Crossed Out Words Novels & Stories

In the gloominess of assassination and extremism, I suppose my personal question crosswords abruptly appeared disgracefully unimportant. "It's the same rules. When you unravel one word, the letters you insert to the criss-cross provide material that helps you to solve the decussate words. No?" "Certainly," she agreed impatiently. "That's the point of doing a crossword!" "Tina must have started with a clean framework -- a mass of totally mysterious communications, which made no common sense at all except if they expressed a top-secret significance. And it almost certainly didn't take her very long to start toying with the likelihood that particular words meant other words. When she worked out

Again, he reminds her of Mathias despite the difference in eye and hair color. The ghost pointer lowers to and hovers over the Delete button and then… clicks it. | Are you sure you want to delete this character? Cancel OK | The pointer clicks OK and just like that, the character of Ecto disappears and only Kayzel remains.

“See if you can spot anything he might have left behind.” There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of debris. Some garbage, an empty can, a few tissues, some scraps of paper. Wait. Walking to the scraps of paper, I rummage through them and pull out one. It’s only one word, written in ink: Those. It’s also crossed out. This is likely a rough copy of some decree, but I know Samuel’s handwriting nearly as well as my own. When we’d been courting, we’d sent letters. I thought it so romantic at the time.

No… “Yeah well… He should have known better than to come here undercover…” AJ shrugged his shoulders before he gulped the entire scotch. Lillianna stood there frozen. Paul? They were talking about Paul, she felt it… “Oi…” AJ clicked his fingers at Lillianna now. He wanted a top up… Oh… “Babe, I think boss wants another shot…” Britney was speaking to Lillianna now. Lillianna shook her head trying to shake herself together before she refilled his glass.

Rosie said. "Hey Rosie, listen to me, I'm sure that whatever your gender results, Omega or Beta, you will be an amazing human being. Do you know why? Because you are born as a strong girl, you are smart, you are cool, you are great Rosie. You know Gemma right? She's a Beta, she just broke up with her boyfriend Eric, they've been dating for more than 2 years, Eric is an Alpha and they had to break up because that's the limit, even love can't cross that line, so whatever the outcome will be, I'm sure you can pass it well "

For a brief moment, I considered leaving. Not because I couldn’t ask, but because the answer already felt… set. Still, I stepped in. My fingers curled slightly around my phone as I brought it up, unlocking the screen. The movement was slower than it used to be, but steadier than before. I opened a blank screen and began to type, then stopped halfway through. “You have been—” I deleted it. The words didn’t feel right. I tried again. “Did I cross a line somewhere?” I read it once, adjusted a word, then turned the screen toward him.

I delete the duplicate citation while she keeps scrolling through my references with the determination of someone hunting for buried treasure. "I still think this paragraph is too soft," she says after a minute. I read it again. She isn't wrong. I sigh before highlighting the entire section. "Delete it." "Seriously?" "If Whitaker can twist it, he will." My finger hovers over the keyboard. Six hundred carefully chosen words disappear with one press of a key. I physically wince. "I think I just lost six months of my life." "You lost bad writing." The apartment slowly disappears beneath our work.

The code was clear: H-U-L-L--S-P-L-I-T-T-I-N-G. C-O-L-E--D-O-W-N. L-E-O--N-O-T--B-R-E-A-T-H-I-N-G. T-H-E--I-R-O-N--K-I-N-G--I-S--A-T--T-H-E--D-O-O-R.

Olivia had been afraid for herself, but she had still thought of the women whose records had already been used against them. Near the lower third of the page, one name is not hidden completely. Or rather, it had been visible once. Someone has crossed it out so violently that the ink nearly tears through the paper. A thick slash. Then another. Then several more, dark and furious, obliterating the name beneath. Only the first letter remains partially visible at the edge, not enough to identify. The violence of the crossing-out feels different from redaction. Redaction protects. This punishes. Leah’s stomach turns. “Who crossed that out?”

Everyone said Alice Foster was heads over heels in love with me. Even when my father and I were kicked out of the house, she still insisted on keeping her marriage vows. She even rehearsed them ninety-nine times because she envisioned a perfect wedding for us. Little did they know, all the best-men at the wedding were picked among a list of the ninety-nine lovers she kept around her. “Oliver, you're already my husband. It’s not too much to ask to let them attend the wedding, is it?” I numbly accepted the box of cash she handed me before rushing to the hospital. The wedding was supposed to be for me. That was, until I saw her walking onto the stage with the child my mother birthed out of