tongue stapled shut. words form, but remain trapped, inside. I try to speak but choke, and a strange murmur emerges. you are wonderful. you leave me speechless.
His eyes flew open in shock, letting in the harsh glare of the red sun. He stood like that, unblinking, for several long minutes. His eyes began to tear up in the arid desert air, but he seemed powerless to close them. It was almost as if his eyelids had been stapled to his eyebrows, fixed in a permanent, protuberant position of surprise.
“Cluh-clack”
“Cluh-clack”
“Cluh-clack”
So it went and so it went. Hours and hours and hours. Papers and papers and papers and papers and papers.
Then all of a sudden, he stopped. He looked up.
A blasphemous act.
All eyes turned to him.
All their faces staring as the “cluh-clack”-ing continued.
All just staring.
she tapped and tapped and wrote and filed papers and fucking stapled his papers for chrissakes. is he going to ever stop making eyes at her and just come out and say it? “Hi, I’m your boss, let’s bang sometime okay?”
Lifting her head up, she blinked, staring into his face.
“What?”
“Cluh-clack”
“Cluh-clack”
“Cluh-clack”
So it went and so it went. Hours and hours and hours. Papers and papers and papers and papers and papers.
Then all of a sudden, he stopped, looked up. Blasphemous. All eyes turned to him.
All faces staring as the “cluh-clack”-ing continued.
All just staring.
He knew it was his time to end.
the 20 page report had taken her hours to write. sources had been discovered, scanned, appropriated, and then hastily thrown away in a fury. she had slipped it into his box just moments before the office closed for the day.
only one comment graced the front page: please staple your sheets properly.
And there it was. A staple in my foot, I had been wondering what that aching feeling was, only to peer under my heel to see my enemy. It hurt so bad. But I didn’t know how it got there. I reached for a stapler remover and tried to pull it out. And just as I pulled it out
I stapled my hands together. It hurt pretty bad. I attempted to staple my eyelid to my eyeball, but the stapler wouldn’t work. I went to the hospital. A lot of things suck. Everything sucks.
As instructed she sat at a desk stacked high with hundreds of documents and surrounded by dozens of boxes in an empty office next to the freight elevator one floor above the one where her department was situated shredding all of the thousands of internal documents until five in the morning. An old, rusty staple broke apart and pricked her finger. A single pinprick drop of blood splattered on the edge of a single piece of paper that was to be shredded. She tore the bloodied piece off the paper, crumbled it up and swallowed it with a gulp of scotch her boss handed her as he scrutinized her every move.
I tiptoed into her office and winced when I caught sight of the colorful pins decorating the top of the corkboard. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue as most writers were rather partial to certain forms of planning when it came to their serious works.
Most of them had strange quirks and sometimes those quirks were even stranger than the lives they actually lived. My job was very simple. I was a handler.
Sort of.
Maybe more like a babysitter.
I don’t know. I was just supposed to make sure that the writer assigned to me took the time to eat, sleep and bathe. And didn’t somehow accidentally injure themselves on a sharp object when wallowing in the pits of self-deprecating despair.
Easier said than done.
Because this particular writer? She had an affinity for staples. I’d tried to get her to use something else.
The pins, especially.
This was her reply.
A series of post-it notes in bright neon colors, spelling out my name–stapled to her corkboard.
just a threat. but if you don’t stop running around in this classroom i will be glad to help you. do you want to be stapled to the carpet??? or perhaps i can take your shoes away. WALKING FEET. WALKING FEET. oh the preschool teacher’s mantra. that and. . . please don’t put that in your mouth.
“I cannot believe it!!” said Stacey. “I have stapled the 3 pages to my school dress!”
The class laughed out loud and Stacey felt her face go red.
Great… as if it isn’t hard enough being the new girl!
I’m stapled to my words. I can’t find the un-do-er. Is there a “unstapler”? That’s not a word. Google chrome tells me. It put scribbles under the word. I am stapled. I am stapled to my words. I am stapled.
