A kind of joyous hysteria moved into the room, everything flying before the wind, vehicles outside getting dented to hell, the crowd sweaty and the smells of aftershave, manure, clothes dried on the line, your money’s worth of perfume, smoke, booze...
He watches the shadows cast by her hands as she sorts through their clothes scattered across the floor. The shape of her arms as she reaches up, slipping his black T-shirt over her head -- like victory. He considers the triumph of this moment, the sl...
The library was my only blessing. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. All day, I looked forward to the happy hours I spent in that beautiful room. My guilt over appa's fate was too heavy to carry up there, and I learned to leave it belo...
And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always...
I felt a hand on my back, movement behind me, my guys making room, someone squeezing into our circle, and then one last hand joined the pile: my Korean aide. I guess it made sense. We were her real family. The closest thing she’d ever had to a real...
You have chastised me, demeaned me and dismantled me, before bringing me back to life. Who would have thought all of this was possible in a grotty cubicle of the men’s room? You hold me there for some time whilst we both catch our breath. Tentative...
I can talk to you about my past, Oliver, not to make you pity me or make myself look weak for attention, but to let you know who I was and what happened. What made me cry. What gave me nightmares. I prefer to hide. In fact, I may have even masked the...
When he reached his own room again, he found Khloe curled up on his bed, asleep. He stood over her, watching her sleep peacefully for a few moments before taking a deep breath and moving to the other side of the bed. He sat down on top of the covers ...
On a nightstand in a teenager’s room, a glass vase filled with violets leans precariously against a wall. The only thing saving the vase from a thousand-piece death on the hardwood floor is the groove in the nightstand’s surface that catches the ...
Hush Hattie!" I said, intoxicated with my success. "I don't want to go to my room. Everyone must know I shan't marry the prince." I ran to the door to our street, opened it, and called out into the night, "I shan't marry the prince." I turned back in...
Shall I pour for you madam?” he asks. It is an appropriate question and yet he makes it sound like a scorching proposal… “Mmmm, please,” is all I manage in reply. I watch him filling the crystal flutes one at a time. He is meticulous and seem...
The sentences still form in my mind, and thoughts still do their little show-off dance, but I know my thought patterns so well now that they don't bother me anymore. My thoughts have become like old neighbors, kind of bothersome but ultimately rather...
I feel it in here," she said, placing her hand against her chest and then against her stomach, "and here. It’s like there’s not enough air or room inside me. That I may… burst out of my skin or drown in it, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing. I...
And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but...
Scott could feel the contents of his stomach flip over and over on themselves. He turned to the side and retched, frothy yellow bile spilled out onto the newspaper covered floor, filling the room with the putrid stench of previously ingested alcohol....
Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you...
And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves c...
Later on, still looking, she had tried to get involved with the Women's Community Center. She liked what they stood for but secretly wished they would wear just a little lipstick and shave their legs. She had been the only one in the room in full mak...
They left like you knew they would. They went away and you fell like a stone. All the way to the bottom of your room. I see you, yes I see you. Sitting in your chair, hating every minute of it. Falling like a stone without even moving. It hurt you to...
He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent-admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was...
Fire supposed he needed to be there in order to give rousing speeches and lead the charge into the fray, or whatever is was commanders did in wartime. She resented his competence at something so tragic and senseless. She wished he, or somebody, would...
