bamsaidthelady
The blanket is a versatile accessory. It provides warmth, security, cleanliness in times of picnic among ants. Blankets hide everything but the limbs. Toes are always sticking out. Fingers dip over the fringe. Blanket. Even metaphors throw it around. The giant's sneeze blanketed the room in thick snot colored raindrops.
The dust sprinkles layered everything in the room. The cracks, the surfaces -- even the dust bunnies seemed to have pet dust bunnies. It was understandable. The room had last been used by a group of frail scared children, stuffed into the closet-sized space and told to breathe as little as possible while the heavy boots of the men searching for them clunked in the hallways and in their sleep.
The stack of papers thumped to the ground. The ugly duck ceramic lamp cracked against the desk shedding shavings as it fell onto the carpet. Lights flickered like in the hallway of a haunted house. And then: the building crumbled, it dissolved, a cookie in the mouth of a tremendous earthquake.
The crowd murmured. It swayed. It danced on anxious toes. A tail of anger whipped across one man to the next. Someone yelled. Another someone collapsed. Calm crashed down like dominoes in a child's finale. The puckish God grinned, his finger stirring the crowd's emotions from his perch on Best Buy's roof. Boy, he loved Black Friday.
The only available line suddenly became occupied, its light blinking ferociously at Brian, the night DJ at 48.9 FM. It was unusual to have so many lines full up at two AM, but since Brian had started his Insomniac Hour (130am-230) program, the phone lines were constantly clogged with the woes that overtake people in the lost hours between last night and tomorrow morning.
The finch hopped cautiously on the feeble branch. The branch broke anyway. Down fell the finch, falling falling, until its wings caught on a gust of wind. The gust corralled the finch into a graceful landing on the hood of a car. That was the last graceful thing the finch would ever do. The stray bullet, nearly bigger than the bird itself, tore through the small body. The blood left behind was not the finch's but that of the slumped over teenager in the front seat.
I am the Distributor of Pain, thought the tawdry child. He balled his fingers into his palm so that he could see fingernail marks for minutes after he released the grip on himself. The harsh swish of a belt whipping out of a buckle brought his nails deeper into his flesh. When the snap came, it would concentrate on one area, but the Distributor knew now that if he could reroute the pain, it would be over faster.
The sunshine raced down from the clouds, beating my neck red as I hauled up weeds and crushed parasites between my fingernails. I stood and looked around me. Mine was the only white (but reddening) neck in sight. The rest were brown. And illegal. We worked side my side, fending off the same bugs and harvesting the same desire to get out of the sun and into the shade with a day's pay in our holey pockets.
The dandelions poked out of the ground conspicuously. They were surrounded by weeds, entrenched, really. Fitting, thought the boy, just like me. Brought here by wind or maybe in some traveler's pocket and transplanted in an alien atmosphere.