When I was very young I was terrified of dogs.  It was their quickness, their ability to outrun me. And their teeth. How did I know what they were thinking?  Would they hurt me if they had the chance? Maybe I thought that way because some part of me expected that kind of unpredictable cruelty, because part of me was unpredictably cruel. But this story isn’t about that.

I was walking home with two of my friends, and we came across a fence with a “beware of dog” sign. To get to the friends house we were going to we had to jump the fence, go about fifty feet, then jump another fence. I remember saying something about the sign — how we should go around and how it wouldn’t take long.  But my friends didn’t seem worried. They said it was ok, and there was no dog in sight. I didn’t want to say I was scared; that’s social suicide for a seven year old.  I said I had to go home, that I remembered I had to do something.  And I left, no arguments, no taunting.

So I started walking back to my house, or more accurately I just started walking. I had no idea how to get back to my house. The only thing I remember about this part is asking a man which direction the city where I lived was. In reality I was never more than fifteen minutes from my house. I finally got my bearings and found the street my house was on. But just as I got to my front steps, key in hand, a car pulled up honking. It was my friend (he had apparently survived the dog) and his mother. She was screaming at me to get in the car. I was home. I was safe. But this woman wanted to take me away from that, into the humiliation of the car and the friend who probably had no idea why his mom was so mad. To this day I wish I had gone inside. I wanted to explain to someone who I trusted why I was afraid. But I didn’t go inside, and my parents never found out about this.

I got into the car and accepted the verbal punishment. And I didn’t look at my friend because he had probably got the lecture about not letting a seven year old wander around by himself, and  was in more trouble than me.

That’s it. No cliffhanger or shocker. Just a story about a scared little boy who did eventually get over his fear of dogs.

Credit: submitted to StoryLog

So you might have heard about this. An all-nude club in Dallas employed a twelve-year-old runaway as a dancer for about two weeks last November. The story was in the Dallas Morning News, and all over the internet, for those of us who follow adult biz news.

The girl told police she was given shelter by a 27-year-old dancer and her boyfriend. Dancer and boyfriend took the 12-year-old to Diamonds Cabaret, where she told managers she was 19. She got the job despite having no I.D. and despite claiming to have forgotten the year she was born. On her first day she made $100.

That’s not a lot of money for a stripper, but it is a lot for a 12-year-old. Her mother told reporters that the girl had “the body of a 20-year-old.”

I don’t know what was going on at that little girl’s house, or why she ran away. Everything in the world seems wrong with a sixth-grader naked in a Dallas strip club, but I can’t tell you for sure that she was worse off there than at home. I mean, I sure hope so. (more…)

Strangely enough, Daniel’s wedding day didn’t upset me at all. It was his 30th birthday six months later which really got to me, as he stood there with his wife Alison while they greeted the guests. I can honestly say that that was the only time when I felt real envy and wished desperately that it was me standing beside him, arms round each other as we showed the world how much we loved each other.

It’s not as if I’m not allowed to love Daniel, but the way we feel about each other isn’t something that we can share easily with anyone else. Daniel is my brother, but since I was 14 we’ve had a sexual relationship - and that’s not something that many people would feel comfortable with.

I’ve only ever spoken about this once before, and even then it was very much in the abstract. While I was still at university a friend had a major misunderstanding with a relatively new boyfriend when one of his friends had reported back to him that he’d seen her hugging and kissing another man in the union bar. She was firstly annoyed at being questioned and became even more exasperated when she explained that the man in question was her brother, as her boyfriend refused to believe her. Their loud discussion took place in the union with an interested audience, until he finally stamped out in fury, still refusing to believe her. As she flounced back to join us she made a remark about preferring her brother to any other man, whereupon one of the crowd said “Yuck, how pervy!” As she sat down beside me she muttered something like “It’s not that strange,” and three or four drinks later I quietly asked her what she’d meant. (read more @ TimesOnline)

At 9.45am on Saturday, June 23 2007, I killed a man. A perfectly ordinary man, on a perfectly ordinary summer’s day. CCTV pictures show him entering the station, unremarkable among all the passengers going to the West End. He waited at the front of the platform until he could hear my train approaching, then he calmly stepped down on to the tracks and looked directly at me as he waited for the impact.

The impact was only a matter of seconds in coming, but those seconds felt like minutes. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. It wasn’t how I had imagined it during my years as a Central line train driver. We talk of “jumpers”; workmates tell of blurry images flashing in front of them, of the shock of the impact. I wasn’t expecting to see a young man in jeans and a summer shirt waiting for death, looking me in the eye. (read more @ The Guardian)

Although most folks never consider it, we all walk with death. Death is constantly lying dormant within us, waiting for the one misstep, or the one stroke of foul luck so that it can blossom and snatch us irrevokably from this world into the next, or whatever it is that death has in store for us.

All of our stories end the same way. In our death. We are all captives here on earth, and nobody gets out of here alive.

The only thing that is certain, is that, inevitably, we all will die, and the most probable fact surrounding that occurrence is that we do not have any idea how much time left. I can postulate, however that, most likely, we all have a little less time than we would like to think.

I have never seen a dried fish that didn’t have a look of absolute surprise on its dessicated face. Death loves to host surprise parties for each of us. (more…)