daily prompt

The Night I Stole …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The ludicrous amount of paperwork is what saved us. Or the fact that possibly no one at the yard had created the documents that would have been needed to handle the situation, or no one would have been able to find them if they did exist, to be the paperwork that I just mentioned.

We were up to no good, but in a harmless way, so no harm had been done, so nothing was done about us the night I stole a train.
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Huey Lewis & the Tux

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Tails.” I spoke the word out loud with my indoors voice. I ordered white tails to wear at my high school prom.

For many American high school students, senior year means at least two things: Graduation and Senior Prom Night (and the morning after). With no research, I can tell you that “prom” is short for “promenade,” which is long for “prom.” For naive bookworm me, the prom, far more than graduation or even theconstantthinkingofthoughtsabouttherestofmylife, was the source of many anxieties.

(There is an ancient cliché about how native peoples who live in the Arctic have 1000 words for snow because they know snow so intimately that they have 1000 words to describe 1000 unique realities. Replace the word “snow” with “anxiety,” and you have me. A thousand different anxieties.)
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(Im)mortality

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.”—G.K. Chesterton, “The Flag of the World.”

The suicide is committing, from his or her terrible and terrifying and terrified point of view, genocide. Humanity-cide.
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