December Knight's Blog, page 2

“The feature is available in both front-load and top-load washers.” The sales ‘person’ beamed with a wide smile and dead eyes. It was difficult to tell what they were thinking behind those pools of high gloss or even what they were. Everything about them, their skin, their clothes, the texture of their hair, all of it radiating with almost a plastic glow or rather shine. The rest of them, including their voice, was uncomfortably ambiguous.

“That’s nice, but you haven’t explained what ...

This box is three times as big as that one, and yet also three times lighter. They sit together in the back of the room. They are the only objects, besides them there is just the rectangular square walls all cream and warm. There is one of them that has an opaque shine, it draws the eye. From someplace undefinable light enters. Sometimes it appears it is coming from the seams of the walls, at other moments from the ceiling and floor, presuming they are in fact the ceiling and floors.

...

His seven-layer cake only had six layers. There was something about that idea that put him mildly out of humor. Giving in to the fact that it was already purchased and sitting in front of him, he cut into it with the plastic fork that had come with the slice and let it past the threshold of his mouth. All the while, as he ate, there was a distinct feeling that the missing layer had somehow influenced the cake itself. Taking a second bite he came to the conviction that it had in some way chan...

He had always thought that the back of the cars looked like faces and when he was behind them it always felt as if they were laughing at him or making snide little faces. That was what was called paranoia. Or so he was told whenever he spoke about it. Others said he was just good at seeing faces in things. What was that called? Yes, he had pareidolia.

It didn’t make him feel much better to think about it that way, but it did make him hate traffic more. There was nothing like having hu...

“It looks like you have bigger problems.” The smile that slid across her lips was cloying, sharper than a knife and providing just the same sense of ease as if it was sticking in your side.

Yes, that was always the answer. There were always much bigger problems, but that never made anything easier. It never comforted anyone to think of that. Even as he was hanging there by the rope he had considered that what she said was correct, that he did, in fact, have larger problems. For one t...

Nancy decided to make the porta-potty her home. It seemed only the natural thing to do when at the fairgrounds. Being so far away from her real home and put in a difficult position one had to make up with substitutes.

“I told you things would go this way.”

She looked up into the face of a slender man with tricolored eyes and the mischievous expression of an animal. The space was tight, he made up for it by practically perching himself on the pocket-sized sink.

The gentle hum of fingers dancing across keyboards spread out through the room. There were one hundred people on this floor and all of them were typing, that was ten thousand fingers dancing across letters if you counted their thumbs. Their eyes one hundred and ninety-nine, one of the employees having lost an eye in a scooter accident the summer before, stared at the screens rhythmically following the movement of the growing letters across them. The cubicles were li...

Sixty-four comes asking for bread, or at least that was how Cranston felt as he sat outside of his local grocery store with a translucent white bag on the seat next to him. It was a rather ordinary day, a Wednesday and lightly cloudy. Despite it being summer it wasn’t very hot. The sun left a warm tingle on the skin and the breeze was pleasant stealing much of the battering qualities of that time of year.

Cranston himself was an inconspicuous man. There was nothing about h...

Today is the day I’ll finally know what brick tastes like. The ground was coming too fast for me to buffer my fall. When I hit, my hands were the first to make contact followed quickly by my face. Sure enough, I was able to confirm what suspicion would have told anyone it didn’t taste good.

I lay there quite defeated. The palms of my hands were oozing blood, and thanks to a miss placed gap in my teeth, I had managed to bite into my cheek which added that last thread of i...

The Fox in the top hat whispered into the ear of the Rabbit. It was a disturbing sight to see, for the Fox never had anything good to say about anybody and the Rabbit was a horrible gossip. It so happens that the two hadn’t even spoken until that day. They had gotten in an argument about pocket watch chains and had decided over the conversation that it was best to take their own corner on the matter, which in so many words usually meant that they wouldn’t make it a habit of ...