fiction

While the stories are fiction, the journey is real.

When he spoke of love, it was in the manner of someone who can recite a phrase in a foreign language but has no idea what it means. He only knows that it sounds pretty.

He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested in, as if to justify his attraction.

On a nightstand in a teenager__ room, a glass vase filled with violets leans precariously against a wall. The only thing saving the vase from a thousand-piece death on the hardwood floor is the groove in the nightstand__ surface that catches the bottom of vase, and of course the wall itself. The violets, nearly a week old, droop in the light of a waning gibbous moon. Wrinkled petals are already piling up on the floor between the nightstand and the wall, and a girl only six days sixteen stares at the dying bouquet from her bed.

If his relative success hadn't made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy.

And in a land accustomed to so much anguish, Chase tried to be careful with words. His soccer moms began assigningnicknames during the first day of official practice: Difom, Kakas, Kochma, and Maldyok, which roughly translated to Deformed, Carcass, Nightmare, and Bad Eye.He made a new rule regarding nicknames.

Energy manipulation took place completely in mind,same way believing in telepathy caused telepathic abilities to grow STRONGER.

Ridley nodded. 'She told me I couldn't ever tell General Harding or anybody else. Told me I wouldn't be safe.' 'Safe?' Uncle Bob stopped rocking and took the pipe from between his teeth. 'She started in talkin' 'bout you bein' safe, sir?' Ridley nodded again, and that's when Uncle Bob grinned. 'Well, shoot . . . you ain't lost her yet, sir. Not altogether, anyhow. Any female goes to talkin' 'bout you bein' safe . . . hmmph. There still be somethin' left in her heart for ya.

. . .but he'd seen elite warriors go down in flames enough times to struggle with the sovereignty of God yet yield to it

You can__ blame yourself for what Socrates did. Those birds came because he wanted them to come, at least a part of him did. The pissed off part. Let that roll around in your brain for a while.__amie considered this. __o, Eddie. The hurt part, that__ what did it.__he crow shrieked again. It seemed louder, and that meant it was closer. Or maybe it was another crow, maybe several. Jamie and Eddie looked toward the sky, listening to the screams. Jamie spoke first.__e can__ let it happen again. We may be the only ones who know the truth about what Socrates can do._ __hat thought probably has occurred to Socrates too.

He told himself she wasn__ really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear.

There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

If you're a ghost," he said, "we mean you no disrespect. And if you're not a ghost, tell me who you are-or you soon will be one

Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities.

Fiction isn't what 'was'. It's 'what if'?

He now realized that right and wrong were intertwined notions. His arms could not differentiate between just and unjust causes. They only knew that they were empty.

The other one was filled with loud and obnoxious tourists. Always boasting on winning a sand castle competition and seeing who could get tanned first. What a whacky bunch of people.

Just because someone is on your path, it doesn't mean that they're on your journey.