Writing.

I can't express how much I love Neil Gaiman. I think he's a genius. Look for yourself. These are things that he wrote for Tori Amos's Strange Little Girls album:


New Age

She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon.

You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think you know is wrong. Passion flows through her like a river of blood.

She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell.

All your tomorrows start here.


Strange

There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle.

You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sing, and a voice that might be hers will say something you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken.

Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again.

Whenever it rains, you will think of her.


Rattlesnake

She doesn't know who owned the jacket originally. Nobody claimed it after a party, and she figured it looked good on her.

It says KISS, and she does not like to kiss. People, men and women, have told her that she is beautiful, and she has no idea what they mean. When she looks in the mirror she does not see beauty looking back at her. Only her face.

She does not read, watch TV, or make love. She listens to music. She goes places with her friends. She rides rollercoasters but never screams when they plummet or twist and upside down.

If you told her the jacket was yours she'd just shrug and give it back to you. It's not like she cares, not one way or the other.


Heart of Gold

-sentences.

Sisters, maybe twins, possibly cousins. We won't know unless we see their birth cirtificates, the real ones, not the ones they use to get ID.

This is what they do for a living. They walk in, take what they need, walk out again.

It's not glamorous. It's just business. It may not always be strictly legal. It's just business.

They are too smart for this, and too tired.

They share clothes, wigs, make-up, cigarettes. Restless and haunting, they move on. Two minds. One heart.

Sometimes they even finish each other's-