Issue No. 2, Words - Fragments

A kid on the bus told me I can’t trust everything I read or see on TV. I imagined a page in a library book: a paragraph, a photograph, and a caption – a phib! I was repulsed. “A whole library filled with lies!” I imagined a news anchor with her fingers crossed behind her back. “Now what I am I supposed to do?” I decided the kid was full of it. I’d trust everything I read or saw on TV. But I wouldn’t trust him. I wouldn’t trust what people said about books and TV.

-Everything’s a mess, the kids were up in arms, running around like Banshees-
-What’s a Banshee?
-It’s an expression.
-A Banshee is an expression?
-Like a Banshee. Crazy.
-I see.

“Do you like balloons?” the doctor asked the little girl. “Yes.” “Good, because right now your lymph nodes are like balloons.”

David slew Goliath with a psalm.

I was on the elevator with a stranger. The stranger tapped the elevator floor with his foot and said to me mischievously, “The ground.”

A girl passes time in a Barnes and Noble reading about her astrological sign. “Leo—You are ugly.” “Well,” she said, “that read me like a book.”

There is a dearth of words spoken directly to you and many, many words spoken just past you. You gradually learn how to listen to the words spoken past you and you correctly mistake the words spoken to you as your own.