The driver of the Ford Explorer (the one with the tricked out stereo) took to the cowboy the minute she realized he’d ditched the scary contraband in exchange for what appeared to be an unlimited supply of hundred dollar bills which he seemed more than happy to spend stocking up on CDs for the long trip east – it also didn’t hurt when Janis gave her a copy of “American Pie,” wished them luck on their road trip, and announced she was going to stay behind for the “American Idol” Las Vegas auditions.
It occurs to me that now that I am certifiably insane, I can get away with a lot more than previously…
Why should it take the tears of a woman to see how men are?
You know that feeling you get when you rev your engine several times and get ready to blow everyone away off the line and then you pop the clutch and there’s an awful “thump” as your transmission falls out on the ground?
“You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip,” I said into the phone, “and yes, I know it’s supposed to be blood from a stone, but we’re well past that stage, don’t you think; besides, I’ve never been any good with either the legalities or the metaphors surrounding the crushing of the individual spirit, although I kind of like the song Money For Nothing by Dire Straits, if that’s any help - but it’s not, is it?”
Can you really never go to debtors prison? Are the Gods of finance watching? Fools
she slid the marble rolling pin off the top of the fridge with great care, and felt the reassuring presence of it’s cold density as her right hand gripped and twisted once or twice, reflexively brushing off the crumbs before getting started.
“Well if you really want the truth,” Henry told the bartender, “I think I miss seeing the perfectly folded sheets in the linen closet more than I actually miss Susan.”
Hector looked crossly at the metal splines and fabric that had become more of an right-side cup than an overturned saucer.
For those who missed it in the comments down below, the assignment is one sentence, exactly 500 words.
She sat on the train to work listening to a terrible throw-back to the early 80s and, terrible though the Nolan Sisters were, she sat in a quite perky way, bopping her head and tapping her feet happily in time to the music, trying all the time not to notice just how much she was annoying the person next to her, when she realised that she seemed to be the only vaguely happy person on the train – she just did not understand it, I mean, sure, she was not always happy herself and, yes, it was an early ‘off to work we go’ sort of train and, yes, this didn’t exactly thrill her to her toes, but surely amongst this multitude of people there was one other person in existence that felt just a glimmer of happiness or good cheer, I mean, just look at them, with their mobile phones, their books, their Gameboys, their iPods, their well-fed and well-clothed bodies, their ‘better lives’, surely just this material wealth alone would lend them to sniggering or sneering in some sort of a “I’ve got more than you” way - exactly why was it that they seemed to be so utterly, entirely, exclusively, without exception, wretchedly miserable, was the end of the world nigh and she’d missed it in the news or was it more personal than that and maybe she was dying and everyone on the train knew that and no-one was willing to tell her, but that couldn’t be true, I mean how would they even know, it’s not like she had it tattooed on her forehead, or maybe that was it, maybe it was something physical, maybe there was something wrong with her, maybe that saying about bliss (how did that go, was it something like blissfully unaware or, no, that’s it “ignorance is bliss”), that was it, the only possible way that she could be sitting here as happy as a bear with his head stuck in a pot of honey, would be because she didn’t know what it was that was causing all this misery in everyone else, there was some ‘big thing’ that she was totally unaware of and that’s why, every morning, day after day, week after week, people sat around her looking almost suicidal; because they knew the ‘big thing’ and she didn’t, I mean, let’s face it they were probably all secretly laughing at her for being so naive and so unbelievably, pathetically cheerful, god they probably hated her, all of them, everyone on the train, sitting there, looking at her and thinking to themselves “hah, of course she’s happy, she doesn’t know, it’s easy to be happy when you don’t even know”; but the thing is, how would she find out and, more importantly, did she want to find out, I mean, if ignorance is bliss, why break it, why try fix something that doesn’t need breaking- no wonder they all hated her, god, she was miserable.
…and, depending on our perceptions, we either hope or fear to live some version of our own parents’ lives.
