Shape. Contour. Line. Plane.

My mind is swimming with terms; it's hard to know where to begin. Think. THINK!

Placing my hands strategically against my forehead, massaging in circular motions, attempting to eradicate the oncoming hangover, I catch a whiff of last night's Sauza and the whole experience comes flooding into self-consciousness. Exactly what I've been avoiding, but it's upon me now, and the midterm examination worth forty percent of my overall grade just doesn't seem quite so vital. By contrast, the almost irresistible urge to vomit has quite suddenly taken me, and now I am reaching for my bookbag...

He grimaced as the flash went off, realizing too late that the final extant image of himself would so clearly portray the unease he was feeling at that moment. All well, he thought -- better that way.

On the one-off cedar deck table he had placed his remaining possessions. The cool glass beneath had the strange optical effect of making them seem blurred, though he knew his exhaustion was catching up with him.

"Ok, what do we do now?" he said to himself. Another sign, he chuckled, that things were going terribly.

He grabbed his smart phone first, and, unsurprised...

Flan in the face, flan in the face, flan in the face.

A wild grin stretched across his face, an expression of pure exuberance, of joy and abandon, just before the pie tin splattered the gelatinous goo all over his tweed coat.

The students were gathered outside the lecture hall, sprawling in the hundreds in the oppressive heat. Here and there, groups had clustered beneath the maple branches, trying desperately to stave off exhaustion. They had been at it for two days already: the most notorious sit-in in America's higher educational history.

As if to further puzzle the wayward boomers...

Ridiculous. He had never been so ill-treated in his whole life. To think that such an imbecilic, poorly-dressed, snivel-nosed shit could have the AUDACITY to pour a saintly bordeaux all over his wife put such beet red hues into his cheeks as to suggest asphyxiation, or potential heart failure.

The fat man shook, with an angry tectonic rumble, and the whole room seemed to hold slack for his reaction, volatile elements stirring with life...

"What in the hell do you THINK you ARE DOING!??" the fat fuck rumbles. His gold watch chain jangles with the bulbous rolling of his obese...

The Ministry of Health had issued a flash across every network in the country. You knew it by the sudden crimson blur in your peripheral vision when nearly every screen within three hundred miles was showing the same thing. Such things could cause the closest thing to a standstill in a city of twelve million people.

"Mario, could you turn up the volume?"

"Sure, Jose," he replied.

"... at least fifty thousand have already been affected, with thousands more potentially affected. We strongly recommend wearing a breathing mask or handkerchief as an alternative, to prevent the spread of this endemic."...

"What's taking you so long, dad?"

I'm eight, and we are on a fishing trip, and I'm having a terrible time. My father is attempting to set up our antique tent and making a great mess of things. He is not the type to keep particularly organized. Perhaps it was he who passed that onto me.

"This goddamn rod is bent all to shit," he grumbles. He always used to curse when he was irritated, which was often. I always knew to steer clear of him in those moments or he would find some arbitrary task for me to do...

Never before had he witnessed such decadence. In every direction he sees strangers from a planet he has not lived on. They do not share his world. Humongous flashing screens paint the slopes of this urban valley with a grotesque LCD glow, electrifying the smoggy night and blotting out constellations he was accustomed to observing. A foreign land indeed.

They had told him about these men, and their women and children, of their social clubs and religious events and twenty-four-hours-a-day informational overload. He had watched the training videos explaining how to communicate in their language, how to mimic their gestures...

The cord wrapped around the foundation of the building and led into the hedges separating the two parcels of land. Thick as a forearm and coal-black, it seemed oddly out of place way out here in the Yukon. He follows it through the hedging, sacrificing the soft underskin of his forearm to the barbs and branches which leave a series of shallow scratches, which soon seep small droplets of bright-red oxygenated blood.

It is overgrown past the shrubbery, with wild grasses and weed growing archlike over the alien wiring. He concludes it must have been here for some time, though...

Despite the obvious instructions, the young boy turned from the class prompt and began scribbling furiously on the sheet of lined, college-ruled paper. First an eye, then another. Two ears — no, wait, make it three — and a cruel mouth. Fangs and something like a tongue, long and sharp and forked. A ferrety neck protrudes awkwardly into shoulders and a pair of thin, hairy arms extend from these.

He squints with intention, his hand begins hurting from gripping the number two pencil so hard. A messy hand and another goes onto the page. Four fingers on one, three on...

"The day after tomorrow, this will all be over." Such a fucking cliche.

Sure, our road trip would be ending soon enough, and we would be returning to our miserable, monotonous, minimum-wage jobs that regularly take us to the very brink of sanity... but to pretend that everything we just experienced would be concluded as soon as we return to home port strikes me as truly false.

The thing that he seems to miss is the continuity of events which develops out of the dynamic relationship between what we do and otherwise experience, and the way we see our fundamental...