I thought the world had been tilted upside down. It would have been preferable to its actual state. Everything looks nicer upside-down. The castle glittered across the water, upside-down. What was above it was only a reflection, of course.
I looked at myself in the water. My reflection looked at me. No, I looked at my reflection. My reflection was the real me.
Nothing's as we thought it was, I thought, amazed at the simplicity of it all.
I could start again! All my mistakes could vanish in this upside down world... Nothing would be the same, but everything would....
Ring, ring. Ring, ring.
Stella looked up. The pay phone beside her was ringing. Turning her attention back to the book she was reading, she tried her best to ignore it.
Ring, ring. Ring, ring.
Glancing around, she plucker up the courage and picked up the phone.
'....Hello?'
'Stella. I thought you weren't going to answer.' the voice said.
'Who is this?' How did he know her name?
'That's not important here.'
'Is that you Danny?' she almost laughed. This was typical of her eldest son. Always the joker.
'Call me Danny, if that makes this easier.'
'Danny, come on....
She closed her eyes and disappeared. The notes swallowed her, refusing to let her go. The beat aligned with her heart beat, giving her the illusion of impossible strength. The music grew louder until it was an explosion--as if thousands of butterflies instantly fluttered. She wished she too could fly away. Fly like the waves of the sound. Fly like the butterflies.
But instead, she was bound like the hair on her head. Bound by responsibily. Bound by expectation. Bound by fear of the unknown.
He stared at her, mesmerized by every breath she took. Dimly, the boy could hear her speaking, but he had absolutely no idea what the girl was saying. His attention was wholly foc...
WHAP!!
"Mark!" Mary said irritably. "My eyes are UP HERE!"
Deluxe. Five bedrooms, four baths. Swimming pool.
So are they all. Four solid blocks. Beach all the way to the highway. Green roofs and white polyurethane fences to separate properties.
The mall, when I was young, Had three shops and a bar. When we stopped going, they had a movie theater built.
And there were horses too. Wild horses. The shit you see in movies. Harming one carried a $50,000 fine.
They moved them out to an island off the cape, I've heard. The developers weren't happy when they started getting hit by Excursions.
The mall is gigantic. It has...
I jumped. And immediately regretted it.
The fear stripped me of all the other emotion that had been clouding my judgement. My wife, my children. Their faces all flew through my mind like the frames of a length of film.
"What have I done" I wondered as the air flicked my hair about. Pulling at my clothes as if it wanted to help me and stop my rapidly accelerating decent.
Then there was just disappointment. No sadness, no fear, no anger. Just disappointment. I had always sat on my high horse whenever I heard a story of one committing a...
In the beginning, there were no gods.
A human boy named Micah, not yet a man, was the first to make the discovery that if the Earth existed, then there must be a heaven; a divine source, a metaphysical origin of the crude, material plane that we inhabit. And so, partly by accident, and partly by perseverance, he discovered the doorway to heaven.
He went through it without a second thought. His other human peers had always mocked him for being too short, too weak, too strange. His family ignored him. He had the time to uncover the doorway because...
Ridiculous. That's how I feel. Every time that I look at my phone.
I know the sodding thing hasn't gone off. Of course it hasn't gone off. I put it in my line of sight so that I will know when it lights up and it's on my desk, I will hear it vibrate when it goes off and yet, ridiculously, I still press the button to check, just on the off chance that I've missed the buzzing and the flashing.
And why? What am I waiting for?
Do I really still expect him to text me when he's been...
When the department store exploded, fine home furnishings, clocks, toys and various fruits and shoes came raining down like a merchandise monsoon. Most of them landed harmlessly in the parking lot.
The people, however, did not fare so well. Most of them were dead from the initial blast, but those who weren't landed with a meaty thud, skulls fracturing like the pineapples that were also cast through the air.
It was one of the worst department store explosions of the decade, though strangely, not the very worst--that one came about three months prior, when the detonation occurred near the hardware...
"Pull!" Erin directed us. We pulled.
"Argh, it's no use!" Ted lamented. "He's never getting unstuck."
Paul's head and chest might as well have been fastened to the tree by some kind of industrial-strength Krazy glue.
"Dammit," Erin said, winded. Even the three of us, with our combined strength, had no hope of dislodging our companion. "Whose idea was it to bring that stuff to our picnic, anyway?" she demanded, scowling at the wicker basket full of the white adhesive.
No one said anything. In truth, we'd all agreed, even Paul and Erin. We thought we needed it to keep...