It might have been the sound of the breaking surf or the cry of the gulls, it may have been the hot sun beating down on him burning with the most intense heat he had ever experienced in his life, it may have been the agony of the fine salt spray which was drifting down and settling into the deep cuts that covered his back, arms, face and legs, or it may have just been that something deep in the reptile-core of his brain that wasn’t ready to die and knew he would die right there on the beach if he didn’t move and move soon, but whatever it was, it caused him to take a breath of the burning air, feebly spit out a mouthful of gritty sand (or was it crushed teeth?) and open one swollen eye which he quickly shut again as a wave of nausea overtook him and the events of last night flickered through his brain like disjointed images from an old black and white film: The glorious weeks spent sailing on the 42-foot antique wooden sailboat which he had lovingly restored as his life’s dream work, hand rubbing the teak until it glowed from within, applying coat after coat of varnish, and polishing the brasswork to a shine which showed more than pride of ownership – it showed that the work had purified his soul, taking him away from his old life of hustle and bustle into a completely different universe which measured time in seasons and the movements of the stars and reached back over thousands of years of sailing ships, all reflected in the shape and the rocking of the compass and the creak of the wheel; then, flick, images of the nights he had spent in Monaco, partying with famous people – one night standing on Paul Allen’s 175-foot motoryacht listening to a group of people who were looking down at his sailboat, ice clinking in their drinks, discussing the beauty of the person, the soul, who had the time and freedom to maintain such a glorious antique and dreaming their own dreams of taking such a boat round-the-world; flick, the woman in the red dress who moved from party reveling to small-boat sailing with instinctive grace, naturally joining him as he steered toward Madagascar, his next stop; flick, the lovely days and nights spent slowly sailing south along the Coast of Africa, mooring, sometimes for a week at a time where the fishing was good “just because,” no agenda, nothing but the smoke from the hibachi and the gentle rocking of the boat and the two of them, soulmates at peace with the world; flick, that night in the doldrums, with the moon overhead and the sea glowing with green phosphorescence, flick, the black looming oil tanker which came suddenly from nowhere in the silent night, destroyed everything, and continued on never noticing the carnage; flick, days on the ocean clinging to a piece of shattered wood, mourning for the loss of his love, wishing he could let go and sink into the blackness; flick, sinking into the blackness; and now this, the hot beach, his battered body and yet, the sense that somehow, this beach was where he was meant to be, the next phase of his life – then, as it always did at this time, the cry of the gulls changed, becoming the shattering ring of his alarm clock demanding he get up and make his way downtown to the office where the model sailboat next to the fax machine might keep his spirit from dying for one more day.
“This looks like a quiet little place for a set of sheets to slip into for an ice-cold beer,” thought the folded sheets, who’d slipped from Henry’s linen closet several months earlier without Henry’s knowledge, and had hidden away in the coat closet, nearest the back door of the house, lying quietly behind a pair of bowling ball carrying cases (hadn’t Susan taken her bowling ball when she moved out? thought the sheets, but not for long, since it only brought up the whole painful business of being left behind, which wasn’t something that the folded sheets was anxious to explore, lying there in the dark, at least not something it’d want to think about while hidden behind a couple of bowling balls, which smelled of cigarette smoke (no doubt second-hand smoke from the bowling alley (the folded sheets tried to breathe shallowly, which was hard to do, considering the excitement of having escaped the linen closet and the very idea that they were on their way somewhere - who knew where! - and hoped that when they got there - wherever that might be! - that the smoky smell wouldn’t have soaked in too deeply, certainly not more than a decent washing and refolding wouldn’t take care of)), while it’d waited for both the courage and the right moment to slip out of the house unnoticed, which had been only this afternoon, and which two bus rides and a short walk later, had brought them to the front door of the quiet-looking little tavern which the sheets now passed through, just in time to catch a glimpse of the surprise on Henry’s face (which the folded sheets mistook as surprise at seeing his own missing sheets show up at the very bar he happened to be at during working hours, but was, in fact, the lingering surprise of having watched a woman pull an AK47 from somewhere out of her bra), the final flash of the cocktail waitress’ bra before her shirt snapped back into place (which was rather nicely crisp and freshly pressed, thought the folded sheets), and finally the site of the assault rifle being fired (an AK47, the folded sheets observed, having seen one in action on more than one occasion while watching movies on the bedroom television), but not the sound of it being fired (since folded sheets, as everyone knows, have no ears), which might have forewarned the sheets (might, I say here, because as everyone also knows, sheets, in spite of what they might bear witness to in the bedroom, still remain rather unworldly and naive) of the inherent danger, nay, the foolishness, of walking into a small bar in the middle of the afternoon while an assault rifle is being fired, but which of course, being earless, the folded sheets didn’t hear, causing them to walk straight into the path of a single stray bullet, which ripped through several layers of crisp folds, dropping the sheets to the floor in an undignified heap.