You stapled your two weeks notice
On the front door of my heart
And left the next day
As if nothing had happened.
The staple is gone,
But the indent still remains.
Just another violation of your lease;
There was to be no permanent damage,
But it’s not like you had any regards for it
Or me
Anyway.
I stapled the paper to the board. I let out a deep breath, finally releasing all the pent up information and top spots. Some of these poor children won’t be able to go on now, I think to myself. This job is always hard, the decisions life-changing.
She testified that she had kept a diary, but one day he had found it. The pages where she had written her most personal thoughts, where she had really expressed herself, he had stapled together, warning her that even her thoughts would never be free from him.
Cold.
I’m so cold.
From head to toe.
I try to move-
my brain tells me so,
“you will die if you stay here”
yet-
My body will not move.
Struggling,
I rip free.
from the ground
Red.
The color red
oozes out.
You save me
you put me back together.
I stapled the paper together. I walked to the front desk, and handed them over to the teacher. I was done with history for the rest of my life. There had never been a better day ever.
Now, I’m an archeologist. Isn’t life funny?
I stapled my hand to my shirt. Dammit. I did it again. I’m bleeding again. Dammit. I lick my blood, tickling my palm. Dammit. I’m licking my blood again. I stare at the stain that I lick and taste metal. Not again. I say. Not again. I always do this. I find someone to bleed and there I am again, licking it, constantly yearning for another taste. I turn to look at my co-worker. She’s staring at me, my desk is jumbled with paper and my laptop is open to a webpage I don’t remember clicking on. Dammit. It’s happening again.
I dreamt the idea would keep me awake though out the night, instead I awoke to it in the middle of the day, walking shoulder to shoulder through the people. Some nagging worry stapled to my mind and yet unknowable would flush my body with anxiety every night.
Stapled is something in the office. paper. work. homelife. all of it staped together in one pretty package and sealed with a pretty bow of pension. ca-chunk-ca-chunk, is the sound of the mindless robots of walled division working away as they staple together the different spots of their life. One could only wish staples were easy to remove…
I am pristine, and white. I wear clothes of crisp, black letters. They tell their story, I am their stage. Then suddenly, there is a shadow above me, and I am punctured. I have been stapled.
Running out. I am just running out of ideas and I can’t seem to keep them together. Honestly, I feel like they are scattering about and are out of control. Some are the same and others are different. I just wish I had a way of keeping them together. A way of clumping up the ideas, throwing out the trash and keeping them secure on the desk in my brain. It’d be easier if they were just…
The idea of slowly being lost in a world. Each step, marks it’s own journey on the long forgotten map. Eventually dwindling away from reality. Eyes wide, unable to absorb the rush of emotions in one breath. Then you see it, the sign stapled to the tree, leaving you stuck in the deep weave of the forest. Escape is only of imagination.
These thing just keep getting worse and worse. I feel like theyre coming together for some reason, there must be a meaning for all of them. Im so frustrated, overwhelemed. Paranoid that someone is watching and listening to everything I do and say. LIke theres some big report out there /
The papers are lined up perfectly, each coallation of pages organized, with exactly a one-quarter inch between them and their neighbors. Each staple is at exactly forty-five degrees. Everything is organized. Everything is perfection.
For exactly fourteen minutes and twenty-three seconds, the world is orderly. And then they come and they take and they disorganize my world.
I straighten everything, even though I know it will only happen again … and again, and again.
It’s enough to drive one mad.
She stapled another piece of paper onto the post. With a sad look, she stared at a picture of an orange tabby cat with “MISSING” written in large letters below. Noticing me standing by and watching, she lowered her eyes and hurried off, clutching a stack of papers.
I turned and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a scrap of orange make its way down the street. “Hey!” I yelled to her, pointing at the cat.
she was his assistant. Always on time and ready for the day. He never knew it, but she looked up at him as the father she never got to meet. Even through she only stapled his papers and filed his emails, she was a piece of him that he would not be the same without.
