August 31st at 5:27PM: “Hey Mommy!” He is whispering, prompting the babies: Say, “We love you! We miss you! And we’re doing okay! We made it through the storm.” The babies take over saying ‘okay’ - cause it’s a funny word – giggling, blowing kisses, saying goodbye, and then Xavier is heard over everyone saying in his distinctive Teletubbie voice, “I love you Mommy,” before the line dies.

September 6th at 8:59PM: I hear the babies in the background as he says he loves me and…

Listening to the words from a woman who insists the King James Version of the Bible to be the one and only true interpretation is filling me with shame to feel this rage as she declares, "I studied over fifteen versions of the Bible and they all say homosexuality is the only abomination unto God!"

I look it up on my phone and begin quoting Leviticus, 1 Kings, Jeremiah, preparing to continue with more books from the Bible declaring 'abominations' but she interrupts, shies them away,…

I sleep in my shift so all I have to do in the morning is tie my pockets and petticoat into place, pin my bedgown and apron, step into my shoes and cover my hair - one minute to get ready tops.

I only have two petticoats and bedgowns, both maroon and dark blue, both made from wincey, but that's fine because nobody takes notice of the workers in the fields and I mix them up ever so often to give myself variety.

On breaks I can run with ease to the kitchen and help the cooks…

She holds almost as tightly to him as he does to her as he whispers, barely audible through his tears, "He said he'd kill you".

She recalls the strange things she allowed herself to dismiss over the last few weeks and it breaks her heart. 

The police are kind enough to let them alone but there are things she must know.

Her son hadn't been the pedophile's first victim only the first to step forward in over eleven years.

Due to her son's courage the pedophile's…

Those on the Board say he had suicidal tendencies and jumped off the roof of the dormitory. Those who knew him intimately declare, to closed ears, that the others pushed him. If the Board had given the old man permission to adopt or even simply foster him it would not have happened. They found a family for his twin brother quickly but none, other than the old man, would adopt 'some faggot'. Why would someone so young be on the roof in the middle of the night anyway? He was only nine years…

“I know I don’t deserve it but I just wish you would forgive me and love me again.”

In a few short words, a single sentence after nearly thirty minutes of testimonial, I found myself drowning in a myriad of emotions and couldn’t find the hesitation to give a reply, “If I had ever stopped loving you I wouldn’t have cared when others beat on you, taken beatings for you, lied about my ‘accidents’ and how the wall got that hole – twice. If I didn’t love you I wouldn’t have gave my…

An asexual woman and an omnisexual man walk into a bar for the weekly drag show and upon leaving the asexual says, "That first one had better tits than me."

"I don't know," the omnisexual says, "yours look pretty fine to me. In fact, I bet if you give me a chance I could change your whole orientation."

The asexual looks at her friend and says, "I love you so much I'd take a bullet for you but I don't think I could ever get that drunk."

* I thought I told you it…

Cory takes a long, slightly exaggerated, inhalation of his new copy of Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker when he sees me looking quizzically, "You're missing so much because you can't smell this?"

"Am I," I ask taking out my 1937 copy of Deutsche in Drei Akten by W. Cary Maxwell and hold it to my face as if I were basking in the sun, adding, "cause this feels good enough to…

The Elementary/Middle School Years:

According to my father it's never too early to learn that a real man: holds a spatula with as much skill as a rifle - learning to cook fine cuisine with all the nutrition necessary for a healthy family, has a starched collar as well as a crease in your blue jeans, and keeps a home so tidy you can eat off any surface whether the floor or whatever you threw against the wall (not that a real man ever would).

Since I'm a boy I whine and…

July 2006 – Oskar wasn’t sure who he wanted to beat more: the male who brought the woman of his dreams, distraught and miserable, to his sofa crying on his lap because she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t returning her phone calls or emails; or, Claira because she was crying over some stranger, her ‘soul mate’, who she’d let get closer to her in two weeks than she’d let him in a year.

August 2008 – “How many days before she…

Sitting here, inside McDonalds, waiting for the night bus to take me home I wondered to myself: When's the last time I thought about you?
It's our third year anniversary. I almost missed it. 'When's the last time I thought of you?'
I use to check your Facebook to see how you were doing without me and it made my soul cry realizing how I wasted eight years of my life at your beck and call.
A moment ago I realized it's just another day in June.

Sometimes I don't get commentary on my 6S's which is understandable because I don't comment on everyone's either but one day I wrote a very good one, so I thought, and after a day without review decided to show it to someone outside the circuit and after several minutes my friend - Name Excluded For Security - wrote back:

NEFS 18:09: LMAO, I use to write like that.…

All she’d wanted was to wear his red flannel shirt and have his hands wrapped around her waist as he whispered ‘Good Morning’, his voice tickling the tiny hairs in her ears. He’d been more than a co-worker and friend for some time so when he promised to give her some of his old shirts – why she couldn’t remember - the image had come to her and she typed it into her ‘protected’ online journal because, when she had fantasies like that, it was the only way she could move on.



She was…

We met on the bus.

Two hours later he was bringing my Sonic's Cherry Slushie from the food court and it never occurred to me that he was infatuated until he asked my age - I had to show him my ID to prove I was twenty-eight and even then he said it was a pretty damn good forgery and asked where he could get one.

"How old are you," the possible numbers raced through my mind and when he told me I felt like it was some sin just standing with him on the promenade, I could hear the…

Laying on top of a pastry box on his desk in his office Owen finds a tan letter with words written in purple ink, in Carrie's distinctive delicate penmanship. It said,

I swear I meant to bake you a pie today - the contents are sitting in my pantry this minute but you see I was sick and barely made it home alive and after spewing the contents of my stomach I really didn't like the idea of seeing anything else gooey, congealing, coagulating…

Kimmie had been awake since just before 2AM and after helping her father prepare the house - taking in or tying down anything outside that could cause damage, bringing in firewood and groceries, setting up the generator in the living room - she sat at her desk, phone in hand, and waited for the money to start rolling in.

The entire town knew that she and her father never left during storm warnings so it annoyed her slightly when, one by one the clients of Kimmie's Kanine…

1992 - When I was ten years old my father bought my sister and me Sega and while I thought it was the best invention in the world it didn't keep me from jumping ramps with my friends' dirt bike (since my father thought girls should only ride ten-speeds),  swimming into the deluges that developed after heavy rains, catching tadpoles and crawdaddies just because, making mazes in the sand to race frogs - see which one could make it to the other side, or hunting squirrels and…

At my sister’s burial I danced on her grave, spinning mercilessly while I sang songs of joy and contentment – ‘Ding, dong, the bitch is gone!’

Never again could she bother me: kicking me while in a submissive position just because I did something as meaningless as borrow her nail clipper without permission; giving me her dessert then telling father I stole it so I got beat while she just stood in the doorway and smiled; or worse yet, making me feel like a disgusting…

The definitive prude since birth she often wondered what life would be like if she allowed herself to 'lose control' just once and so, without calculating the possible ramifications, during the summer break of 2002 she broke the proverbial 'ties that bind' and got her answer in the form of a torrid love affair with Josiah, a man she happened to meet while working a summer job far from home, in the podunk city of Kinston.

~

Their last day together before she had to…

Not wanting to appear too forward and scare his potential mate away, Álmos Turul left the store in wanting, wishing he'd had the courage to at least ask this august bird-of-paradise her name.  He dubbed her Lophorina being that, to himself at least, she was of a rare genus set alone from the rest.

What caught his attentions first was the pensive attitude she exuded not only in her manner of walk but also in her eyes, her smile, and -- when she spoke to ask if she could help him…