Some of the consolations she’d found were difficult to explain to others, such as the shape of trees and their constant vigilance over night, day, traffic, holidays, over any and all things that came their way while they stood rooted sentinal with the kind of loyalty so extremely rare in people; specifically, she thought, that waitress she had come to know who had the biggest chest she’d ever experienced, and while this was not necessarily a good thing and she felt sorry for the way the waitress had become not so much a person with wants, needs, desires, hopes and fears, but rather a walking rack for Large Breasts in the abstract sense, that waitress who was the most loyal friend she’d ever had up to and including the day she’d finally pulled the automatic weapon from its spot nestled between the hills of her prodigious pearl-white breatal zone, when she snapped and finally, it seemed, the years of sheet-folding and drink-hauling, all the leering glances and insensitive comments, all of it conspired in a whirling fog until her anger pierced redhot and fullblown over the top; despite all that loyalty, thought the treelover, that waitress was not as steadfast as even the smallest whippet of a tree, whose commitment to the seasons and attempts at movement and life had to be among the most incredible phenomena on this earth, though among the most common.
Scrubbing the shit from the toilet bowl always reminded Kurt of the constant hiding of his truck from James, the repo man, and the curious, messy game the two of them played.
“Shame, really, those folded sheets being gunned down like that,” the bartender told the policeman, “two sheets to the wind, I guess you might say.”
When I sleep at, night, if I sleep at all, it’s with hands clenched tight in fists of rage.
Oh the sun came out!
When it comes to birthday parties, you never know what’s gonna really tickle ‘em - so you have to throw in a little bit of everything.
I’m sorry I didn’t make out with you in public every time you wanted to; I feel bad about that.
After winning his author! author! award, Wendell found himself unable to do anything more than daydream about the meaning and responsibilites that came with such an award, which eventually led directly to his being canned from work, and indirectly to his troubles at home, or more specifically, his troubles in the bedroom, which Wendell assured his wife was nothing to worry about and could happen to any man from time to time; “kind of like me winning that award,” he’d tell her, “you just never know.”
They kept driving for a few hours in a companionable silence: The Plan would reveal itself with the rising sun, The Motive was apparent in his hands that never stopped moving for a moment, flipping through The Driver’s cd collection, the glove box, the consul; she asked him what he was looking for and heard just a slight murmur before he turned up the stereo, reclined the seat and squeezed his eyes shut against the oncoming light.
It’s never a good sign when the dull ache in your side slowly becomes intense enough to cause small beads of sweat to sprout on your forehead.
The Stupidbowl, the Beer Holiday on which most of the United States sinks into a cathode-ray torpor of collective suffering, makes absolutely no sense whatsoever when you live in sunny California.
Is it the added years or the added pounds that make ice skating so much more difficult than I remember it being from my youth, because it certainly can’t be the blade itself - it’s as skinny as ever.
It turns out that while I’m busy giving my sister’s cat some quality time while she’s away overseas, the sister is finding time to party with Royalty - go figure!
