Parts of a whole (the whole is a part)

More orphaned paragraphs, mysterious and intriguing bits of prose I think up while walking places. I am beginning to wonder if these are little teasers of stories I will never write, or if they are stories in and of themselves. Most of it is really too pretentious to ever do full form of.

----------------------

Not one of them was there by choice. Not one of them would have chosen to be anywhere else.

----------------------

For a single, shining moment, everything was perfect. The birds were singing. The traffic noise seemed to go away. Even the sun shining through the trees felt warm without burning, bright without blinding. But then reality snapped back into place and he wondered why he had never noticed the spark of loathing burning behind her eyes.

----------------------

The world ended at five PM on a tuesday, but no one told Tabitha Monroe. And at seven AM on the wednesday after the world ended, she woke up, made coffee, and drove to work on streets no one had told her no longer existed. And she never once thought it odd that there was no one else to be seen. (To tell the truth, she rather liked it that way.)

------------------------

There were occupational hazards to co-parenting with a superhero. This was not supposed to be one of them.

------------------------

"I'm pretty sure my great aunt is the last surviving Neanderthal," said Joshua conversationally. He wasn't lying.

------------------------

He marveled at how she spoke to him like an adult, this once-tiny girl who he had found once more wandering the streets of Paris. She had a vintage hat and a vintage sundress, looked like she'd just stepped out of an Audrey Hepburn movie. She spoke like an adult, but after every other sentence she licked her teeth, and he could hear the once-tiny girl whispering the secrets of the universe to him in the pauses between her words.

"Nothing is ever lost," she seemed to be saying. "It just comes back to you in a myriad of different ways."

"Matter is neither created nor destroyed," he said, and the once-tiny girl gave him a perplexed look.

"I was talking about the Louvre," she said. He nodded. So she was.

--------------------------

No one ever figured out how to get the ship out of the jar. This was for the better, as it saved them the trouble of trying to put it back in afterwards.