My girlfriend's name was Bethany. I like the name Bethany. It strikes me as a lithe and gothic name. In a good way, though. Probably because the first Bethany I think I ever met, on a friend's results day, was a lithe and gothic person. Well. They seemed like a recovering Goth, at least. Dark eyeliner, attractively unattractive clothes. My Bethany ( Read more... )

When the rain first started, I used to go out in it. I'd just leave the house and walk around, listen to music, try to come up with ideas for my dissertation. I always said that water was nature's conduit for inspiration. How many of us can't say we wished we had a pen and pad to take into the shower? Oh, sure, to begin with I'd still see cars ( Read more... )

It's not the climb up the stairs or the dark in the hall that worries him, it's not the cold lonely nights as the winter draws tight around his shoulders and the air vapour trails icily around his throat. It's not that, he'd contend. It's heaven in a last breath, a slow descent into myself*, and the dawn of tomorrow. Which, when it comes, as it ( Read more... )

I'm living in a slight mess, a small pile of, to my left, things, to my right, stuff, directly behind, in a very neat pile, various items of no relation and no sure place to stay. Transient objects, itinerant domestic detritus. Juggling balls desperately seek home, willing to sleep on top of each other.
My mother just told me, they're coming to ( Read more... )

The things have stopped talking to me, in my room. While it smiles at me now, as though we were friends, the alarm clock in front of me used to converse long into the night before it woke me up the next day. That mannequin once showed me how to do the electric boogaloo, now it only moves when it falls over ( Read more... )

The engine goes on, and she sits on the tarmac drive, exhaust fumes and rumbling the only movement on the road. The radio goes on, and the headlights rise at the front, casting hedge shaped shadows across the front of the house. The DJ introduces Kylie and his CD goes on. The last one he made spins in the deck. Track one. Streetgangs ( Read more... )

It finally rained. It finally fulfilled it's cast iron promise to me, the sky made to me , one night, and it finally opened up. (Opened up and told me it's drizzly secret.) The raindrops, though, were nothing like one another, were nothing like each other at all. Each splash came individually wrapped and not one had so much as a shower to call its ( Read more... )

To my left, said the small voice to the young boy, is three hundred and fifty two miles of absolute silence. If it wasn't for you, right now, the girl screaming for help over there would never even hear her own echo ( Read more... )

There is a story I was told by a tired, lonely babysitter at five past three, one sleepless night. I don't remember which character did what, or why, or when, all I remember is the tone of her voice and the new light she cast on my world as she spoke.

She inspired my heart,
and runs through my veins,
that girl.

We sat there looking at the skyline. That thin sliver of concept space that connects architecture to infinity, and she told me about Aisa and Rayn ( Read more... )