All in Fiction
On the television, the women who are after the bachelor sit for interviews. Each talks of how she can't understand what the bachelor sees in the girl who got hypothermia. They tell the camera of her lack of social skills, how she doesn't get along with them. How they want to rip her throat out.
“Every time he says, brother, he’s talking to you,” Mom explained. “He makes it sound like he’s talking to the whole world, but he’s only thinking about you.”
He did say it all the time. I’d never noticed.
The door creaked open and snapped me out of my malaise. Brian walked in. My axe was still lodged firmly into his head.
When Conan O’Brien asked if his parents had purposely named him after the legendary comedian, George conceded that his parents didn’t actually have much of a sense of humor. The crack went viral on You Tube.
A cop as underwitted as an egg stares us down. Like he's never seen two imaginary robot friends who often get mistaken for puppets. I point a finger gun at the cop but he doesn't seem to react.
Your dad is curious about the beer, but your brother and uncle and cousin look at it and put it back down—more for me you say to yourself. Fuck those fuckers.
Aharon put down his gun and walked towards her. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes, trying to convince her to carry on. This is justice, he thought, and he wondered how to help Ariel see it as she should.
Marianne had walked in front of the store every day for years. But only when her husband left her, only when she came home to find his closet empty, did she press her face to the glass.
She wished they’d realized this before she’d traded in her elastic-waist pants for less flexible slacks. In hindsight, maybe she shouldn’t have pulled out her harmonica when asked about hobbies. Anyway, at some point during her drunken escapades, this flyer had appeared in her lap.
The village once quiet and ordinary was now stained with blood and it was only 5 p.m. It was going to be a long day, and the good kind of long—the kind that was lengthy in its celebration at the bar, the kind that ended with cheers.
The boy held the note as long as he could, hardly noticing the heat burning his fingers, then he let the scraps fly out into the air like the flaming wreck of a paper plane. He watched until the flames were pinched out by the night and the note was no more.
... the first time he saw her was the last and this grief slowly grew inside him and began to replace the old grief, until, eventually, the loss of both people settled in Jack’s stomach and he thought only of the first, wearing the memory like a layer of skin, tucked away just beneath the surface.
He was reading something. He was at the bottom of the paper, but he didn’t remember what was in the middle or at the top. They were important, these letters on paper. His job was a letters-on-paper kind of job so he guessed that made him important.
Alice looked at Henry for one long moment before nodding, and when she did he could hear her teeth clicking against the barrel of the gun and he shivered at the sound. He closed his eyes for a second and forced himself to swallow. He opened his eyes and looked at Alice. “Do you know why you want to do this?”
There is always a battle between the beautiful and the cliché. If a beautiful thing is written a thousand times and again does it become less beautiful?
William followed Dr Poots downstairs into a dark room that smelled strongly of disinfectant, like an operating theatre or a caretaker’s closet. An electric light stuttered into life overhead then hummed along steadily.
Little Dan squatted against the wall of the gondola and cried quietly into his folded arms. Elizabeth leaned against the rail and stared out at the sunrise just breaking the treetops. Somewhere out there, in the city, a soft boom clouded into the morning and a fist of smoke rose from the horizon. The balloon rose with it.
It suddenly occurred to Amy that the one person she wanted to talk to was the one person who remained elusive, hidden, actually, by the blacked-out glass of his Ram truck. The driver had not appeared. Between the tinted windows and the reflections off the glass, she couldn’t be sure who was in the truck or how many there might be.
By the side of the road, I screamed myself hoarse, pacing back and forth, unable to stop looking at the flattened car. I want to die, I want to die, I want to die, too, I kept saying.
Our naming the men reached its peak with the Prophet. The gist of the joke is this dirty little man walking quickly around town, always with his head turned slightly to the right, mumbling and gesturing to himself as he goes, is actually talking to God.