I was reading a great book when the words turned to sand. A hole opened up on the page and the words drained through, and I, engrossed in the plot, followed them.
When I awoke everything was different. But just slightly so. My alarm clock's red letters were blue. My green-striped sheets were now blue striped. The knobs on my dresser had turned from square to oval. My fat tabby cat was a calico.
The stuff was all there, it was just the details were mixed up. It was like a sketch artist had recreated my room based on a...
The words hovered beneath my glowing finger, power incarnate. I lifted the text, spinning it lazily in the air, before hurling the curse at the image of my nemesis.
The photo I had ripped from the backcover of her book dissolved, dripping onto the table, her face hideously deformed, the black ink staining the tablecloth beneath.
"She thinks she can write horror," I said, the deathly silence of the basement swallowing my words. "She doesn't know what horror is." I smiled. "Yet."
Sandy was impressed. Her son, John, had never thrown a ball back like that before - so hard and fast that it bypassed her completely and flew over the wall at the bottom of the small garden they shared. "Nice one, Johnny!" she yelled. "Let me go and get it, I'll be right back!"
She yanked open the wooden gate recessed into the red brick wall and entered the narrow alleyway at the back of her house - and all the other houses like it. She looked left and right and spotted the ball rolling away from her, towards the...
The conversation lasted two words: REDACTED REDACTED
[Security clearance confirmed]
KKTnI Event 21/12 Exec Summ
Months of supervision of the three alien ambassadors and chaperoning the three chosen human representatives of the UN Science contingent had led to this final one ended discussion. Tom Savage, DoO, predicts we will never meet others from the mothership.
Something that Amy WITHHELD (the NASA astronaut in training, there to the relief of the US) Darren WITHHELD (Irish poet who'd not cut his hair for 30+ years) or WITHHELD Xing (Japanese ex-military) had said, done or shown the three inseparable E.T.s had resulted in...
It was cold. Freezing, really. There at the stoop, on the street, glowing in red. Dark, straight hair raking her face. She shivered, stood and walked down the street. To me, this place is foreign. To her, she knows the environment like the stories her mother told her. She walks down the road away from the doorway. Where they threw her out. Spit on her. But now she walks down the road trying to keep warm. She coughs. The shivers shake her again. The cold day drops her onto the street, rejecting her and the brightness of her clothes. The...
The episodes were getting more frequent. I'd forget where I was. Friends looking at me strangely as I carried on conversations finished ten minutes ago. Losing my new phone. Girlfriend called off our holiday, fed up of getting ignored. The tests showed it wasn't epilepsy. I felt strangely calm as though it was meant to be.
During my time away I lived a different life, on a different plane. Soon I knew it would be my permanent home.
I could hear dad's voice at a distance, feel mom's hand on mine. Fear.
I was slipping away in the hospital bed....
Sal couldn't breathe. And he couldn't stand running through a huge group of people. They didn't have much to hurry for. Some of them were walking calmly to trains, while others were meeting thier loved ones after riding in on one.
He was the only idiot in the place litteraly pushing through people. He would have to apologize to the old lady with the walker he knocked flat on her butt later. Right now, Karen was his main focus.
Karen. She left Salvadore a message on his answering machine. Something about leaving him, because she couldn't keep playing house anymore....
Dispossessed
All he had to his name was this park bench, and not even that.
As he sat and gazed off into the distance, he contemplated his fate. He'd lost his job, then his home, then his family. Nothing was left to him, not even his body that lay six feet under rotting in a pauper's grave. His spirit sat on the bench that the shelter had dedicated to his memory. Suicide had not ended his suffering. Dispossessed of everything he had held dear, he contemplated getting his life back.
His ex-wife stood looking at the bench, at his name...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. The rain was falling around her and she looked out into the street, wondering when she should make her break for it. Sensing that the rain wouldn't let up for quiet some time, she dashed onto the streets holding her package close to her chest. Her eyes flitted from side to side as she transversed the narrow streets and alleys.
She saw the blue door ahead of her and pumped her legs harder, eager to reach her destination. She threw herself against the door with a...
The wind blew across the plains, picking up clods of dirt as it ran past, and I gripped my son's shoulder, as if by some instinct. Soon the dust would blow through the cracks in our log cabin, and the kitchen -- the tiny corner we called the kitchen -- would soon fill with what looked for all the world like soot. That we could take. The ground and the wind had been trying to kill us for years. We were used to it. But lately we'd had to contend with spiders. Tarantulas. Tough sons of bitches that put their...