Would You Burn The Olive Trees If You Grew Them, If You Felt Their Bark Wind Under Your Fingertips Like

The siren caressed the sailor girl’s cheek gently, like a receding tide brushing its long fingers on the sand reminiscently.

“You never wanted to hurt me, did you. Why? Won’t you starve? You’re thin as bone,” the sailor girl asked, letting her eyes roam over her wet skin as she bobbed out of the dark water.

The siren shuddered at the comparison, and whipped her hand back suddenly. Mermaids were competitive, the more meat on a girl the higher she rose in their ranks. To be thin as bone meant one was nothing but that, a carcass without value, without muscle, sinew, or flesh.

“I am more than bone, but you. You are thin and sick even though you rove the land where food grows on trees and you hunt for nothing, and yet, you come to me to die. I will leave you disappointed. If I have to suffer this life, so do you.”

Her short dark hair seemingly melted over her face, as the sunset turned to night and shadow enveloped her entirety.

“I, I meant no harm,” the sailor stuttered, unaware of her misstep.

“Your people never do, and look what that leaves us,” she spat, and turned her head, now a dark hungry pit, toward the docks where a siren hung by the neck.

“My people? Is that what I am to you? Some violent human eager to noose you,” the sailor girl’s eyes carried hurt, and she nursed her chest’s wound with a calloused thumb in circular motions.

“I wish you’d broken my heart with your teeth and not your words,” she said, and retreated from the shoreline with a flush cheek from where she touched her.

What is there to do but wait for everything to come crashing down in a sudden cold splendor, and remove the sand from beneath my feet.

It took three. The first killed her parents, in the home they used to share. The second took her legs, leaving only her arms to hold her. The third took her life. It took three bombs for Israel to murder a little girl. But it only takes the death of one child to devastate a world.

In defense of the comic, whose characters are foolish but whose mind is not. I see her brilliance in the whites of the audience’s smiles, in the wit and the quickness of her responses. I know many serious men with the mask of intelligence hiding a simple and plain nature. I find the opposite quite riveting.

-Confessions of a Ticket Sales Clerk

Am I denying myself happiness because I do not deserve it? Or because I am afraid that if I do, it will end anyways.

Hope lives in the eyes of children. I can see that now that it has left mine.

Even in its darkest hour, the world carries good people on it. And we must fight for them. Love is sustainable, a replenishing and revitalizing energy. Hatred ravages the wielder just as much as those it is wielded against. It can propel you, surely, but for how long? How long can you hold the fire before you, too, are turned to ash?

Why do you paint?

To make moments longer.

Sorry I don’t write to you anymore. I’ve been meaning to, surely. But I just haven’t gotten around to it. Every time I try I see the blood dripping down your face, from your hair slick to your forehead. It didn’t even look blonde that day, you barely looked like yourself shambling toward my car like that. A part of me hoped so badly that it wasn’t you, or that you didn’t recognize me through your haze. But it was, the voice croaking in its throat was coarse but it was yours. The creature on fifth street was my best friend.

I know you don’t remember much now, and letters like these are probably meaningless to you. Who bothers to read and write when they’re.. becoming what you’re becoming. Maybe you’re finished becoming..I hope not. I hope there’s still time.

Do you remember before all this? It’s all I can think about. Things were so normal then; I didn’t appreciate that enough. I didn’t know I was going to lose it all to the awful man who did this to you.