Humor
Great Waste
I never really knew my father. My first memories of my siblings are fraught with conflict. And mom? She was so busy with her own life, we were left to fend for ourselves at a pretty young age. Perhaps that’s why swimming in the ocean alone feels like home to me. I find solidarity in the solitude of the deep, blue waves. With years of practice, I’ve learned to listen to the waters around me, noticing the subtle shifts of currents carrying relief in the form of warm patches. My warm blood can only do so much as the water conducts heat from my body at a rate 25 times faster than in air. I take a breath and dive deeper.
By Bethany Gaffey5 years ago in Fiction
Astral Man of La Mancha
Nicole looked at me and asked, “Are you coming tonight?” I fidgeted about in the recliner that I had just sat down in, giving a blatant display of discomfort in the question, knowing that what I would say could cause a bit of resentment. I picked up the book lying on the nightstand next to the chair and held it up.
By Chris Rohe5 years ago in Fiction
A Void of Anticipated Silence
Innately, children have a poor sense of fashion. For years, Vern watched as student after student paraded around proudly in too small t-shirts spotted with the latest fad driven superhero team, sweatpants a shade of brown not completely known to Vern, and dark blue Bills jerseys whose fit better resembled a thigh high skirt than an actual, acceptably sized top.
By Matthew Agnew5 years ago in Fiction
Marigold
At the far edges of the void, far from most living eyes, leviathans—behemothian creatures from the darkest abysses, and made of the clay from broken worlds—swim through seas of lost starlight. In the seamless bowels at the iron roots of broken mountains, serpents studded with thousands of lidless, sightless eyes coil through warrens carved by their insatiable maws, leaving only obsidian, thrumming with power in their wake. In the vaults of a necropolis forgotten by the souls of its makers, an ocean pours out of a jar that flows, eternal, from a plane of endless water, brimming with life and magic of every kind. Endless are the places in which life thrives, and a scant few of them are the simple fields and valleys in which surface civilizations thrive. While the surface-centric mind might stoop to believing that the machines of Reality had been hewn for them, life is unstoppable, varied, and wonderous, and touches every corner of the universe in equal measure.
By Shiv MacFarlane5 years ago in Fiction
Sharks of the Seas
"Wow! I can't believe we've gone this far. We've already gone farther than we should have gone. It's not as if we weren't warned. They told us to be wary at all times and to only venture forth when the coast was clear. Will they give us trouble?" Echo mused.
By Thomas Durbin5 years ago in Fiction
Marilyn's Inferno.
Marilyn felt oppressed. The heat in London was suffocating. So much so that Marilyn felt it was positively infringing on her human rights. A respectable woman, such as she, should not have to suffer the indignity of having to hang out of her second-floor window trying to catch a breeze.
By Caroline Jane5 years ago in Fiction
