Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway.
Another time, in Cincinatti, a small wire-haired dog sprinted across a parking lot.
Last week, a gigantic monster on a small planetoid in the vicinity of Proxima Centuri ate a ham sandwich at a local monster-cafe.
On a nuclear sub beneath the ice of the Arctic, a captain of Hungarian descent vomited up the contents of his stomach, ingested the night before at a going-away party for a member of the crew.
On Broadway, a dancer in a leotard nervously practices for an upcoming performance, her...
Marvin knew that he had to return the salad dressing. Last night, it started screaming at him. "BRING ME DWARVES!" it yelled. Strange, since as far as Marvin knew, salad dressing does not have vocal cords.
So he put the salad dressing in a baggie and threw it in the back of his backpack. He could hear the salad dressing yelling. "I HATE THE DARK AND I HATE THE WARMTH!!! THIS IS WORSE THAN THE FRIDGE! THAT WAS DARK BUT AT LEAST IT WAS COLD!!!"
Down the stairs Marvin ran. As he pushed his way out the door, he ran...
Turning twice to see the darkness and the light, Keeley lost track of the zombie that had been running along behind her at surprising speed. Somehow he slipped in to the shadows as her light-blinded eyes took too long to adjust. No matter. Keep moving. She had to keep moving. She'd learned that early on. They were too slow to give chase. Except this one. Something about they way he moved led her to think that he was different. Faster, yes. But also more precise.
The bridge ahead of her looked empty. Still, she approached it warily, knowing that appearances...
There were three daughters of the Feng family, and when the father lost his business and the mother lost her mind, the three daughters were left to serve others on their own china, long ago sold for half its value to a family of gloating pretenders.
The first daughter married a nice young man from across the way, not a family of any importance but he was a hard worker and that was enough. The second daughter died young, and since no one cared to remember her family, much less her, her life was brief and short and unremarkable.
The...
Once upon a time in a bright, little forrest,
there were three Elves named Jimmie, Bob and Horace.
Jimmie was an arsonist, Bob was a drug lord,
and Horace killed hookers with an old VCR-cord.
They went into prison but just now they broke out,
"Each take a hostage and run to the river!", Bob shouts.
They stole a get-a-way boat to cross the stream,
when Bob decided to work against the team.
He killed two hostages and shot Jimmie in the leg,
So Horace had to put a bullet in Bob's head.
"My leg hurts like a bitch!", Jimmie...
Wine makes you drunk if you drink too much. I like wine. Its like grape juice with alcohol. They should put it in juice packs and give it to adults. If you drink wine while your pregnant, then your baby will get messed up and look like a raisin. i like raisins. they are grapes that got old and they got shriveled up, like my uncle. He drank too much wine and got messed up. My mother doesn't drink wine anymore. It kills you slowly.
I saw the thing. It was preserved in the glass case, the only one of its kind. So faithfully had the curators touched it, applied the special fluids, made sure that never again, never again would it be forgotten. It had been once before, after all. After all, memory is a sieve. And this was memory itself. It shouldn't have been forgotten.
I can't remember the thing itself especially now. I suppose that's expected. My memory's not special in anyway, no, not at all. It doesn't matter, anyways, just that it was a record, so that people wouldn't forget, wouldn't...
She found the key on the internet.
It seemed silly, a little, to buy a physical and tangible thing like that to open up a locked trunk in a dream. But it was necessary, she was sure. She'd been trying to get into the trunk in the bedroom of the house of doors - the house she returned to over and over again in her lucid dreams - for years. For as long as she could remember.
The trunk, solid and wooden, banded with brass and locked. It was impenetrable. She'd tried peering through the keyhole, picking the lock, everything....
Time starts... now.
She took a deep breath, and put her head under water. Her robes flowed around her, clinging weightlessly to every crve and bone, floating up around her ankles before settling, like her, at the bottom of the tank.
Beneath the water, everything seemed muted. She could ignore the audience, the leering faces, the peering eyes, the raucus, crude carnival music hummed softly through the water, muted and beautiful, a world within a world. She liked it in here. No pressure, other than the water around her, slowly increasing on her lungs. She began to breathe out, a...
lost, without a hand to hold. I stood there in the darkness. At first I thought it'd be worth it. Now I was thinking, not so much. I followed the narrow dirt trail farther into the trees. The scurrying of squirrels and other night creatures kept me on my toes. In my head, I pictured myself in a horror movie. But I was the one character who got out alive. I passed many trees. Straining to see through the dark, cold air. I called for him over and over. Each time there was no reply. I stood there, listening to...