As Becky stood in the middle of the earth, under the shade of the whippletree, amidst a streaming tunnel of fluorescing colours, listening to the sounds of a million voices collide and pop violently against each other, she wondered who else there was like her, she wondered if she were the only one truly alive in this steamy, underground version of reality, if all these other ‘people’ were just figments of her fig-scented imagination, if she were the only person that constantly received these giddy, swirling eddies of emotion that seemed to be simultaneously enervating and, yet, as stimulating as the stars in the night sky, these emotions of colour and noise and ice-cream which would swish fluidly around her body or if, indeed, there was another, one more, just one other entity who could wave away entire disenchantments with an insignificant brush of their hand, one who merely needed to think of the pastels and the paisleys to end the suffering (or begin it), one more being who would subtly, but oh-so surely join her in this licorice all-sorts land and bring her, finally, to her bursting and beautiful beginning.
The realization that death was but a step in attaining a higher state of being was, of course, great comfort for most, but Bob often found himself materializing along the edges of the collective, so that he could secretly long for the touch of bare, smooth skin, held tightly against his body that had now also become nothing more than memory.
a message today from the volga: a random skype intercept from a russian who needs to practice his english in order to pass an interview in three days, and so wanted to practice on someone who would listen but I would not, could not; i told him i had neither microphone nor speakers when what i hadn’t enough of was empathy, or none of was gullibility, nor time to help him.
every time i leave the window open i can’t sleep, but every time i close it i miss something
Poetry tells you very little about when the next bus will come.
The flight attendants can scream and bitch all they want, but I follow one simple and immutable rule: When the flaps go down, my tray table comes up.
“I’m so bored,” said Little Miss Muffin, “I wish Master Coffee would come over for a game of Scrabble.”
Once upon at time one of my sisters travelled around with the Moscow circus as an usher - I can’t help but think it would have made for a more interesting story had she been a human cannonball.
Re-reading the scrine definition in the top right hand corner of the page (depending, of course, on your scrine skin) - grudknows suddely yelled, “PHFFFFFT WHAT THE…?!” and thought to herself in very loud tones, ‘BOOT! I’m sure this is the work of Boot’ - finally, and mostly because her brain wouldn’t shut up about it she went on to rant and rave to her sister’s cat about how one experience as president of a club (past tense) was more than enough AND *even* that was the fault of Boot who happened to be in Paris at the time and therefore was not around to give grud the good slapping of sense that she required - the cat failed to look impressed, and those who didn’t know better might even say that the yawning stretching cat was bored out of her skull.
El presidente, member number 8… what is with these zany Australians?
Can anyone remember the word for ’a fear of being president’?
If you think you might like to go back to school, ever, then don’t put it off; start today - don’t do what I did, which is assume that scientists will have invented the time machine before your forties.
i was away on the island of cuba writing the great american novel, when it occured to me, i should write the great cuban novel
Sometimes you wake up and all the Australians seem to have lost their minds.
Some historians claim that the turning point of the insurrection was the discovery that the wallabies had infiltrated the Internet.
In a small Oregon town, tucked amongst the cedars along the base of a snow-capped mountain, lives a boy named Henry who hasn’t grown or aged a day past ten for 99 years.
“i don’t know….thai, chinese, sushi…..i just want to use chopsticks.”
Rifling through my desk for a purchasing agent’s phone number, I found instead a quote I jotted down while watching The Big Sleep (although I cannot remember whether it was written by Raymond Chandler, who wrote the novel, or William Faulkner, who wrote the screenplay): My sleep is so close to waking that it barely merits the distinction.
you can feel better about your writing anytime, by reading a dean r. koontz paperback.
Yet another day was ruined because of the duck’s stubborn refusal to stop quacking down the chimney.
With the emergence of the drug companies’ newest lines of Nationality Syndrome medications, doctors everywhere finally realized … [unfinished]
Joel loved his mashed potatoes.
“Well, g, it seems to have worked so far - they’re so worried about the wallaby insurrection, that they’ll never see the revolution of the Big Red Roos until it’s far too late.”
Sometimes a steaming, quivering, twelve-inch sausage dripping with juices is just a steaming, quivering, twelve-inch sausage dripping with juices.