I still have the drawings
stained glass window that you made
opens to a fuzzy thought
stapled hopes and memories
and I know we hurt
but man,
since when do I say “we”?
Arthur Wallace Freelance, a wealthy Irish landowner of good repute, married Catherine D’Ioness, a French woman having made a living on jewelcraft, on the 7th of April, 1209. They were wed amongst a cheering crowd of friends and family outside of their home in the north of the Isle, as the sun rose over the ocean and great waves smashed and exploded into foam at the cliffs far below. Aside from this event, they are unimportant in the endless annals of history. Their names survive for no other reason than the children they sired not a year after the rings were placed upon their fingers.
Their first and oldest of the three children was a girl of beautiful auburn hair and slender, tall figure, whose ghostly complexion and timid mannerisms gave the boys of the surrounding countryside terrible nightmares of confused passion for as long as she lived, and indeed, as long as her face remained in the memories of those she had known even after her death. Her name was Beatrice, and, her life was riddled with heartache and bad poetry and love lost and found again, but aside from this, she was altogether a normal girl. When she passed, she was no different from the rest of the world except for that she held the greatest secrets to man’s heart.
The second child was born Richard Freelance, three years after Beatrice, a dark haired and sharp-faced boy, who, after the massacre of his family at the age of eighteen, would change his last name to Hope, and would go on to become one of the most important people in the history of mankind, an alias that would go on to be known by all of the world, and later, beyond even that as humanity soared into the stars. An unusually intelligent and gifted young man, it is for Richard’s terrible legacy that the empty name of Freelance is remembered at all. But it is not his story that we tell.
The last of the children, born two years after his brother Richard and five after his sister Beatrice, was little William Freelance. Cut down at the age of sixteen, William Freelance’s life was an empty and pointless venture of biological progression, his history nearly identical to the common teenager, a lanky, quiet, and truth be told dull child who was not unique at all, nor, some may argue, even likable – save for his final moments. Yes, the night of his demise in the manor Freelance, William met destiny just as his brother Richard did: it seems that, in his final moments, all of the emotion, all of the passion and power that William had seemed so devoid of exploded out of him as he saw his family die all around. Before the final blow on the back of his head ended his life in a crimson splash, William Freelance had cut down 12 of the intruders that had entered his home and murdered his sister and parents. Only seven had remained.
This is his story, right up to the violent and pivotal end.
I wish I could staple my eyes shut. The pain would be worth being able to be functionally blind to the things I have seen in you, of you. You’re still the perfect person to hurt me, after all this time. Still pulling my guts out of my throat.
Somehow Sollux had managed to staple his hand to the table. It hurt like hell and he was thoroughly embarassed. He wasn’t about to get help from anyone. They’d never let him live this down if they found out. He tried to remove the staple but he was having trouble.
I was sitting at the counter, wondering what to do next. I looked over and saw a stapler. Without a second thought I decided to slam down upon the device with all the force I could muster.
After it was done, and the adrenaline wore out, I noticed I was now attached to the carpentry.
Stapled pictures to corked walls. Pictures that mean nothing. Pictures that are nothing. Pictures that will go to waste and will end up in a recycling bin and become one of those stupid layered pencils.
Stapled, not stable. When you’re stapled you’re stuck, when you’re stable you’re ready, ready for anything and everything. When you’re stapled, you’re forced. Forced to do this, do that. Just like those meaningless pictures until you’re torn down when the year ends and you’re put in the waste bin, put into recycling to become something that you’re not.
And it’s painful.
Being stapled.
tongue stapled shut. words form, but remain trapped, inside. I try to speak but choke, and a strange murmur emerges. you are wonderful. you leave me speechless.
His eyes flew open in shock, letting in the harsh glare of the red sun. He stood like that, unblinking, for several long minutes. His eyes began to tear up in the arid desert air, but he seemed powerless to close them. It was almost as if his eyelids had been stapled to his eyebrows, fixed in a permanent, protuberant position of surprise.
