awritedesign
The woman's skin was thin--like translucent vellum. How long ago was it that her veins were barely visible beneath? How long since the muscles in her hand filled out the spaces between her finger bones, flexing unnoticed beneath smoother, tanned, and melanin-rich skin as they crumbled the aged cheese on her plate? When did her cuticles become so irregular-looking and her joints grow bulbous and arthritic? Did her wrist always have that particular protruding bone? The wrinkles on the backs of her hands folded like so much fabric, looking like the ridges and valleys on one of those 3D plastic terrain maps they have in museums, especially when she held them up to her myopic eyes. Even her palms were unfamiliar. The creases there were records of too-long baths and swimming lessons, scratches and cuts long forgotten, old eczema bouts, sweaty first-date hands, talcum powdered baby bottoms, and 80 years of labor. Her palms looked like so much paper crumpled and smoothed, crumpled and smoothed--which ones were the life and love lines again? Did she ever know?
"Huzzah!" Michael said, gingerly laying the last strand of DNA across the latticework growing inside the petri dish. "I have executed CRISPY!"
"Don't you mean CRISPR?" Shelly asked, shaking her head as she piped her own solution into the 3D printer. "Just because it's cheap doesn't mean you have to make fun of it."
I named him Steadfast. Not because I knew what the word meant, mind you. But because, at 7 years old, I thought it sounded fast. And I wanted my first horse to have a strong, fast name. Little did I know that in the next 10 years, he would more than live up to the name I had given him.
The air around them was so dry that it seemed to crackle with electricity. The baby hairs on her arm stood on end, stretching as if they made to escape their very follicles. The minute she smelled the change in the air, she pulled Jake up to her favorite spot on high--out her bedroom window and onto the small sub-roof of her parent's house. The smell, the roof, brought back memories her her childhood. Of her first thunderstorm outside in the elements.
Jake touched her shoulder and a sparked arced between them, blue and quick. Unapologetic, he pointed off in the dark distance just beyond the tallest fir tree in the neighborhood.
"I saw a flash. Wait a second, the thunder is coming."
And indeed it was. one--two--three--four--five seconds later it came rumbling across the rooftops, booming and reverberating off their bare skin. Summer thunderstorms were the best, Shaina knew. The ones without rain, and without wind. The ones that seemed like they were bottled up clouds of anger, releasing in deadly bolts whenever they couldn't hold any more. The ones where she could stand on the roof and feel like she was the conductor of a supernatural orchestra.
Perhaps the roof wasn't the safest place to be in a thunderstorm, but that's exactly what made it thrilling. The risk. To feel her skin prickle and ripple with the electricity and sound, as if her senses were increased, her adrenaline running wild.
A bolt of blue lightning etched itself briefly across the dark sky, its light shadow lingering in their eyes for seconds longer than it existed in reality. one--two--th--and the thunder boomed again.
Shaina threw back her head and laughed.
You can monitor your child's breathing.
Ender's monitor measured his intelligence.
Surveillance cameras monitor your activities.
You never wanted the hall monitor to catch you without a pass to the potty.
There's a monitor to regulate the amount of water that exits a fire hose.
The beeping of monitors count the seconds of silence at a hospital in the middle of the night.
You're reading this on your computer monitor.
A lizard in the Komodo Dragon family.
You watched me from the wooden chair across the room as I picked up my phone. You didn't think I would do it. You didn't think I could. Frankly, I couldn't believe I had even volunteered. Steven sat opposite you, holding the purple controller to his N64, driving Link in search of Zelda, and watching me from the corner of his eye. He didn't believe I'd never done it before.
Slowly, I entered the numbers you gave me.
I paused a moment, allowing my fear to flood over me. Then I looked at the clock. 1:50am. There wasn't much time left. So, looking at you, I pressed Send.
...
"Pizza Pipeline, how can I help you?"
"Hi, I'd like to order a pizza," I said, avoiding your gaze as you laughed with your eyes.
...
And after all that, the pizza never got delivered...
Oh, the things you do to impress someone.
It was snowing--blizzarding, actually. That's what we call it up here. The wind was blowing so hard, the falling snow was like a million sharp daggers slicing at our skin. And our lips--our poor lips. We were surrounded by so much white water, but we couldn't drink it without a fire to thaw it--and us--out. By then, you could smack them together, but there would be no smack, only a rough kind of rubbing. Flakes of skin started peeling and drifting off into the snow. I couldn't tell you if my cheeks were getting cut by swirling snowflakes, or the shards of Dan's disintegrating lips.
The elements had sucked the flesh from our lips, leaving only brittle carcasses behind. We didn't speak, for fear of creating unhealing crevasses there that might rip our faces from chin to nose. What strange animals we would become, then?
have you ever seen the look they give you? Where they stare down their noses and telepathically try to shove your sorry ass into a corner? Have you ever entered a room and suddenly gotten the feeling that they were all just previously complaining about you? Have you ever had someone scorn you without you knowing why?
enter. entree. on tree. in tree. in threes.
is it a dish served as you come through the door?
are they traditionally consumed in a tree?
Is it so small that you have to eat it in triple?
on tree. on tray.
is it called that because they serve it on a tray?
no, those are hors d'oeuvres.
It went up, up--so high, so high. It was painful to look at, so he looked around it. The leaves shone artificial fuscia. The water around him refracted an impossible neon red into his pupils. The smoke that trailed it, a wispy light pink. He thought about how blind he would have gone if he had been in the snow.
Around him, the remains of his shattered boat floated atop the gently curling water, the eddies and currents bumping the shards along irregularly, as if they all resided on their own separate plane.
The brightness lit up the sky for a total of three seconds, it went up, up, apexed, and dropped, arcing across the bay. It was like a shooting star--or a flimsy firework.
He hoped someone saw it.
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