“That’s alright, Ted,” Emily lied as she hurried out the door, “lots of people throw up during sex.”
no, no, no…your wrong…I always wear my pants like this on Wednesday’s
There’ll seldom be a successful revolution within a thousand miles of a drive-through fast-food restaurant.
As I scrolled through the numbers stored on my cellphone, I realized, with a sudden pang, that I had neglected to erase the listing of my recently-murdered colleague.
“Goddammit, you cannot justify any damn fool thing you want to do by calling it ‘surrealism’!”
I used to have a human for a manager and he treated me like people do, he was real, he was Australian and he was from the land; now he has gone and I have a textbook for a manager and she engages me as a stakeholder would, she is plastic, she is American, she is from the Ivory Tower and I, I am lost.
It occurs to me that now that I am certifiably insane, I can get away with a lot more than previously…
The Schitzo Crack Whore (SCW) was not on crack she just acted like she was hitting the drugs a little too hard - for all I know she *may* not have even had a mental health condition and as far as her being a whore, well she wasn’t really, only in the loosest sense that anyone might be so considered by receving things from someone with whom they’d shared a jolly good rogering.
People who avidly read the tabloids and trash mags for hours on end either don’t have an interesting and varied social circle or else they haven’t realised exactly *how* interesting and varied the people in their lives really are - personal observations bring me to the conclusion it’s often the latter.
So while I still have work, I send an email around to - well - *everybody* - letting them know that the actual work I carry out here is getting scarce and I’m on the look out for a new job - anyway, while I got a lot of uh… real responses, I did find this one the most amusing even though it gave me a bit of a complex about all of the pringles I’ve been snacking on of late.
Those who don’t properly appreciate the collarbone tend to also miss out on the pleasures of several other wonderful erogenous zones.
“Well, if you’re going to force my hand like this,” Jessica said, “I’m going to have to go with your ‘love is like a rotting dog carcass, spotted by sharp hawk eyes from 300 feet,’ although honestly - Chet, wasn’t it?, yes, thank you, sorry about that - I’m just thinking, Chet, that you might want to rethink some of those options before the next round.”
“I fly at midnight.”
“Shit!” said the King…and the court strained.
It was bad enough when I thought I’d fallen into a well, but when it turned out to be a bottomless pit was when I really became upset.
Based on conversations with a local animal psychic, Bob was made aware of the fact that ducks have a propensity to lean towards evolution for an answer, rather than faith, and tend to believe that all creatures will, if given enough time, eventually evolve into ducks; oddly enough, this “end of the line” type of evolutionary thinking, Bob realized, is shared by most cats and many humans, which left him in quite a pickle - was he turning into a duck or a cat, or was he already as good as he could get?
Hi, just found this site and wondered if anyone shares the same surname as me (Scrine), I would like to know more about the origins of my ancestors, i.e. where do I come from?
Cheers, Spilane.
Pizza would be good.
“Look, that’s the third time someone has felt it’s okay to yell at me this week, surely it’s my turn by now?”
The SCW suddenly noticed, out the corner of her eye, an old woman with a wheelbarrow picking roses in the square - the rage welled up inside of her and she marched purposely toward the woman (who she found was picking for charity but this did not distill her anger) and put down the soapbox she was carrying, stood firmly upon it and began her lecture about the evils of picking flowers from a public place.
If he’d been wearing a watch, a quick glance at his wrist would have told him that there was time for a pint before the plane began boarding, but since he was not, in fact, wearing a watch, and had not now for quite some months, it was pure instinct that guided him onto the pub stool.
SCW, autrement known as the Public Mass Transport (PMT) Nazi, decided that her affliction, that of being not “as one” with one’s self (or multiple selves), addicted to narcotics, and unable to contain her procreative urges and kleptomania for said urges, was unique and, as such, should afford her a seat in the “Priority Seating For the Elderly” section on the serpentine, smelly, and crowded train.
“There’s nothing wrong with passing through Dallas while on your way to a wedding,” the man said to the passenger seated next to him, foolishly forgetting to glance down to see whether or not the man was wearing cowboy boots.
i turned around and there she was. my first rickshaw customer of the day was the most beautiful woman i had ever seen.