“Cluh-clack”
“Cluh-clack”
“Cluh-clack”
So it went and so it went. Hours and hours and hours. Papers and papers and papers and papers and papers.
Then all of a sudden, he stopped. He looked up.
A blasphemous act.
All eyes turned to him.
All their faces staring as the “cluh-clack”-ing continued.
All just staring.
He knew it was his time to end.
she tapped and tapped and wrote and filed papers and fucking stapled his papers for chrissakes. is he going to ever stop making eyes at her and just come out and say it? “Hi, I’m your boss, let’s bang sometime okay?”
Lifting her head up, she blinked, staring into his face.
“What?”
“Cluh-clack”
“Cluh-clack”
“Cluh-clack”
So it went and so it went. Hours and hours and hours. Papers and papers and papers and papers and papers.
Then all of a sudden, he stopped, looked up. Blasphemous. All eyes turned to him.
All faces staring as the “cluh-clack”-ing continued.
All just staring.
He knew it was his time to end.
the 20 page report had taken her hours to write. sources had been discovered, scanned, appropriated, and then hastily thrown away in a fury. she had slipped it into his box just moments before the office closed for the day.
only one comment graced the front page: please staple your sheets properly.
They were always together. At home, at work, in the car, at the store, in their heads. Enough is enough. Someone had to pry them apart.
And there it was. A staple in my foot, I had been wondering what that aching feeling was, only to peer under my heel to see my enemy. It hurt so bad. But I didn’t know how it got there. I reached for a stapler remover and tried to pull it out. And just as I pulled it out
I stapled my hands together. It hurt pretty bad. I attempted to staple my eyelid to my eyeball, but the stapler wouldn’t work. I went to the hospital. A lot of things suck. Everything sucks.
As instructed she sat at a desk stacked high with hundreds of documents and surrounded by dozens of boxes in an empty office next to the freight elevator one floor above the one where her department was situated shredding all of the thousands of internal documents until five in the morning. An old, rusty staple broke apart and pricked her finger. A single pinprick drop of blood splattered on the edge of a single piece of paper that was to be shredded. She tore the bloodied piece off the paper, crumbled it up and swallowed it with a gulp of scotch her boss handed her as he scrutinized her every move.
I tiptoed into her office and winced when I caught sight of the colorful pins decorating the top of the corkboard. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue as most writers were rather partial to certain forms of planning when it came to their serious works.
Most of them had strange quirks and sometimes those quirks were even stranger than the lives they actually lived. My job was very simple. I was a handler.
Sort of.
Maybe more like a babysitter.
I don’t know. I was just supposed to make sure that the writer assigned to me took the time to eat, sleep and bathe. And didn’t somehow accidentally injure themselves on a sharp object when wallowing in the pits of self-deprecating despair.
Easier said than done.
Because this particular writer? She had an affinity for staples. I’d tried to get her to use something else.
The pins, especially.
This was her reply.
A series of post-it notes in bright neon colors, spelling out my name–stapled to her corkboard.
I think I need a raise.
just a threat. but if you don’t stop running around in this classroom i will be glad to help you. do you want to be stapled to the carpet??? or perhaps i can take your shoes away. WALKING FEET. WALKING FEET. oh the preschool teacher’s mantra. that and. . . please don’t put that in your mouth.
“I cannot believe it!!” said Stacey. “I have stapled the 3 pages to my school dress!”
The class laughed out loud and Stacey felt her face go red.
Great… as if it isn’t hard enough being the new girl!
I’m stapled to my words. I can’t find the un-do-er. Is there a “unstapler”? That’s not a word. Google chrome tells me. It put scribbles under the word. I am stapled. I am stapled to my words. I am stapled.
You stapled your two weeks notice
On the front door of my heart
And left the next day
As if nothing had happened.
