lchand27
It was somber, almost, the mood in the air. The boisterous laughter and jeering turned to murmurs. A chill swept through the hall. The silhouette, outlined in light, was frozen like the rest of them.
It couldn't be. It simply couldn't be.
It wasn't.
The trees were quiet. Solemn. Leaves rustled and shifted up there, far away. Here, down where the trunks were as wide as houses, the shade cast was an ever-present twilight. Here, things did not grow. They did not breathe. The forest, it seemed, was scared to live, here in the shadow of its vigilant watchers.
And then the crack, the break sounding sharp, scattering the whirls of smoke around the table like dust twisters across a dry, restless valley.
She had a cut lip running red, an eye swollen shut, spotted bruising all colors of the rainbow, and a smile wider than the Mississippi.
He, on the other hand, didn't look so good.
Their stories varied -- they often do, in these sorts of situations -- but there was no question who swung first.
Have my cake and eat it, too,
Eggs and flour and sugar and vanilla,
Baking - powder? Soda? Powder.
Cinnamon, maybe, and milk,
all jumbled together,
watch out for the shells-
The way it sat, fragile, on your tongue - dissolving like you imagine tissue paper would, just a mouthful, not even that. And the juice, too - grape juice, Mott's, the kind your mom bought at the grocery store on hot summer days and brought out when you were done playing, hot and sweaty - one sip, one swallow, and your throat remained parched, burning, as you knelt beneath the cross and closed your eyes.
It's a funny thing, you think: the way belief always sat stale on your tongue, the way it tasted going down, thin wafers and grape juice - Mott's, the kind your mom bought at the grocery store from time to time. It never tasted as good as at home - one swallow was never enough to quench your thirst.
It wasn't so much the turn of the mouth as the look in the eye that gave it away, she thought as it approached. Monsters, miscreants, men -- all wanted, but not all were willing to bargain honestly for their wants. It seemed, again, she had a dishonest buyer.
"She ain't nothin' but a low-down, crook'd-branch thief," he said with a groan, holding the bloody towel to his head.
"Yeah, but she sure got a smile to match," he answered.
And then there's that.
The complaint, all too common these days -
What good's an education?
Or, rather, what good's an education if you don't already got money?
And if you already got money, got a future and a life and a job ahead of ya, all lined up like, what's the point of it then?
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