Story. Страница 14

The Kneeler. Rita Hooks

The day after I arrived, I awoke to a grey morning, drizzly rain outside. I pulled back the heavy drapes in the main room, a cavernous space, and looked again at my new abode. The room was sparsely furnished with old heavy furniture. This must have been the living room — looked like the set of the interior of the home in Long Day's Journey into Night. I had studied O'Neill's play while taking a theater class and could visualize the man and his two grown sons sitting around the table in the middle of this room.…

An Aging Mind. Kathleen E. Dunlap

Growing old is cruel. I don't recommend it to anyone. It's like snow in summer. Unseemly and ridiculous.     Young backs don't ache, young hearts beat in rhythmically, and young minds remember with ease. There's my main issue: my mind. The doctor says my brain is eating itself....slowly, determinedly, and inevitably.

The End of Chapter One. Ginny Swart

Evie Morton sat chewing her pen, staring out of the window.     She'd heard of writer's block but this was ridiculous. She'd so looked forward to her first Adult Education class for Memoire Writing and now she couldn't get a single word down on paper. All around her, women scribbled their lives industriously, heads down and hardly pausing.

A Ghost Story by Mark Twain

I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years, until I came. The place had long been given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof in my face and clung there…

The Big Deal. Jamie Brindle

He started by telling them how they would die. Sometimes, he thought that selling deaths was all his job really was.     It was always good to start with the death. That's what the customer was invariably looking for. That's what really sold them.

W. Irving. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 

Near the eastern shore of the Hudson, at the broad part of the Hudson river, there lies a small market-town called Greensburg, but which is more generally known by the name of Tarry Town. Not far from this town, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley among high hills. This is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to rest, and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever…

The Cross on the Old Church Tower. Louisa May Alcott 

Up the dark stairs that led to his poor home strode a gloomy-faced young man with despair in his heart and these words on his lips:-- "I will struggle and suffer no longer; my last hope has failed, and life, become a burden, I will rid myself of at once." As he muttered his stern purpose, he flung wide the door and was about to enter, but paused upon the threshold; for a glance told him that he had unconsciously passed his own apartment and come up higher, till he found himself in a room poorer but more cheerful…

Kana’ti. Richard Tutt

1765     Kana'ti crouched, waiting for the dawn. His bare feet anchored on tree roots protruding from the steep, muddy bank of the coosa like ancient arthritic fingers. He was still, quiet, as natural to the valley as the massive poplar tree he leaned on. The rough bark, deeply furrowed, grabbed his smooth dark shoulder, steadied him. He was invisible, wrapped in a stand of younger black willow and redbud saplings, growing abundant under the taller, dense canopy. He wondered if he died there, would he grow…

The Day that I Died. Shendl Pratt

The ceremony is over now. The people have all left, and I sit alone in the hotel room. I don't know how to feel. Relieved, I guess. Knowing the day, you will die is strange. It filled me with a sort of anxious expectance until today. Now I just want it to be over with.