It was the fall that surprised me the most. Summer seemed to go on forever, endless heat and misery. When the leaves finally started changing, my eyes were still blinking out the sweat, trying to focus on the shimmering horizon. When it became acceptable to wear heavier clothes, I persisted in the delusion that this was merely a blip, and that the inevitability of summer would win out, sense be damned.
It finally hit me standing atop my building, feeling the inarguable autumn winds whip at me. The smell of woodsmoke filled my nostrils, wrapped around me and told me,...
Francis ran as fast as he could. A flock of partridges was chasing him. "I must reach the oodles of gold first." He thought to himself as he ran. There it was! Oodles of gold lay over the hill. But he could tell that if he kept running he'd never beat them. So he rolled down the hill. He picked up in speed as he rolled towards the oodles of gold. He knew he'd reach it first. The partridges stopped at the top of the hill and groaned. They had lost. Francis danced around in the oodles of gold. "I'm...
The floorboard creaked. The house came alive and... walked.
It did not walk as people walk, as things designed to move would move. No, a house is not meant to ambulate, not meant to be in a place different from the place it had always been. That was the first trial, overcoming years of inactivity, millenia of tradition.
But the house was determined to leave its lot, after its lot in life had fallen. All around it, other houses had fallen, eaten away by neglect, time, disuse. And while this house had not had resident or human inhabitant for far...
I had to bind myself together. I could feel pieces of me falling away, an arm, my left toe, my sense of grace under pressure. My lips struggled to speak as my tongue became unattached, my teeth loosened in my gums. My heart threatened to beat itself right out of my body, and I feared that it actually would.
The curse of unbeing is a cruel one indeed. I thought this as I wound the linen around my eyes, working to keep them in my skull. I wondered what I could have done to anger someone of such great power....
Harry didn't want to meet Sally...unless he was a cat. Harry loved cats but not in your "here kitty, kitty" kinda way. No, Harry liked cats as his main course. All of that urban legand about chinese food being chock full of cat intrigued Harry. He hung around the locla chinese joint waiting to confirm if it was true. Indeed cats checked in and never checked out...like a hotel California but much worse. Stealing a cat meal was a piece a cake with the new discovery. His dine and dash was complete with a simple request for combo number 7...
She opened the envelope and screamed. Lick, lick, and sealed it tight. His address she wrote in delicate red ink, a thin spidery scrawl which crawled over the front of the envelope and crept over to the back, coming together into a pair of bright red lips over the seam.
Emotion-paper was still a new thing, the idea of some crystal-wearers out in Sonoma that actually seemed to work. Like a flat mood-ring, it imprinted with the feelings of the person using it. And with the proper equipment, a helmet that transmitted some harmless electrical impulses to the reader, those...
"Light. I feel light"
"I should think so, you lost about half of you."
I struggled to open my eyes, afraid to see what had happened. The last thing I remembered before the darkness was the light, the bright light that had surrounded and suffused me, that had seemed to consume me. A hand waved in front of my face, and at first I was certain it wasn't mine, couldn't be mine. I had never been that skeletal, I had always been a rather large man.
"Easy there, you just did something stupid or amazing, and you're rather week. We...
The fire engine arrived too late. The pile of ash and debris that had once been a column of flame and once been my home was done. Everyone agreed that no one had ever seen a fire burn so quickly, so hot, and so cleanly. There would have been an investigation, but there was nothing to investigate. Just a lot of tiny pieces that were my life.
I knew that it was a bad idea when I had first tried it. Language is not to be taken lightly, even at the most abstracted level it's a dangerous thing. But at...
The day after tomorrow, this will all be over. Again.
That's the problem with this repetitive eschaton, once you've seen one end of the world, you've seen them all. I've seen the world end in fire and in ice. I've seen it end with righteous fury, and with an uncaring whimper. Our bad decisions have come back to reward us, and the thing we never saw coming came. All these and more, and in one memorable occasion, a giant kitten.
It's hard to care, hard to even pretend to care when the world keeps ending, and for me keeps going...
"So you can sell me anything I want?"
"No, no, you misunderstand me." He smiled a bit too broadly, his teeth white and sharp, his voice bearing an unplaceable foreign accent, slight but there just at the edges of his words. "I am a salesman of want." And with this, he hefted his large case onto the counter.
It was not without effort that he strained it up. Not that his face would betray this, but Jane could see the muscles straining under his beautiful black suit, perfectly tailored, at least to her untrained eye. The case seemed heavy, but...