At the beginning of the day, darkness and silence.
At the end of the day, seated near their fire, sipping coffee.
[#493, Nola Farman]
At the beginning of the day, under the stairs.
At the end of the day, the empty spaces of the ruin.
[#129, Diana Wood Conroy]
At the beginning of the day, frenetic failure.
At the end of the day, if he’s still alive, I’ll bring him home.
[#547, Tony MacGregor]...  [more]  

Suddenly, there she is in a very strange place at nightfall. Sounds are magnified as if to offset the opaque blackness of the night; distant shouts and roars from the desert highway. The tension of the journey becomes paralyzing so that she feels unable to move or act, overcome with the enormity of where she is...  [more]  

You know who I am.
Feeding the myth of Scheherazade determined to keep her date with dawn. As evening draws in, she would be disciplined to make the regular payment: full of backbone, wild emotions in check, super-professional...  [more]  

To a lot of people it felt like the end. Some said months or weeks, some even said it was only a matter of days. The big clock is ticking. That is what an asshole yelled out the window of a speeding vehicle that sprayed dirty water from a puddle all over her dress...  [more]  

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The officer was obviously not trained to appreciate logic...  [more]  

“I love my new house,” says Jonny Lull to his colleague Tina Tassels. “It’s modern and it’s even got a tiny garden for my cat. The only trouble is I don’t really know where it is but that’s OK because I work at the club most nights now...  [more]  

I went down to the houses of sunlight.

Down there the ornamental thorn was flowering, but the cold was still lacquered on to everything—the trees, the railway platforms, the backs of the houses...  [more]  

“You can’t stay outdoors all night!” she shouted from the back door. Beyond the circle of light that fell from doorway to dirt it was completely dark. The farmhouse was in the middle of a paddock surrounded by more paddocks...  [more]  

It was the beginning of Autumn when I saw him for the first time. I had just moved to the city. It was not only a new city to me, but new in and of itself. Inland, it had developed from the original small town on the site with a spurt of growth in the 1970s...  [more]  

Soon after, his son David came into the room. The little insomniac, he thought, as David stood near the heater in his homemade Star Wars pyjamas. He looked at the patterns on the pyjama top and thought about his son sleeping with Princess Leia and Chewbacca...  [more]  

Can I tell you about a show? I’m not asking your permission, but worrying out loud about that troubling gulf between speaking and seeing, knowing words favour literary forms while things of mute materiality so easily slip out of reach...  [more]  

Private Broden bent in close to the corpse and gave the thumbs up. She smiled one big-assed smile like the silent body on the wire bed was a prize trout. Her glowing, full, nineteen year-old cheeks contrasted with the mottled brown-black-grey of the dead flat face...  [more]  

At first I assumed that Diderot was on the verge of offering me an apology. However, in his clever way, he had turned the argument upon my own head. To suggest that I had entrapped these companions of my imagination, like a ravenous spider, was unsupportable...  [more]  

A four-mule cart was covered with old ticker-tape stretched on branches of elms, and in that manner we had been voyaging a couple of weeks, while my ears kept starting out of my balaclava through frostbite...  [more]  

I was up before dawn to catch the hotel shuttle back to the airport. I boarded the first flight to Cape Town, last stop in Africa on the way to the South Pole.
The aircraft rose up above the mine dumps, tons upon tons of detritus...  [more]  

Let the record state that I made an effort to be friendly. Myrtle Baker will never stand accused of unchristian behaviour. “Myrtle,” my friends say to me, “we know that much about you at least.” Well they know a lot more about me than that—I have nothing to hide...  [more]  

There are very few lifeless objects which one can say are irreplaceable but my stick is one. This is not a walking stick but it is a crutch—of a fashion.
My stick takes me places. And brings me back...  [more]  

The moment had come.
She was at a complete standstill. Silent. Unable to move. To speak. Her limbs did not move, her concrete heart was heavy in her chest. At that exact moment, it seemed as if she couldn’t even breathe...  [more]  

A pair of lips floated over the battlefield like a big pink bird.
They pursed. They grimaced. They parted, pulled in a breath through to the sky behind, met again...  [more]  

The sunrise came on all golden and it revealed the village spread out asleep on an incline that followed a shallow valley down to salt water. This little world was wrapped in a rilled meadow that loomed lightly wooded in the southeast...  [more]  

Sorry, I’m a bit sick, but I’m gonna go ahead anyway. I’m not close enough to infect you like this. Not nearly close enough.
Sorry I meant to digest this a bit more before I gave it to you, but all I’ve been able to do is bite it apart...  [more]  

The first and last time I arrived at Puerto Santa Maria de Victoria the full moon was scattered across the ruffled lake. We had been under sail for several hours, navigating darkened headlands that poked into the beaten silvery waters...  [more]  

Thank you, Azzam. Is this on? Can you hear me down the back? OK.
First off, I’d like to thank my beautiful bridesmaids, Dalila and Lucia. I’ve got to tell you, I don’t think I would have made it without them. They are both so special to me...  [more]  

‘This space in between is so extremely small, and normal life seems nearly within their reach...,’ and she gestures restively with her hands to describe it, bringing them almost right in front of her open, intelligent face framed with short spiky hair...  [more]  

Gloriously coloured parrots nod their heads and gossip as they sashay, in their ridiculous waddling way, sideways up some gnarly old branch, or dangle nonchalantly upside down, swinging in the breeze...  [more]