Green cover holds me. Oak Tree stands guard behind me. Sun warms me. Stream sings me to sleep. Sleep meets with Dream and carries me into the depths of Imagination where everything is what nothing ever was or will be.
My father was born. The pressed leaves of Limerick brushed from the crib. A mirage shimmers over the pond. Ships and flags and trucks. Red brick stoops on analog streets. Lamps on the corners.
We move and it is 30 years later. Soon the crushed leaves of New York gather. The east coast bleeds in tides, rushing us over the Plains.
In the West, we dry in the momentary sun, then open our mouths for the never-ending rain.
I'm dead. Really dead. Not in the "there'll be a twist at the end and I'll be saved" kind of way. Just dead. My story has no happy ending, no prince, no knight in shining armour, none of those fairy tale fables. I lie there motionless, on the cold, dew covered ground. I look truly awful; the complete stillness of my chest makes me cringe. This is what I wanted, was it not? No. Not this way.
I leave my limp body there and find my way back to town. I need my mom, I need my dad, so I...
White bedsheets flapping in the heavy breeze. Orange shrapnel from withered branches impotently scrape the stiffening linens.
I never saw an owl in my backyard, nor a black cat elbowed and shrieking on my fence.
But I can smell the wet detritus of autumn by the cellar windows and drip, drip, dripping from the gutter.
The doorbell. A banging on the screen door. Shaving cream in the middle of the street. These things, too.
When I arrived, the hyena was circling him silently, and the silence was what bothered me the most. It should be cackling. But it was just quiet. I'd seen enough hyenas hunting to know that this was wrong.
I looked at my options, felt out with all my senses to see what living creatures were nearby. Posessing the photographer was no good, since he clearly had no weapons and not much physical strength, even with my intellect of fighting capabilities. If I possessed the hyena, if The Shadow was already inside (and I knew it was, no hyena was that...
The Ministry of Health had issued a flash across every network in the country. You knew it by the sudden crimson blur in your peripheral vision when nearly every screen within three hundred miles was showing the same thing. Such things could cause the closest thing to a standstill in a city of twelve million people.
"Mario, could you turn up the volume?"
"Sure, Jose," he replied.
"... at least fifty thousand have already been affected, with thousands more potentially affected. We strongly recommend wearing a breathing mask or handkerchief as an alternative, to prevent the spread of this endemic."...
Delia placed fifth in the science fair. For her project, she sliced a potato in half and put each side in its own tupperware container. One side, she sealed shut with a top. The other, she left open.
On the posterboard she wrote "This is what happens when oxygen affects a potato."
Michael's was next to her. He strung miniature light bulbs with wire to show how electricity works. His posterboard was the sturdy kind, with its three foldable panels. He got first place.
Delia hit puberty at twelve. Michael did not. He ate more french fries than ever. He...
The sweetest honey was the one they daubed on his lips.
This wasn't really torture; not in the traditional sense. Instead of pain, he was given touches of pleasure.
Simple pleasures - gentle whispers, the smell of bread, the touch of soft wool against his cheek.
After a few days, he wondered if they really wanted him to talk, or if they wanted him to stay. If they wanted him to remain there, relying on them, content to be with them until the end of his days.
To call him a pet would be too extreme, but the principle was...
He promised me it would work. He'd be able to get me out of the tank before I ran out of breath.
Each move, each second, carefully planned for months in advance. I'd practice both still and swimming like mad, holding my breath for longer and longer periods of time. I was up to three lengths of the pool.
All the while the wife watched from a shrinking distance, suspicion crowding out any remnant of sanity in her eyes. How was she to know I was more attracted to her sister than to the husband.
I'd warned him to not...
The thing about mermaids is, well, that they aren't.
You're thinking seashell bikinis and fish tails, but that isn't it. Not at all.
My cousin Marjorie, this is back in '30, mind you, and the turn for the worse had been taken by all of us. She kept her things, her jewels and her dresses. They became her scales, her fins.
She decided to become a mermaid in the same way that some of us choose to marry. It was deliberate, it took forethought. She knew that she would dive beneath the waves to never return. Perhaps she would give...