Posts Tagged: Story

March 13, 2008

A Slow Bloom and the Young Search for Value

Christopher looked every where. He looked beneath his bed, under his desk, and behind his dresser; nothing. He even moved the clothes pile on the floor of his closet. Still, he couldn’t find what he was looking for.

“Ah,” he thought confidently to himself, “There’s one place I didn’t look! Surely it must be there!” He darted off towards his Disney branded Mickey Mouse T.V. and its matching red stand to give them a quick look behind too. Nothing. Nada. Absolute zero.

Christopher let out a long and frustrated sigh as he plopped himself into his little red desk chair in obvious defeat. Read more…

March 12, 2008

Social Hitchhikers’ Theater Act 2

The cell chimed a while before I could audibly zone in on its catchy Pearl Jam ringtone and track it to an innocent looking pile of jeans and socks hurriedly tossed onto the living room sofa. I could faintly hear a polyphonic version of “Yellow Ledbetter” struggling to escape an avalanche of fresh denim and cotton. I dug through my laundry and managed to rescue the call before it was demoted to voicemail. I simultaneously looked down and thumb-flipped open my cell; I immediately recognized the caller. Read more…

July 24, 2007

A Tired, Worn, and Travel-wearied Leather Rita Botta

Filip loved his religion. He was the kind of man who needed tangible boundaries, real rules to live by.

His was a life lifted directly from the pages of his daily planner. His was no ordinary daily planner! It was a Small Italian Genuine Leather Rita Botta, and it was bursting at the seams as it valiantly attempted to envelop all the oddities Filip had shoved into it during his daily travels between home and office. The Rita Botta could have handled all of the expected norms: a notepad, calendar insert, contact page, and the occasional business and/or credit card flap. Its most formidable challenges, however, came in the form of an oversized black comb, TI 30XA, zip-disk, 7′ wooden crucifix, and 10 – 15 paper-clipped pages torn from “The Screwtape Letters.” Read more…

February 1, 2007

Social Hitchhikers Theater: Act 1

“What are you waiting for? If not now, then when?”

I wasn’t really sure what to say to Dave, in response to his inquiry. He had a forceful way about him that seemed honestly persuasive, initially, but quickly became demanding, even domineering. He meant well, and that was the source of my problem. How do you tell someone to shut the hell up when you know they are right? Read more…

January 28, 2007

The God-Shaped Hole

We are all born naked. We rush youth trying to become old. Then we beat time into delusion in our vain attempts to stay young. We refuse to die with grace and dignity. We prefer crowds to mirrors. We frame discussion in the past or future, forever avoiding the present. We are more ‘other’ than we are ‘ourselves’. We insist on defining ourselves by things we do, rather than who we really are when we are completely alone with the self in the dark. Read more…

January 27, 2007

Love Falls Down

There once lived a woman, in an age not too far removed from our own, who had not seen her children for sixteen years. The choice to leave them was her own. Her twenty year marriage to her husband was not a particularly healthy one. Jealousy, bitterness, rage, and a nagging feeling of nonacceptance gnawed at her fragile soul until it could no longer participate in such union. Her husband’s early drinking and philandering didn’t help matters either; he was a dog, in every sense of the word. Read more…

January 25, 2007

Six Miles Out

There once lived a man – a young man – who stumbled upon a familiar crowd of people sharing drink and food.

“Hey there!” The young man shouted. “What are you all doing gathered here like this? Is there nothing better for you to do today than gather together yet again in this tired, old courtyard? It is a beautiful day and the sun …” Read more…

January 21, 2007

A Fistful of Flowers

The audible brush of his wheel chair’s rubber coated steal wheels gliding across the mahogany-stained, crack-gapped, hard wood floors was customarily accompanied by a broad sense of gloom that naggingly pricked at the remaining four senses of coherent individuals within an earshot of the notorious sound. Read more…

November 26, 2006

Kilroy and the Angry Swag

It shouldn’t have taken so long. The job required ten minutes of his time, tops. Yet, Kilroy was still there, barely balancing atop his rickety, make-shift ladder which was built out of a not-so-clever vertical combination of his cat’s tan-carpet-covered scratching post and a green, plastic clothes hamper. He knew better than to perilously perch himself atop stacked unstackables; but he really needed to hang his swag and lacked proper props. So, there he was, stretched beyond limits in a perpetual state of momentary flux. He was, on the one hand, stretching madly to tract and tack two handfuls of sun-stopping swag raised as far above his head as they possibly could be; on the other hand, he was fighting to stabilize the poorly designed skyscraper upon which his fickle feet were fluctuating. Now Kilroy hung, frozen, numb, and quite suspended in time. Read more…

November 21, 2006

The Misexamined Life

The five a.m. hacking was more dependable than her alarm clock. Every morning she was shaken out of her already restless sleep by the tortured grunt and bark of her nicotine and tar stained lungs. Between hacks and gasps she’d stretch toward her bed-side table and take hold of her pack of Marlboros. She’d normally light a stick before her feet hit the bedroom floor. Somehow, the hair of her choice dog always took the edge off of her early morning gagging. Read more…