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Self conscious and stoney-faced, like mama taught me to be, I stared at the bright faces puffing away in music class. I couldn’t whistle if my life depended on it. Not around them. It had been two weeks since I’d made the pact with myself and my own mouth. I first told myself I was going to cultivate what came out of my little lips. Be more careful and conscientious than these screamers and biters and smackers around me. I was going to show them, looking at them with a discerning judge’s eye, at six years old. I would never be louder than anyone else – that way, everyone would listen to me when I finally spoke. In a moth’s voice.

The laughter that echoed down the marble footsteps of the corridor banged around in her flowerbrain. She inhaled the smell of violets and felt them bang her head against the wall again. Or was it all in her head? There was no separation between her world and that world anymore; no protective membrane; the egg had finally cracked and she was visible to everyone else and they were visible to her. She could not hurt them, but was so afraid of hurting them.

New birds, cooed the mother pigeon, turning the baby little eggs over with her sharp sharp beak. Her beak could peck a pecan in half in less than the time it took for her to swallow it, but her beak never pierced through the thin shells of the eggs. She wore the bright blue shawl of a common middleaged mother pigeon.

I received the skull in the mail the day before Christmas. I live alone, and my family is dead, and I have no friends; I was surprised about the big box in the mail, but thought that maybe it was medicine from my health provider for my diabetes, and left it on the table to be opened later. I had a nice, quiet lunch, and watched some cartoons while filling out paperwork for the office. When I was finished, I turned my attention to the package. The skull was black, and with my limited layman’s knowledge of geology, looked at least a hundred years old. There was a handwritten note on yellow parchment poking out of the skull’s eye. After I had finished examining the thing dispassionately, I picked up the paper and read it: “There’s more where this came from.”

God, I want to roar, to pound these fucking laws like a drum. I want to set things on fire. Flames are beautiful. Let them lick my legs and drag me down into their glorious war, let me become flame, let us burn the world as we see fit, eat, drink and be merry on the crackling white-bones of skeleton people with dim aspirations and stagnant hearts. Fuck this shit.

the walls were closing in on us. try as we might, there was no way we could run away in

The grey lithe form slipped through the bars of the window. It wrapped around her body. Her body was pale and covered in dirt and blood. It lifted her. It warmed her. It carried her out of the window, carried her […]

A story in 25 words or fewer:
Because of what they had done last night, the next day’s sermon about morals made them uncomfortable.