face waiting to be popped.
I tried to explain my truth to you but
you couldn’t wrap it within your own.
“I want to die knowing I’ll have
been a trending hashtag on twitter.” He paused. “I’m just not
sure how to go about doing that yet.”
“My father has one rule with people
he speaks to: tell him truth, especially if you think he doesn’t
want to hear it. A king no one disagrees with lives only in a world
of mirrors. It’s one of the first things our mother taught us, to
try and live in the world and not in our idea of it, or the idea
that’s shaped around us.” Jasia snorted, unable to stop herself.
“I know it’s not always possible: I’d be the last person to
claim I can understand the lives of rural commoners and the like, but
being told truths and opinions we don’t agree with helps in that.”
“‘If no one stands up to a king,
they become little better than an emperor’,” she quoted.
“We can’t get rid of celebrities:
they are the new nobility. Without them, who will be able to be
properly eccentric in our too-rigid world?”
The last of the great meme wars was
fought between Hello Kitty and the emoticon army. They had an
emoticon of Hello Kitty on their side, but even so there were no
survivors.
“I know you’ve broken up with me,
but I’d like another chance. I won’t spoil the ending of another
tv series or movie for you. I promise.”
It is the first of April, when no
online news source is to be believed.
Wait. That should be most days anyway
....
Kelly’s mom never stopped claiming
that a spoonful of sugar would help the medicine go down, not even
after Kelly was diagnosed with diabetes.
Excerpt from this morning:
My brother told me once that the
problem of being a prince is that there are limits to the amount of
truth one is allowed to speak, perhaps especially to friends. I don't
think I understood it until I had to thank Jasia for the clothing her
House had made for me without giving away just how much it meant. It
was not a gift, but even so: there are favours one can never repay
and no royal should ever have those hanging over their head. I
thanked her again formally as we made our way toward the gala. I'd
like to think she heard the words I couldn't say, but we didn't know
each other well enough for that.
The fun of writing parts of a scene on
an iPhone ...:
The ballroom was large, even wider than
the cavern below the castle though not nearly as tall. The gala had
spread out into two other ballerinas, one of which I was certain I'd
never been in before.
... Because ballerinas are clearly a
special kind of ballroom.
“Everyone asks if I’m telling them
the truth, as though expecting I even know myself anymore.”
Once upon a time, there were three
bears that never understood why any human thought they’d actually
eat porridge at all.
“There must be a villain to this
piece that isn’t me,” she pleaded with the director.
“We’re doing a play about the Book
of Genesis. What else did you expect?”
If it tastes good, it's bad for you.
And more delicious.
- the rule of food.
"You did it," he whispered to
everyone he met, and said nothing else at all.
Sometimes the words were a shout or
cry, othertimes a scream or whisper.
But there was always that look in his
eyes.
That look that said that there are some
things we never escape from.
Because we did it, all of it, and we
will never own up to it.
Once upon a time, there was a king who
abdicated his throne for love. But his love turned out to love the
king more than the man.
“I’m sorry. You have to leave. I
said I could only be with someone I trusted and you lied to me.”
“I did? When?”
“You told me you were an atheist.”
“But I am!”
“You said ‘Oh, God!’ at the
moment of climax.”
Stories I will never write: a
historical fiction piece where the Catholic Church is broken up not
in a protestant revolution but for being a monopoly.
I wanted to be a superhero. But when
all you can do is make people’s faces explode, it seems fate has
other plans.
So many people now need to visit their
plastic surgeons again, and I get a commision each time.
I knew you had fallen for my fiendish
trap because I understood the power of the prisons we make for
ourselves. It took everything I had not to cackle that you were
finally under the power of the nefarious Doctor Midnight when you
said, “I do.”
“The world changes,” Princess Kisp
said. “What people fear may not change, but why they fear it does.”
“Of course you’re going to become a
superhero when you grow up,” Dad assured me. “We have the best
insurance plan in the business.”
“You say that nothing changes save to
get worse, but I refute you thus!”
“Thus? What is your thus?”
“Pictures of kittens and puppies.”
"You speak of choices as though
consequences were something that happened to other people."
So. Some companies make you work OT
(sans pay) for smoke breaks; one could apply that to prayer breaks as
well I imagine.
Which is a fun image, since you could
get people complaining about secondhand prayer.
I said every word I wrote was about
you. But none of them are. You only exist between the lines of text
as how nightmares lurk in all dreams, like how love is the core of
loss. Everyone has to find the places where they don’t belong, the
seeking not a hoping. Trying not to be the sought. What do you do, if
you can’t be a home for you, if you can’t fit yourself? You
wander, perhaps wishing to (become a) wonder.
It is a difficult thing, but the secret
of life is that all things are difficult. That the hunter is always
the hunted. There is no growth that is not hard. And we would rather
have been spared the pain than grown. Because there is no truth that
cannot reek of ugliness. Being hard is what makes us powerful. But we
forget the bitterness coring into the apple. Stone can shatter at a
single touch. We are all Medusa, also the Minotaur. The cracks we
never see run deepest.
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