Is it possible to be disappointed into a coma?
“First things first,” she said efficiently as she began to scrub the grout with his toothbrush.
While the man sipped his beer, the baggage handlers apparenty decided to test the water-retentive characteristics of his luggage by leaving it out in the pouring rain; the bags, he discovered upon reaching his destination, had failed miserably.
The talk around town is that if a Scriner gets married, and I happen to show up, the whole affair is at risk of being live broadcast right here on Scrine.
Cheese-stick rays, dead lizards, foil helmets and cats.
It was not her favorite cookbook because the recipes were wonderful, although they were; nor was it her favorite cookbook because the foreword started with “Cooking is about the release of pain and frustration”; what made it her favorite cookbook were the icons accompanying each recipe, indicating virtues such as “Virtually noiseless,” “virtually dishless,” “can be made in bed” and “can be eaten in the bathtub.”
They were people, she imagined, who did not disapprove of their fellow man, unlike those who patrolled mores today; these people were tolerant, just as gourmets, by and large, tended to have tolerant, expansive outlooks [(removing Scrine-unnecessary period)] [—] it was the obsessive dieters who were unhappy and anxious.
As Miss Jane leant back in the creaky dental chair, the surgeon in the off-white mask asked her again “… are you sure about this?” and Miss Jane replied “I don’t care if it takes out half my brain with it, just get rid of the damn memory!”
… what ever happened to the Care Bear and the wind-up Tigger?
Now that his shirt was ironed, the man fiddled with the technology available to him on such short notice, in the hope that he would be broadcasting Other Keith’s wedding to the world at 4:00 p.m., Central Standard Time.
He stopped at the door with the nagging realisation that he’d forgotten a key party item; “HURRY UP!” his friends yelled impatiently as they headed to the waiting cab; he shrugged and started out the door and as he did so his brain finally kicked into gear, ‘Ah!’ he thought in smugly relieved tones, ‘the megaphone!’.
“I need to let the bunny out.”
The SCW pondered her life, deciding that perhaps the solution was to become a Carmelite Nun - not because she had any particular religious leanings (despite being raised according to her parent’s beliefs) - but because she was sick to death of hearing about every one else ‘getting a bit’ while she was stuck with DIY.
“But I’m talking about the deep, optimistic good-witch type of kindness […]”
Waking up Sunday morning, the man remembered the rumor of the bagels—as big as a man’s head, the groom had said to him the night before—and hoped he hadn’t slept too long.
I’m thinking about ripping out the front lawn and planting purple cabbages every foot or so in rows, mulched in bright shiny white quartz rocks.
As the afternoon wore on, Henry became more and more convinced that everyone else in the office had been replaced with a robot—and not even the good kind of robots, the ones that boost productivity and enjoy doing repetitive tasks: no, these robots were lazier than Henry’s human coworkers had been.
And… even though he didn’t precede the sentence with Gertrudes name, he still looked meaningfully in her direction when he said, “and we need someone to…”.
“Well,” Henry’s wife said as the doctors and nurses went about their business, “if you had taken the toaster to a repairman the way I suggested, you wouldn’t be in this situation at all.”
“A total of 26.9 inches fell in Central Park, the most since record-keeping began in 1869, the National Weather Service reported.”
It could be a factory line.
If only those people back in the ice age knew what we knew today; they would have turned off all of their household applicances and it would have never happened.
“Milk, honey and papaya create a drink that gives you hope in a world filled with bad news.”
Each day life ponies up one thing in consolation; for mouse, it is a mango, a papaya, or a drink involving a blender; for some perhaps a perfectly aligned set of pens or a well-struck guitar chord; for me, it is deliciously cool rice pudding with cinnamon and raisins.
there i was….laying in bed, i could smell the coffee, and hear the bacon crackling, but i knew immediately that i was going to fall back asleep.
When I look at the curve of her shoulder in the moonlight, the years fall away, and I am young again.