literature
Whether written centuries ago or just last year, literary couples show that love is timeless.
Mad Money
Tap... Tap... Tap... Tap Jolting awake I sat straight up in bed struggling to recognize my surroundings. “Jaysus” I mumbled gripping my swollen face. I was still getting used to my new apartment and the unfamiliar sounds didn’t help my cause. Tap... tap... tap... Where was that encessent tapping coming from?? Ugh no bother probably another leak from my luxurious digs, I figured another 5mins before a search couldn’t hurt. Rubbing my eyes and yawning loudly I fell back into my bed sinking into my hangover and what was proving to be the most uncomfortable mattress I had ever slept on. “Free is free I suppose, thank you Nana.” I mermered. What was I expecting from an inherited mattress on a floor that was probably 30 years old. The springs sung squeaky hymns with every movement. Almost oddly comforting reminding me of my childhood summers spent at her house.
By Elle deBhal 6 years ago in Humans
The Flight Attendant's Dilemma
As Savannah sat in her jump seat, mentally preparing for Take-off she wondered how much longer she could do this job. She had been a flight attendant for three years and initially loved every aspect of the job. She loved the travel, of course, but also enjoyed meeting the passengers and the community of the crew. There were lots of benefits. She liked the flexible schedule, free flights, hotel discounts, car rental reductions, and discovering new regions and sites of interest. She had met some amazing people. And let's face it! The position was still highly coveted; It had been a very competitive process getting accepted into the training program and securing the position, working for a major airline.
By Laurie Jordan6 years ago in Humans
A Lucky Find
Every garage sale you come across could be full of rare treasures and lucky finds, but usually, it’s mostly garbage. You may still find a treasure, but you’d have to get up pretty early to find one. That’s for one garage sale anyways, when an entire neighbourhood holds one, who knows what you can find at any time. The issue is, as a college student, this may be your only really good opportunity to find certain things. Bits of furniture or appliances that would otherwise be considered a bit too pricey… if they worked anyways.
By Thomas Wort6 years ago in Humans
The Adventures of Johnny Middlefinger
It was a beautiful spring day in NYC, so everyone was out and about. Johnny "Middlefinger," a tall, lanky 16-year-old, accidentally kicked over a little black book on the sidewalk. Johnny looked around, picked it up, and hurried to the comic book store since he was running late as usual.
By Kim Kuznitz6 years ago in Humans
Adelaide's Box
Adelaide hadn’t worn a dress in a long time— six months, to be exact, though it felt much longer— and had thus forgotten how wholeheartedly she hated the sensation. She hated the way her chest felt compressed, and legs dangled in the breeze, not to mention the irritating way her thighs rubbed against one another, sticky sweat building up in time with the unrest in her stomach. She sat rigidly alongside her eldest sister, Christine, who was crying, and her little sister, Jane, who was not. There was a tenacious sort of melancholy floating about the room, accompanied by a symphony of sniffing and sighing (and the occasional sob, which came almost exclusively from across the room where Adelaide’s newly-widowed aunt sat).
By Nicole Alberto6 years ago in Humans
The Hidden Cabin
A crinkly sound resonated from the ground beneath black combat boots, crushing the slowly dyeing leaves that had flown away from the trees to move on with life. The brush of wind pushed through her long brunette hair, leaving goosebumps on the back of her neck while sweeping away the various shades of orange and red from the dirt trail. While placing her hands in her pockets to keep them warm, she started her pursuit home through a set of abandon train tracks just behind her school. A couple feet ahead was a fellow student walking on the tracks, also appearing to try and keep warm from the aggressive wind. Roselen recognized the student and jogged up ahead, having a desire to have some company on her walk home. Catching up to the fellow peer, she recognized him as Harlow, someone she used to have a close friendship with in their younger years, but drifted apart entering high school.
By Karolina Kuzma6 years ago in Humans
Potential
He assesses the scene. A scuffed black suitcase, the corners wet and peeling, weeds slithering up from the sidewalk to tickle its sides. The clasp is gold, cracked open, no number pad or keyhole, leaving the lid ajar. By peering once again through the considerable gap provided, he confirms it.
By Mary Hargreaves6 years ago in Humans
CREATING YOUR ABUNDANCE
CREATING YOUR ABUNDANCE I wonder if Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg ever signed up to a course called 'Creating your Abundance'. I suspect not. The only abundance being felt is by the company running the course, and being urged to think positively is not alleviating the stress of dealing with my very real bills. I normally work in tourism, something of an oxymoronic statement nowadays.
By Deborah Wilson6 years ago in Humans
Somewhere Safe
The tin sparkled in the mud of the Thames, practically calling out to her. Well, that’s not true; it didn’t sparkle. Urban as it was, London’s river was not precisely well lit. But in her memory, the tin shone like silver in cascades of moonlight. Once she’d tugged it free of its brown-gray prison, it felt rough: battered and worn from the tide, covered in grime and sand and fish turds. But then again, so was Molly.
