I woke up this morning fuzzier than usual.
It's easier to remember in my sleep but the memories are now tied with hopefulness--your hopefulness. Your jacket was cold on the outside as I hugged you, and I remember your body warm as I slipped my hand in and tried to squeeze. I remember you tried to kiss me goodbye and I moved from it as I sobbed. I didn't want to miss that kiss but still I moved.
The journey alone has been quiet. You text me or email me or my own brain will write your words for me...
I looked at the passport, and then back up at the woman standing in front of me.
"Are you serious?" I asked, a puzzled look on my face.
She looked sad.
"What is to be funny?" she said, her broken English somehow endearing.
"I don't know how they do things in..." I turned her passport over, and looked at the country name listed. It took up three lines, and many of the letters just looked like squiggles to me. "...your home country, but over here we do things differently."
"Is me!" she smiled, and I felt my tough exterior melting...
Heavy midnight. The crawl of the planchette under our fingertips. The triptych was coming alive. One creature sprang from the painted panel. A beast, horned and elephantine, illuminated by the moon through the cellar window.
It spoke to us through the board:
“Extradimensional bovine dreamfeeders graze upon fronds that sprout from the heads of sleepers. These dreams—long, lush, iridescent fancies rooted in neuronic soil and flowering up into the night—are their food.
“The beasts lumber through a meadow of musing at night, their jaws drooling plasmic sludge, their snorts ruffling moppet heads from across the chasm of dimension. They pass...
The first day of school and he was already in a fight. Mark sighed as the three seventh graders approached him from three different directions. His electric blue eyes took in the boy in front of him, a lanky kid with a bulbous nose and mean eyes. Beside him, another boy stood with his arms crossed over his broad chest, a sneer on his face. And behind him, Mark knew, was the last boy, a slack-lipped teenager with dull, incurious eyes.
“Lunch money,” Skinny said, holding out his hand.
“No,” Mark replied coolly as he sat back in his black...
Not everyone knows this, but Kate Beaton is obsessive, the painterly equivalent of a Method actor. To create each new page of "Hark, a vagrant!" she recruits Swiss artists' models to dress in period clothing and pose in front of the Alps. Frozen in position as well as in time, they are required to make only the most ridiculous of faces for her art to take fruition. Eyes are stressed. At least half of the models have held a spot in Guiness for eye-bugging capability.
Once their minds are relaxed after a sufficient period of standing still, they are required...
The world was so close to perfect, he hated having to point out the flaws to the designer. It was his least favorite part of the job; they always took it personally. Months to design each reality, thousands of hours of effort by the design teams, but it always came down to the lead designer to take responsibility for the deliverable.
Clients were, of course, unreasonable in their expectations of what kind of world they would live out the rest of their lives. They were clients, after all. The health and happiness of a hundred thousand subsequent generations would depend...
1943. The year of my birth. To a very young mother. Raped by a stranger. I spent forty years believing that Tom Morran was my real father. When I found out the truth (by accident) I had a breakdown which took me by total surprise as I had always been an unemotional, logical man. Cold, is what my wife called me. A cold fish. No empathy, no sentiment or sympathy. Even when our youngest was miscarried after a car accident I didn't shed a tear.
Divorce was not something my wife contemplated after her short stay in hospital but I...
Dave had placed an add just the week before in the personals. His fetish wasn't the most obscure among those looking for lovers among the silks, the plastics, and the aluminums of the world. But when compared to those seeking human companionship, it was certainly odd.
"Seeking a lb. of cotton for intimate relationship" was how it read.
And he certainly wasn't expecting a response. After all, he'd been placing the same add for three years. Ever since he'd received 1000 thread count cotton sheets for his birthday from his grandmother he couldn't stop thinking about it.
So when the...
Today, I sat next to a bog of pond. Water was at the brim and shutters at the cold wind. the sky grew gray and the wind quickened from a breeze to gust of pure power. the trees started to bend and wave in ways unimaginable. A clap of thunder broke the sound of the wind. tThen it started to rain, big fat droplets of the stuff, Fell with such strenght it pound the pond to it's breaking point.
I am in Palm Springs the sun the haze the people I am in focus everything behind me is a blur an attractive sexy blur. I am in focus, focus with a lower case f. I want to tell you something I want to tell you what it feels like all hot and steamy the way chilled alcohol burns and tingles demands more my throat loose my toes free the smell of grass the smell of pools. I want to tell you something something about time about memory about thinking that things would never end never get bad I want...