The staple is gone,
But the indent still remains.
Just another violation of your lease;
There was to be no permanent damage,
But it’s not like you had any regards for it
Or me
Anyway.
I stapled the paper to the board. I let out a deep breath, finally releasing all the pent up information and top spots. Some of these poor children won’t be able to go on now, I think to myself. This job is always hard, the decisions life-changing.
She testified that she had kept a diary, but one day he had found it. The pages where she had written her most personal thoughts, where she had really expressed herself, he had stapled together, warning her that even her thoughts would never be free from him.
“Did you seriously staple the sacred text?” he asked, clearly aghast.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. The loose pages were driving me crazy!”
Cold.
I’m so cold.
From head to toe.
I try to move-
my brain tells me so,
“you will die if you stay here”
yet-
My body will not move.
Struggling,
I rip free.
from the ground
Red.
The color red
oozes out.
You save me
you put me back together.
I stapled the paper together. I walked to the front desk, and handed them over to the teacher. I was done with history for the rest of my life. There had never been a better day ever.
Now, I’m an archeologist. Isn’t life funny?
I stapled my hand to my shirt. Dammit. I did it again. I’m bleeding again. Dammit. I lick my blood, tickling my palm. Dammit. I’m licking my blood again. I stare at the stain that I lick and taste metal. Not again. I say. Not again. I always do this. I find someone to bleed and there I am again, licking it, constantly yearning for another taste. I turn to look at my co-worker. She’s staring at me, my desk is jumbled with paper and my laptop is open to a webpage I don’t remember clicking on. Dammit. It’s happening again.
I dreamt the idea would keep me awake though out the night, instead I awoke to it in the middle of the day, walking shoulder to shoulder through the people. Some nagging worry stapled to my mind and yet unknowable would flush my body with anxiety every night.
The monkey stapled the chicken to the quick brown fox.
Stapled is something in the office. paper. work. homelife. all of it staped together in one pretty package and sealed with a pretty bow of pension. ca-chunk-ca-chunk, is the sound of the mindless robots of walled division working away as they staple together the different spots of their life. One could only wish staples were easy to remove…
Staples:
Bread
Milk
Eggs
Bacon
I’ve got to get the staples.
I need to feed my family.
I need to provide.
I need help.
I need help.
I need help.
I am pristine, and white. I wear clothes of crisp, black letters. They tell their story, I am their stage. Then suddenly, there is a shadow above me, and I am punctured. I have been stapled.
Running out. I am just running out of ideas and I can’t seem to keep them together. Honestly, I feel like they are scattering about and are out of control. Some are the same and others are different. I just wish I had a way of keeping them together. A way of clumping up the ideas, throwing out the trash and keeping them secure on the desk in my brain. It’d be easier if they were just…
The idea of slowly being lost in a world. Each step, marks it’s own journey on the long forgotten map. Eventually dwindling away from reality. Eyes wide, unable to absorb the rush of emotions in one breath. Then you see it, the sign stapled to the tree, leaving you stuck in the deep weave of the forest. Escape is only of imagination.
This word blows. Who cares ?
These thing just keep getting worse and worse. I feel like theyre coming together for some reason, there must be a meaning for all of them. Im so frustrated, overwhelemed. Paranoid that someone is watching and listening to everything I do and say. LIke theres some big report out there /
The papers are lined up perfectly, each coallation of pages organized, with exactly a one-quarter inch between them and their neighbors. Each staple is at exactly forty-five degrees. Everything is organized. Everything is perfection.
For exactly fourteen minutes and twenty-three seconds, the world is orderly. And then they come and they take and they disorganize my world.
I straighten everything, even though I know it will only happen again … and again, and again.
It’s enough to drive one mad.
She stapled another piece of paper onto the post. With a sad look, she stared at a picture of an orange tabby cat with “MISSING” written in large letters below. Noticing me standing by and watching, she lowered her eyes and hurried off, clutching a stack of papers.
