One day in the magical land of Ilonata, a herd of unicorns went out to search for a lost foal. It had wandered into the deepest parts of the forest the night before to play a game of hide and seek with the other little unicorn foals but forgot to return home once it got dark. Usually, unicorns were quite skilled at blending into their backgrounds, so they could disappear behind trees and rocks with surprising ease. Their glittering coats and shining manes didn't give them away when they crept into the shadows. But the seeking unicorn didn't notice the hiding foal's shining mane, and no one came to look for it when it disappeared, which was probably why it got lost. The unicorns went into the forest and searched. They searched by the river, among the ferns, and behind the rocks and trees. But no matter where they looked, there was no sign of the missing foal. But suddenly, they discovered a trail of little muddy hoofprints that looked like they must have been left behind by the foal.
My Neighbor's Halloween Decoration by Readeroffate, literature
Literature
My Neighbor's Halloween Decoration
So recently, my next-door neighbor got a new Halloween decoration which is somewhat strange but maybe a good thing. He hasn't been the same since his wife's disappearance, mostly staying indoors and only coming out to take food from random Uber drivers. I knew they were getting a divorce. The entire neighborhood knew about it. It's a tiny neighborhood in a small town, so everyone knows about everyone. I'm sadly their next-door neighbor, so there were nights when I could hear them screaming at each from their kitchen and days when I would see them giving each other the finger as they crossed the front lawn. I don't know what caused them to hate each other, but whatever the catalyst was, it killed whatever love they had for each other. Or at least, for the wife. The husband seemed to try to reanimate those old feelings of love. I would sometimes see him at the local grocery store, buying large bouquets of tulips and roses. Other times, I would be refilling the bird feeders and see him
Lying On My Front Doorstep by Readeroffate, literature
Literature
Lying On My Front Doorstep
Today, I opened my front door to find intestines on my doormat, coiled up like a snake sleeping in the sunlight. And all I could do was sigh and call the cops again. Every third of the month, I'll open my front door to find some organ or body part lying on my doormat. As if it were a gift or a package I ordered. For some reason, they are always clean, like someone carefully washed off the blood, viscera, and evidence on them, leaving no trace of the culprit or whatever violence they performed. The first time it happened, they left me an appendix. I remember crying for several days. Nowadays, I've accepted it. I don't want to. I know what's happening is horrible, but it has been going on for so long that I've grown jaded to the horror of it. It's a part of my life now, a part I never wanted. The first time the police came around, they searched my tiny apartment, combing it for anything suspicious. They searched the surrounding area as I waited around nervously. After an hour or so
One day a young child was staring at a giant gray rain cloud. He was wondering how much water it must hold. When suddenly the rain began to fall upon him. The child was unconcerned about the rain because he was still pondering something he felt needed to be explained. All this rain coming down was really from a single cloud. So, all the millions of raindrops were also from this big grey rain cloud. Even though the droplets themselves fell individually, they had all actually been formed together as a single mass. The child thought to himself that all humans could have also come from a single source. We may think we are all unique separate entities with individual personalities but we could all really be just part of the same being. Isn't water itself the key ingredient for all life? So maybe one source of water could have created all the animals and birds along with everything else the little boy could see. Since we all came from one giant formation of water are we
"Do not ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incompetence." -Robert Heimling The doors to the ER flew open with a bang as Micheal was wheeled in with swift urgency. The Opium had ceased his screaming but his burned arms were still a throbbing mess. Hot and cold, numb and agonizing at the same time. Patches of skin hanging off of him like he had been flayed, his extensive wounds were weeping blood and water. The way the hospital staff buzzed all around him was a hectic blur. As his heavy head slouched to one side, behind the window of a door by the big elevator, he could see what looked like a Doctor talking to two men in black suits. The Doctor, a younger man with short hair, was so obviously sweating bullets, that even a drugged up and traumatized burn victim that had just almost died, could see that something was wrong. The Doctor made many hand gestures that were utterly failing to appease the other two men. One of them pinned the man in white against the wall.
Now that things have come to a conclusion, I am writing the events down to codify the lessons I have learned from my infidelity, and to have something to refer to should circumstances go south in my life in the future. I had read posts on Reddit about infidelity seeking to see what others had done, and while this will never make it online, I hope that putting this down on paper will be therapeutic for me. I will try to write down the most important conversations as I recall them, at least the ones most important to me. Not all perfectly verbatim, but close enough. Growing up was painful, and music was an escape for me, a refuge. After we, Ted became my refuge, until he wasn’t. His absence and disengagement left me adrift. In Ted I thought I had a dream husband—athletic, sexy and on his way to being a surgeon. Yes, like someone out of those hospital television shows. After graduating, we were both focused on our careers, so the lack of time together wasn’t a problem. The
There was a light that use to shine so brightly. We would all gather around like moths to the flames. Somehow, we understood, that there was truth and power in our illumination. Even though we were only in our teens We knew our light would always shine the brightest. The older people could not grasp the magical mystical elements of our luminescent splendor. We realized that they were following a dim, dying flame. It could only shine by day and we knew it was taking them the wrong way. We would try to explain to older people what we had discovered but they didn’t understand. They were only interested in following the ways of their parents. They carried on the traditions of their past. They would scoff at the concept that we had found a new radiant light that could lead us all to a better world. You are just foolish children they would say, what do you know of life? Perhaps we did know little of their life but we grasped the new incandescent glow of a better life. This
I don’t know what urge sent me there that evening, but I’m glad I went. They were tearing down Shady Maple Apartments - my first apartment. I pulled over to the side just to see the old building one more time and reminisce. The property was sealed off by a chain-link fence where construction - or rather demolition - workers, along with their bulldozers and backhoes, were all about the building complex. Already the car port was collapsed and the parking lot was being torn apart. Dust drifted into the air along with sounds of the ongoing demolition. It was a surreal sight and I found myself wondering what had become of the tenants. Like old Mr. Furgas... that man would talk to you for hours if you didn’t get away in time. Or the lady with all the cats that lived right below me. I had moved out years ago when I got a better job, and now I lived in a townhouse. But I found myself thinking back to the days when I was still struggling to make ends meet and of all the memories I had made.
My daughter, Olivia, wanted me to meet her at my favorite bistro. She was already seated when I arrived, and I sat beside her as the sun would have been directly in my eyes if I had sat across from her. After some small talk, Olivia asked a question that had been bugging her for a while. “Dad, how come you were so easy on Mom with the divorce? I know that some of my friends talk about how one parent took the other to the cleaners to make them pay for their affairs.” Well, I thought this was an interesting way to start off Father’s Day, but then Olivia usually came right out and spoke about what was on her mind. “Well, I didn’t want to have you go through the trauma. Obviously I couldn’t eliminate all of it, but I tried to minimize it as best as I could. On the other hand, I thank God that your mother cheated. That is what gave me you. My life would have been so much poorer without you in my life. That is why I did what I did. I gave her everything she asked for. In return, I
After five years abroad, my family returned to our old home town. We had been renting out our house, but had not rented it out after the last tenants left in preparation for our moving back to the States. I was 12 when we left, so I pretty much remembered things as they were, although some things seem a little smaller now that I was older and taller. I wondered if Jerry, my best friend, still lived down the street. We had written a lot when I first moved away, but like kids do, we eventually lost the discipline of regular correspondence. I had been running cross country in my old high school, and decided to go on a run to get reacquainted with the old neighborhood. I did notice that some things had changed. New grocery stories, new housing developments in what used to be the woods that Jerry and I would wander through, collecting mosses as well as birch bark to make little canoes. I was almost back home when I heard a voice call out to me. "Bruce, is that you?" I was