“The building had a gothic feel to it. The windows had black soot stains from years of enduring rain and neglect. The whole place was a dreary sight, not to say that all gothic buildings were dreary. In my book, gothic buildings were the best types of buildings, compared to the square ones that looked like a four-year-old’s Lego experiment.”
“Mary went upstairs later that night to check on Jamie. She knocked on his door quietly. ‘Jamie… are you there? It’s Mommy.’ Mary jiggled the handle and the door was locked.There was no sound. ‘Jamie… I’m sorry I yelled at you earlier.’ Still, no reply came.”
“I see you all. All the different people. Running around like ants in a farm that has been shaken too hard. You get angry at the little things—your coffee when the barista gets the order wrong, the weather because it always seems to be raining, and the jammed printer in the back of the office that never seems to work. I see you. But you don’t always see me.”
“Earbuds vibrating inside my head / A barrier from those who leave me dead / They park their hearse outside my weary skull / Emotions bubble but my face remains dull”
“You watched your grandfather die. / I believe you were 7 years old at the time / But the strangest thing was even though he wasn’t blind / he refused to acknowledge your face.”
“I got it / Even though it’s been years since the last time / I shot it”
“The days are getting longer. The nights, an eternity. Have you ever noticed how slowly the sun moves? I have, I’ve watched it. For 12 hours. Sunset to sunrise.”
“He was biding his time until dusk, trying to keep his mind focused and clear, yet nagging thoughts still clouded the corners of his mind. They were all jammed up by the very thing that instinctively wanted to liberate them: his mouth. He channeled his words through his inventions, letting them speak for themselves. But this was important. He could not let any other event distract him from his precisely planned schedule.”
“I swear I’m not that bad of a liar. I have to do it quite often. My mom sat me and my sister down at the dining room table as though we had killed someone.”
“I had five minutes to defuse a bomb that would destroy everything. It was located in the left wing of a hospital, but I didn’t have any other information. I was not given a defusal kit. I was only given the resources around me, but they would do just fine.”
“I was over at my house when it started. It was something that I’m sure nobody in the entire world was expecting. Nothing, not nukes, not machine guns, nothing could stop this.”
“It was April tenth. A normal day. It all started at breakfast. I had just woken up, and my family was still asleep. I was eating pancakes. They were very good pancakes (especially considering that I made them) and just as I was reaching for more, my arm moved, and I knocked over my glass of milk.”
“I stole his shotgun once–he seemed very annoyed–but he eventually got it back from me. Maybe he wanted revenge and decided to try to kill me. How he managed to ram into us and completely destroy our ship, I will never know.”
“I watch the little spots of color / Dance around the night air / Like lightning bugs / Twirling into the night sky / And disappearing from sight.”
“life is soft and serene when you let her / when you wake up too early and you sit in the living room / the sun hits you and you hear ocean waves”
“Poor Alexandra laid sick from the cold, for today was the second day of winter, and she was unprepared. It wasn’t that she lost her winter coat or anything like that. Alexandra intentionally left it. She had escaped her sanctuary during the winter solstice and didn’t bring her coat. But her lack of warmth was not the main issue (her race was known for having a small resistance to the cold), it was the amount of damage done to her body that showed.”
“You just bought the new iPhone 7. Super wow. Maybe you should rethink your choice. The iPhone 7 might look really cool, but it’s missing things and has many flaws.”
“Once there was a sun and moon / The sun circled the moon, like a dog racing to catch its tale / They were Unified / Stronger together / The light and the moon / The same / But separate”
“Pierre Gusteau was a different child. Not in a bad way. He always wanted a legacy. Everyone wants a legacy. Everyone wants to be remembered. But Pierre. Pierre lived for a legacy.”
“The castle had remnants of grandeur, of beauty long forgotten, now hanging in rubble and ruins over the cliff of the violently churning sea. Perhaps once it had been glorious, but now it lay in tatters, much like the man who claimed residency there.”
“Yellow is the bright color of sunflowers and sunsets / Then the sun goes down and the sunflowers are forgotten”
“A doctor in white scrubs progressed among the tanks. He took a look at the cardiographs for each patient and saw that they were running steadily. Beep, beep, beep, beep. He saw a nurse and said, ‘Are the new ones ready for inspection?'”
“After having done the same commute for more than half a year, you start to see some patterns. There are certain people I see every Tuesday going to the shuttle at Times Square, or that man who walks really slowly on the stairs at 36 Avenue on Wednesdays. Of course I don’t know any of these people’s names, but I can guess.”
“I remember her cheekbones / twirl / smile / grace / eyes / But I remember her pain / I remember her laughter / But that was before”
“I woke up with a deep, solemn feeling. Opening the drapes to see the gray sky didn’t help my spirit, nor did it help that it was a Sunday. I put on my slippers with a slow creak of the floorboards, each screech giving off a sound of desperation. As if someone were calling for help on a depressing day. If only I could make that sound.”
“Take a breath. Foot up foot forward foot down. Take a breath. Then you’re at the top but uh oh you fell down.”
“President Obama put a hand over his head and sighed. ‘It is done.’ He repeated this over and over in a whisper, ‘It is done. It is done. It is done. My God. It’s done.’ He ran out of the room, taking the stairs at a run. The Marine sentries nodded as he ran out of the West Wing lobby, toward Marine One. “
“I was carried uncomfortably for a while into a loud area. Then a train, which I have seen in Gumville before, came roaring in. On the train, he opened up the pack and grabbed my parents. I screamed, ‘No!’ but of course only my cousins could hear me.”