“They have a bigger plan for me, I know it.”
“They have a bigger plan for me, I know it.”
His initial indifference to my situation shocked me, but I don’t blame Tim. He doesn’t know me. There was no baseline in his mind for what I should look like or how I should be acting. In his eyes, the limp in my walk could be a lifelong condition and thus one he doesn’t want to pay extra attention to for fear of stigmatizing me. But all of that does not change the fact that I am a 16-year-old girl with a half-shaved head, glaringly obvious lack-of-sleep bags under my eyes and a right leg that doctors would technically consider “broken.” Oh, and my parents think I’m dead.
Tim never understood Sam’s obsession with boots. Tall boots, short boots, leather boots, boots with heels, and those fuzzy boots that people made fun of but yet still remained firmly entrenched in the annual rotation of society’s collective footwear collection.
“I wish you would have worn a different shirt.”
“Please stop staring at that man.”
“Stick ‘em up.”
Kris nodded to the cashier with all the authority she could muster despite being only 28 percent sure of her plan.
“Did you say sticky bun?” the young barista asked.
“So I have some interest in a venti, two-shot chestnut latte, but I have questions.”
“Ok…”
Gary descended into the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station just after 7:00 a.m., escaping the cloudless, gradiant-sunrise sky that let any semblance of warmth escape into the atmosphere above. He rubbed his mitten-less hands together as a series of escalators carried him down to the platform at the bottom of the cavern carved out beneath Washington, D.C.
Catherine always hated State of the Union day.
A blue horse dragon sits quietly in the night. Ten feet away, drops of Budweiser the same temperature as the hands that have been holding it for two hours spatter out onto my clothes and the ground around me as I toss the bottle in the air. I make it flip over once, then twice, then three times. The bottle turns gently in the soft light of the one nearby light that’s casting a glow on the carousel. The fourth try is too violent, too fast, sending the only big drop of beer that remains directly into my eye. It burns for the second it takes for the bottle to clang against the hard-packed dirt at my feet. I’m sitting on the National Mall in Washington next to the carousel where my daughter, Annabelle, made me bring her every Saturday. The blue horse — the one that looks more like a dragon by the time you get to the back — that was hers. If some other kid got on there before I could hoist Annie up to the ornate saddle fit for a medieval fantasy princess, she threw a fit. We would wait until the next round, waving ahead the families behind us with an awkward “no please, go ahead” without the chance to properly explain the situation.
