Collection of three short demos
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Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Verity by Colleen Hoover one. I hear the crack of his skull before the spattering of blood reaches me. I gasp and take a quick step back onto the sidewalk. One of my heels doesn't clear the curb. So I grip the pole of a no parking sign to steady myself. The man was in front of me a matter of seconds ago, we were standing in a crowd of people waiting for the crosswalk light to illuminate when he stepped into the street prematurely, resulting in a run in with a truck. I lunged forward in an attempt to stop him grasping at nothing as he went down. I closed my eyes before his head went under the tire, but I heard it pop like the cork of a champagne bottle. He was in the room looking casually down at his phone and probably a side effect of crossing the same street without incident many times before death by routine. People gasp but no one screams. The passenger of the offending vehicle jumps out of the truck and is immediately on his knees near the man's body. I back away from the scene as several people rush forward to help. I don't have to look at the man under the tire to know he didn't survive that. I only have to look down at my once white shirt at the blood now splattered across it to know that a hearse would serve him better than an ambulance. I spin around to move away from the accident to find a place to take a breath. But the crosswalk sign now says walk and the thick crowd takes heed making it impossible for me to swim upstream in this Manhattan river. A spool of blue thread by Anne Tyler. One late one July evening in 1994, Red and Abby Whits Shak had a phone call from their son, Denny. They were getting ready for bed at the time, Abby was standing at the bureau in her slip drawing hairpins one by one from her scattery sand colored top knot red, a dark gaunt man in striped pajama bottoms and a white t-shirt had just sat down on the edge of the bed to take his socks off. So when the phone rang on the nightstand beside him, he was the one who answered with a residence. He said, and then, well, hey there, Abby turned from the mirror. Both arms still raised to her head. What's that? He said without a question mark, huh? He said, oh, what the ****, Denny Abby dropped her arms. Hello. He said, wait, hello? Hello? He was silent for a moment and then he replaced the receiver. What Abby asked him, says he's ***. What said he needed to tell me something. He's *** and you hung up on him? No, Abby, he hung up on me. All I said was what the ****? And he hung up on me. Click just like that. Becoming Michelle Obama by Michelle Robinson Obama. It was exactly 10:00 when the networks began to flash pictures of my smiling husband declaring that Barack Hussein Obama would become the 44th president of the United States. We all leapt to our feet and started instinctively to yell. Our campaign staff streamed into the room as did the Bidens, everyone hurling themselves from one hug to the next. It was surreal. I felt as if I'd been lifted out of my own body. Only watching myself react. He had done it. We'd all done it. It hardly seemed possible but the victory was sound here is where I felt like our family got launched out of a cannon and into some strange underwater universe. Things felt slow and aqueous and slightly distorted even if we were moving quickly and with precise guidance, waved by secret service agents into a freight elevator, hustled out a back exit at the hotel and into a waiting SUV, did I breathe the air as we stepped outside? Did I thank the person who held open the door as we passed by? Was I smiling? I don't know. It was as if I were still trying to frog kick my way back to reality. Some of this I assumed had to be fatigue. It had been as predicted. A very long day. I could see the grogginess in the girl's faces. I had prepared them for this next part of the night explaining that whether dad won or lost, we were going to have a big noisy celebration in a park.