putting the cat out –
overhead, a butterfly
makes its escape
Tag: escape
Quotable 287
Writing during periods of despair is not a burden; it’s an escape.
– Ken Levine
Quotable 248
Words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.
– Cyril Connolly
#quikfic 128
The fog hid the road, never mind the homes across it. Cy crouched and crawled softly to the left, away from the killer behind him.
#quikfic 127
The police drone hovered over the nude sunbather too long, and the bank robber made his escape. The sunbather got her share later.
#quikfic 91
Hal looked out across the vast landscape of the frozen tundra. He hoped to catch a glimpse of his missing sled dogs. And the sled.
Fiction: Birth Order
“Kristen’s escaped.”
Sub-Proctor Anne’s mouth was tight, as though she were braced for me to gloat.
“Oh,” was my entire contribution to the conversation; it was the most Christian thing I could think of to say.
“I thought you would want to know,” Sub-Proctor Anne said, still guarded. I nodded politely at her, and she moved on to resume her work.
I wasn’t surprised. How many times had I warned everyone that Kristen would remain here only as long as she wanted to? The church’s Joliet Maximum Assistance Rescue Ark hadn’t held her during a previous pregnancy. She slipped past the dogs and the guard towers and the electrified fence as though they didn’t exist. So what chance, I asked, did the minimum assistance-level St. Reagan’s Birth Assurance Home have? An electronic gate and a simple nine-foot chain-link fence with a thin strand of razor wire on top meant nothing to someone like Kristen.
Fiction: Katydid
Katydid sat on the couch and looked at the bare, boring linoleum floor. She had nothing better to do.
Mommy had been lucky enough to get a job at a diner and was gone most of the day. There was no TV, no computer to play games on, no one to play with, and only three books, all of which she’d read dozens of times. She stared at the floor, trying not to cry from sheer exasperation and misery and memory.
This isn’t real, she thought. This isn’t my life. This isn’t real. This isn’t real.
Over and over again. It became her mantra as she stared at the floor and let her eyes go unfocused. She gradually gave up thinking the words and let herself fall into the belief that what she was living was not real.