I turned and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a scrap of orange make its way down the street. “Hey!” I yelled to her, pointing at the cat.
she was his assistant. Always on time and ready for the day. He never knew it, but she looked up at him as the father she never got to meet. Even through she only stapled his papers and filed his emails, she was a piece of him that he would not be the same without.
I still have the drawings
stained glass window that you made
opens to a fuzzy thought
stapled hopes and memories
and I know we hurt
but man,
since when do I say “we”?
Arthur Wallace Freelance, a wealthy Irish landowner of good repute, married Catherine D’Ioness, a French woman having made a living on jewelcraft, on the 7th of April, 1209. They were wed amongst a cheering crowd of friends and family outside of their home in the north of the Isle, as the sun rose over the ocean and great waves smashed and exploded into foam at the cliffs far below. Aside from this event, they are unimportant in the endless annals of history. Their names survive for no other reason than the children they sired not a year after the rings were placed upon their fingers.
Their first and oldest of the three children was a girl of beautiful auburn hair and slender, tall figure, whose ghostly complexion and timid mannerisms gave the boys of the surrounding countryside terrible nightmares of confused passion for as long as she lived, and indeed, as long as her face remained in the memories of those she had known even after her death. Her name was Beatrice, and, her life was riddled with heartache and bad poetry and love lost and found again, but aside from this, she was altogether a normal girl. When she passed, she was no different from the rest of the world except for that she held the greatest secrets to man’s heart.
The second child was born Richard Freelance, three years after Beatrice, a dark haired and sharp-faced boy, who, after the massacre of his family at the age of eighteen, would change his last name to Hope, and would go on to become one of the most important people in the history of mankind, an alias that would go on to be known by all of the world, and later, beyond even that as humanity soared into the stars. An unusually intelligent and gifted young man, it is for Richard’s terrible legacy that the empty name of Freelance is remembered at all. But it is not his story that we tell.
The last of the children, born two years after his brother Richard and five after his sister Beatrice, was little William Freelance. Cut down at the age of sixteen, William Freelance’s life was an empty and pointless venture of biological progression, his history nearly identical to the common teenager, a lanky, quiet, and truth be told dull child who was not unique at all, nor, some may argue, even likable – save for his final moments. Yes, the night of his demise in the manor Freelance, William met destiny just as his brother Richard did: it seems that, in his final moments, all of the emotion, all of the passion and power that William had seemed so devoid of exploded out of him as he saw his family die all around. Before the final blow on the back of his head ended his life in a crimson splash, William Freelance had cut down 12 of the intruders that had entered his home and murdered his sister and parents. Only seven had remained.
This is his story, right up to the violent and pivotal end.
I wish I could staple my eyes shut. The pain would be worth being able to be functionally blind to the things I have seen in you, of you. You’re still the perfect person to hurt me, after all this time. Still pulling my guts out of my throat.
Somehow Sollux had managed to staple his hand to the table. It hurt like hell and he was thoroughly embarassed. He wasn’t about to get help from anyone. They’d never let him live this down if they found out. He tried to remove the staple but he was having trouble.
I was sitting at the counter, wondering what to do next. I looked over and saw a stapler. Without a second thought I decided to slam down upon the device with all the force I could muster.
After it was done, and the adrenaline wore out, I noticed I was now attached to the carpentry.
thats so derpy bro trolllll lol i hate staples yet there usefull lol lol troll
Stapled pictures to corked walls. Pictures that mean nothing. Pictures that are nothing. Pictures that will go to waste and will end up in a recycling bin and become one of those stupid layered pencils.
Stapled, not stable. When you’re stapled you’re stuck, when you’re stable you’re ready, ready for anything and everything. When you’re stapled, you’re forced. Forced to do this, do that. Just like those meaningless pictures until you’re torn down when the year ends and you’re put in the waste bin, put into recycling to become something that you’re not.
And it’s painful.
Being stapled.