Have you ever wondered why a pineapple is called so when it is neither pine nor apple? Why didn't Tarzan have a beard? Why do toasters always have a setting that burns toast to an unimaginable crisp in which no decent human being would ever want to eat? Who made the law that eighteen is of legal age? If x-ray vision is the ability to see through all things, then wouldn't you see through everything and thus see nothing? If...
Part One A red strip of sunlight snuck in through the window pane and splashed against the mirror I faced. Cringing away from light, I continued getting ready for school. I spent what I considered to be too much time with my makeup: covering up blemishes whose red marks still showed through the powder, picking black chunks of mascara off of my eyelashes, and giving up on the unevenness of my eyeliner with a frustrated sig...
Rick followed Jane with his eyes. He was sitting on the bus as it was going to school that morning and Jane had just boarded. It was only about a mile more to the school, but he got to at least see her long curly blond hair as she walked unsteadily down the aisle of the school bus as it started moving again. Rick had been on the bus for almost an hour now. He lived out in the country on a rock farm. They called it that be...
Chapter 1 September 11th 2001 8:46 a.m. An explosion of sound blasted through the building. It lurched violently to one side. Two people in the express elevator with me gripped the handrail as we continued our ascent. One was a twenty-something woman wearing tan pants, a white blouse, and an embroidered red scarf. I’d seen her many times having lunch at The Odeon on West Broadway where I worked. The other, a man, was tall...
Julianne finished loading the large moving truck and pulled the rear door closed. She walked down the rear ramp and glanced up at the only home she had known for the last twenty years. She glanced down the street to the rubble which was the house her first boyfriend and sighed. She allowed the memories of when she was thirteen years old flood her mind and then pushed them away. “What’s taking you so long?” she asked herse...
My beginning: No control. Outside the window, the cold wind is howling and whipping back forth. Inside, deafening electronic music is pounding while dozens of drunken college kids slam their heads and blow their fists in the air. Steaming red lights beam into the room as half-drunk girls sip from their red cups and drift their eyes across the room, trying to latch on to something. Inside, the walls are cheap, paint chips...
