I couldn't sleep with her next to me. So cold. Her skin. I had to pretend she was still alive. There was no way that I could imagine she was no longer going to be waking me up with her laugh, kissing me when I refuse to get up for the alarm, tickling me when I roll back on my side and try and get a few more moments in bed, before the inevitable morning routine for work.
She was lying on her back, no longer looking at the mirrored ceiling, but deep in her thoughts. I convinced myself they...
The city was empty. I lost my way back in the dark unfamiliar landscape, absence of neon flashing landmarks to guide, silence unnerving me like nothing ever had in my one hundred and eighty years on this planet. Since immortality was the norm, the world had changed beyond all imagination, people no longer wishing to stay cramped so scattered around the galaxy, Earth abandoned, unloved, only a few of us remained as guardians. But in essence we were prisoners of our grandparents greed, innovation and biological advances.
I am a very lonely man. We all are.
Back in his days, John was the sharpest lawyer in town. At the office we used to call him the "Samurai". He used to step into a court room, with a sword for a tongue, he would win over the jury, and he'd win the case, before you even noticed that it started.
So when he took on the case of the murdered child as the defence, the media was all over him. I remember him cancelling a meeting, because there were so many camera teams around him, that he could not move his car. When I asked him why...
This starts out as a fairy tale, but does not end as such.
Riding on a subway, Jane was squirming with self-consciousness. Shaking dark curls out of her eyes, she wiped her shaking, clammy hands on purple and black striped leggings, brushing her elbow against the heavy object that was swinging gently -- almost innocuously -- in her left hand jacket pocket.
It's so heavy, she thought. Would I be able to drink all of it?
Earlier that day, she had obtained a potion in a sketchy graffiti-infested alleyway from her great-great-grandfather, who was alive and well -- and a...
Most voids were black. Or so he thought. In literature. in movies and television. When there was a void, one saw a large blackness that stretched into infinity, broken up only by the colors of whatever object the story placed in the middle of said void, in order to enhance its enormity.
But he stood now in a white void. Had it shone brightly he may have concluded he was dead, or dying. But it was just a whiteness without a brightness. A dull white, if such a thing were possible.
The woman had not walked into the space. Rather...
"I'm not stalking you, I swear," she said to him as he stared across the produce section in the grocer.
"Oh? The coffee shop by your office I could understand. The subway too. Maybe we live on the same line. The movie theatre might have been a coincidence. And the cologne section at Macy's could be justified. I'm a little concerned that you'd appear in the same Casino, the same bar and the same strip club, but to each their own. So that you'd even say you're not stalking me, here, in a grocery store, the most obvious place for...
The sky was blue, the grass was green and the little clouds were as fluffy as the picture in a child's reading book. All was well with the world. And on her swing, she could see above the park, above the neat hedges and the flowering bushes. She could, as she swung higher still, see over the row of terraced houses and into the street beyond. Over the flowering cherry trees and the neat gardens with their blossoming plants, over the heads of the middle class and middle aged gardeners and housewives and shoppers and busy bodies of the suburban...
Rose wished she'd never agreed to that picture.
The look, the provocative stare, running her hands through her hair like that? That wasn't her. How did she expect to be taken seriously as an author when her picture looked like an ad for those 1-800 numbers, the ones they put on late at night with the skimpily clad women.
Maybe she could play it off. "I write humor; it was a joke!" she'd claim. The truth was, authors got paid almost nothing to bare their souls to their readers. It didn't matter if it was humor, scifi, or even detective...
You had me at 'Ox Bow Lake'" I sighed. Temporal Repair 202, the practical. "So we have this rift, right? And you're saying it's like God was dealing out the cards in a Cosmic Bridge Game, when this stupid 21st century chronoterrorist (I hate Chrono's) interrupted his deal."
My instructor nodded, pleased at least one of us had listened and remembered his tortuous analogies. He cleared his throat, "So, how does God carry on dealing so everyone still gets the cards they were 'meant' to get?"
We all looked at one another round the card table. We were stumped. Not...
100 feet away I watched the smugglers struggle to get over the jagged stones, collapse onto the wet sand, expel salt water from their lungs and pray to whatever gods they believed they had reached shore alive.
Frank De Libre was the youngest and most sober on the galleon. Swimming for freedom, literally. Kidnapped two years beforehand from his parent's home, watched his tutor die trying to save him.
I could see everything as the images appeared like a slide show. This was the fifth time I had undergone hypnosis and finally my lifetime of phobias had been explained.
Coincidentally,...