She did not dare admit that she never considered ceiling repair a political act. She had never thought about the restorers who intentionally left the Russian bullet holes in the National Museum. She had never even cared.
The nerve of these negatives to claim to be real numbers like us. Why, in my day we never even heard of them. But there they go, moving into our neighborhood, brazenly carrying their minus signs in front of them like it’s a badge of honor.
There lived in a forest a fox and a stork who passed each other virtually every day and they both had that regional quirk where they were invariably civil and polite while secretly despising the other but they were also sensitive and neither wanted to be accused of being practitioners of the 'Seattle Freeze...'
You almost came out at your part-time job, planned a date with HR and everything, but you backed out at the last second. For a few weeks the shame had been trickling in slowly, but suddenly it started coming by the bucketful.
"I'm walking in our lake," another stated. "The water comes to my ankles. But I'm two hundred feet from the shore. I'm supposed to be swimming." Dying fish were nearby, laying on their sides, looking desperate and disappointed.
Losing another member of our group would be terrible, but the loss of a child is beyond compare. We’ve all been lucky. Hoping we’ve earned the right through good behavior to exit according to our position on the chronological timeline.
The workmen sitting at the counter look my way when I enter the cafe. They stare at me, their eyes alive with malice, mouths compressed into lines as thin and sharp as razor blades.
Or maybe he's looking at his old shoes, thin and hollowed out, like himself. He’s been making do with these sneakers for the past five years, regardless of the season, even though the leather shows cracks the size of his shoelaces.
As soon as the pair left with the angel, Ramli ran to Suleiman’s house screaming for his friend to wake up, that the monger had kidnapped the angel, that they had to run to the shore and save her.
The waitress, a twice-stabbed lady beetle, brought a bottle of Brazilian Zinfandel, made from black-skinned grapes grown on the misty banks of Iguazu Falls and aged in anjica barrels. The assassin bug nodded after sniffing the cork.
