A freewrite

My feet dangle over the edge of a cliff. I gaze out over the landscape as I watch the setting sun. Behind me, my troops are setting up camp. We press onward to the East, to fight for our king. The road ahead is long, and we have traveled far. The road ahead is long, but we shall march it quickly, for our pride and success as warriors depends on it. We have traveled far, but even still I look toward our homeland, and my thoughts once more turn to my newborn son. I long to cradle him in my arms. I wish to run away from this life of pride and glory, to live humbly with my family, to take my son and husband with me far from kings and war and to disappear into the country to live our lives as farmers. But I cannot. The shame of it would stain my ancestors and descendants as far as anyone could remember. The betrayal would poison my king's trust for the rest of his life. My duty as a general is simply too great to allow the desires of my secret heart to take shape.
A messenger informs me that my tent is prepared. I set my thoughts aside and retire for the evening.

Sea Legs

So I gave myself a chance to do better than normal and I wound up breaking past the point of no return into a fever dream of boring stew. We were walking down the beach and I didn't know where I was going but I kept putting one foot in front of the other then all of a sudden she was gone and I had no idea where she decided she'd be gone to but that was fine only she took my heart with her and also the beach and now I'm out at sea. And being at sea would be fantastic only I'm pathologically afraid of boats and I'd really like to tell the sailors to turn around and take me back to shore only the closest thing I've got to sailors are dolphins and they're more interested in swimming laps and trying to fuck each other to try and help someone adrift so I drifted. For decades I must've drifted until I stubbed my toe on a table and realized I wasn't at sea I was in a restaurant the whole time - or at least for a little while I thought I was at sea when I was really in a restaurant - which was fairly embarrassing because there was a gorgeous woman across from me who'd been waiting this whole time for me to calm down from my drifting episode and notice I was on land. And ever since then I haven't known what to do either, because she's been with me and I've been completely dry ever since but I have this irresponsible nagging fear that the next time I'm even close to a body of water she might try and dump me overboard, or jump in herself, or something. Since then we've moved to a desert, but every so often I'll see a mirage and think it's an oasis trying to sneak up on me.

So I just reread pretty much everything on here

There's parts of the things that I wrote that I liked quite a bit. Then there's parts that made me cringe. But let's just talk about the first of those because I'd prefer the latter to remain my own dirty filthy little secrets, yes?

Turns out you don't need to title things to post them. Of course, that makes the first sentence the title, which screws up the indexing somewhat due to length variance. So it's much better this way.

The song could always make him hurt, for it sang in the language of secret truths that he held in his heart.

Sandra stared down into the wineglass and muttered a curse for her twin. Where most people would pray, she alone knew that her brother was a vindictive bastard. That and, more directly, so was she. She was bitter and angry and even when the world owed her it gave her news like this.

"If I had to ask you how much you make up on the spot, what would your answer be?"
"I'd tell you not to ask stupid questions."
"What makes that question stupid?"
"Because that's as close to an answer you'd get, and if you didn't expect an answer like that then it's not just the question that's stupid, now is it"

How much bullshit will you wade through before you get out of the field? Or at least get a pair of boots?

Everything I say here is a lie. That doesn't make me a liar; my lies happen to tell nothing but the truth.

Doing without meaning is different from doing without purpose.

Nana-nana-nana-nana...

When the professor walked into the room for the first time, most of the class paused. They didn't do or say anything out of the ordinary, until he introduced himself. That's when they were shocked. They were shocked because he was ten years old.
I know the reaction because I was there, watching for it. Nobody in that room knew who the professor was or what he looked like, except for two men: me, and an assassin. I was there to find that assassin. He had the advantage of my not knowing who he was disguised as; I had the advantage of him not even knowing I was there.
While that class reacted to learning that they were around twice the age of the professor, I was watching the whole room, unseen. I needed to see all of their surprise, because I needed to see the one man who wasn't really surprised at all.
A single glance in a single instant was all I needed to see, and when I saw it, I knew I'd won.
All I had had left to know was where the danger was, but once I found it, taking down someone who'd kill a child for money was all that would be left. And that would be easy.
Why would it be easy?
Because I'm the goddamn Batman.

Mars

Gregory was about to shit his britches.
Well, you would be too if were the first man to walk on Mars.
Gregory, a veteran astronaut, had taken to talking to himself in his spacesuit with the radio off.

"Holy FUCK," he said to nobody in particular.
"Oh my-" he started saying to God, before he cut himself off.
"I cannot FUCKING believe it."
"I am actually walking
    -- fucking WALKING --
        on fucking MARS."

Description of a Room

There were two categories of dirty clothes in the room. In front of the closet were the clothes that had been worn only a few times and would be kept on for active duty; inside the closet lie the clothes that were retired from service - at least until next washing. A pile of socks sat to the left of his dresser. Atop the dresser, his alarm sat conveniently close to the bed; the snooze button well-worn. The rest of the dresser was piled with stacks of books, each with a bookmark nestled somewhere between the covers. The sheets of the bed were coming up from under the bottom-right corner of the mattress, and the blankets were half-hanging dilapidated off the side. Under the bed were assorted boxes, most half-full. The floor was, in general, filthy. Dust bunnies adorned the are where wall met floor like chintzy molding. A handful of insect carcasses dotted the hardwood floor. The walls were bare, excepting of course the hideous wallpaper the previous tenent had left behind. One of the bulbs in the ceiling light was burned out.
In the room lies a desk. The desk has atop it a ream of blank paper, pencils, charcoals, pastels, colored pencils, brushes, three rulers, a compass, four pen-holders, a quill, and a stick of chapstick left open. On the floor lies the crumpled-up corpses of used scraps of paper.