By Jamie Heminway6 years ago in Humans
Avaji in Euvoia
In an art studio called Euvoia in Manhattan, New York, the modern artist Benjamin Avaji paints a portrait. The painting contains a clock, a glass of water and a little black book.Benjamin brushes another long black Gouache stroke on the white Blick with a black coloured Blick Masterstroke Golden Taklon brush, laying the edge of the desk down onto the canvas.He looks over at the blazing fireplace and smiles. The artist steps away from the portrait to prod the flames in his study and when he turns back towards his painting, over at the edge of his desk there now a little black book rests... appearing exactly in all likeness such as the one he has been painting for the last couple of days.“I, I don’t think I...” Benjamin says and picks up the little black book from the edge of his desk. “How strange... I don’t remember having placed this book on my desk...” Benjamin Avaji flips through the empty little black book and finds nothing written inside. “Perhaps the performance has accomplished itself.” He says, referring to the experiment with magic he’s been working on the last few days. His assumption being that he could, through the translation of representations of objects which are in the world, cause the manifestation of objects in a dream-like way by the motion of light energy and traditional magic elements, in this case... fire.Benjamin Avaji walks up to the portrait he’s been working on and says, “Assuming that this little black book has manifested itself as a result of my having painted this portrait, my intentions coming to operate as a result of the magic afforded to me by the fire in my fireplace then I can assume that anything I write inside of it will come true if I cause the appropriate symbolic machinery to function and operate by fire... and just as the many ancient esoteric texts I have studied, in combination, appear to indicate...”Hours go by and the artist looks at the clock which reads eleven o’clock at night, says, “I should get some rest though... this is good enough progress for today...” and then, with a black ink pen, from the interior pocket of his black business suit jacket, he writes in the book, “and then, in the life of Benjamin Avaji, on April, seventh 2021 $20,000 appeared in the art studio, the Euvoia.” where then feeling quite accomplished, the artist puts out the fire in the fireplace, relaxes on the couch in his art studio, rests and falls asleep... and falls into a dream, a most wonderful dream...Benjamin finds himself laying down, in a dream, in a dream-trance, on a long, flat concrete bench in the white walled hallway of a mansion adorned with golden baseboards, where now here, thousands upon thousands of white feathers spin in the air above him, sparkling the effect there like diamonds, the dream atmosphere, smooth like whole milk, gleaming soft and effulgent like if Greek architecture were composed of pillows, with his hands extended out towards the bright, glowing feathers... reaching out to them, the life drama bending to break in the extraordinary in this... dream.He lay, the hands outstretched, while the feathers spin quickly in the air above him where now the artist begins to gain some lucidity in his dream and just as his gaze intersects with the ethereal glow of the fast spinning white feathers a gale rushes in, somehow blowing everything around in the hall except the feathers. Glasses of water are rushed up into the air, papers fly, thrown to the west end of the long hallway and the feathers now appear to take on an edge of like fire. Blazing here, the spectacle is wonderful, those feathers burn brighter, the performance is marvelous, magnificent so, and those fiery feathers spin faster.As the feathers appear to be on the edge of burning themselves out, bearing themselves against the burning, the blaze, a single American dollar bill flits through the air, the hundred dollar denomination, and in like beside the slow motion of crashing things about the whirlwind of the astonishing weather, the one hundred dollar bill flutters swiftly where now it comes to a sudden halt, with like some kind of liquid slack, prostrating itself in the air, below the white feathers burning, the white feathers burning their boundaries... out.Benjamin Avaji sits up in the hallway of his dream and plucks the one hundred dollar bill from its place in the air. The feathers let out a single burst of flames, in unison, burning themselves out, completely now, coming to disintegrate where here, instead of falling to black ash, their soft white material burns away into what appears to be a desert sand and Benjamin extends his hand out, allowing the once fluttering feathers to pour out on his left hand as a most fantastic medium... soft desert sand, gold, like a grand hill of wheat ground up to grind the gears of time itself by self-referentiality. The room begins to expand as the sand pours out and off of his hand onto the ground.When it’s all gone to the ground and the last grain falls down the sand begins to glow. The gleam grows and then, suddenly, golden bells fall upwards from the small piles of sand, the bones of those floating spinning white sparkling feathers burned up in their passion, resurrected once again to fly, like the phoenix. The bells, thousands of them as they go, populate the expanse of the ceiling in this mansion as it has expanded to appear now as an auditorium of sorts, and expand as they make their journey to that higher place.The golden bells hang in the vault, grandiose, now to resound that comfortable swell of the sweetest song, the bright beam of beauty and it’s radiance lays itself out on the space here, thickening the quality of life about the element of the beauty. When the wave hits Benjamin, the brightness takes it’s transcendental course and the one hundred dollar bill in his pocket is drawn to translate, transformed by the multiplicity of golden bells in the up there of the upside of the auditorium. It twitches in his right hand and, through like plexi-glass, pops, once where thus was only one has now become about itself as two. Benjamin Avaji looks down at his hand which now holds two hundred dollars with awe in the auditorium of his dream, under those bright and golden bells who, bringing about all of that resplendency, appear to be growing in size now.Those grand bells let out another enchanting bellow of the bright, where here now, amidst the whirlwind of a dream churned up on the flames of dream feathers and the sands of their own time coming to burn away only to be resurrected up into their aerial arrangement again, the level of the threshold is slammed soft into it’s second stage by the glowing resonance in reverberation... something like the heaven I suppose, as the sound of light absolved the life, making like itself life in the auditorium place, most beautiful and ever more beautiful so.Once again, Benjamin Avaji’s money is caused to multiply as the energy of bright beam of the golden bells breaks the dollar into many and much more of itself. From his hand two hundred dollars bursts into two thousand, the American notes appearing to sparkle as they blossom, the monetary flower, into the addition of themselves, Avaji’s accumulation. The bells resound once more and two thousand dollars then bursts into twenty thousand dollars in front of Benjamin Avaji, the black suit wearing artist, now made dream magician who wakes up along with the burst on the couch in his studio, the Euvoia, with a suitcase in his arms, at his chest.He is taken aback and, with his eyes wide open, is surprised to find himself on the couch in his studio... with the black suitcase in his arms. He hurries to open the suitcase and finds the twenty thousand dollars within. Benjamin Avaji closes the suitcase, picks it up to hold it at his chest and hugs the black suitcase containing twenty thousand dollars.“The performance has accomplished itself again...” he says and looks down to where his little black book rests on the ground beside the couch, “I’ve been given a gift by the magic of the little black book...”
By Elliott Maxwell6 years ago in Humans
