The building was out of place and yet appropriate at the same time. Sarah was the only one who seemed to notice it either way. An old pagaoda-like structure in the middle of the town. Other people were nearby, but if they saw it, they didn't act like it.

After snapping a few photos with her smart phone, she approached one of the entrances. (At least she assumed it was an entrance.) She knocked on the door several times. There was no answer, but it swung open for her nonetheless. She looked around at the park, and the people in...

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...

The Potentate surveyed his creamsicle tower cooly.

"Were my instructions not clear," he asked in the calm manner so many of his associates found so frightening. "Was the language I was speaking truly so difficult to decipher?"

Nobody spoke up at first, though everyone knew two things: the longer he went without an answer, the angrily the Potentate would get. The second fact, whoever spoke first stood a good chance of receiving the brunt of his displeasure. As was often the case, everyone opted for an intense anger spread over the whole group, then face being a direct target of...

"The water was clear," he kept insisting.

We all had been there. There were pictures, and a video somewhere posted on youtube. The water had been far from clear. Anything but clear. It was thick almost to the point of gummy with chocolate brown sediment, and tiny detritus the likes of which I didn't want to contemplate.

"I saw it," he said. "Perfectly clear. Purified. He was standing in the middle of it, and he made it clean by his presence. I tell you I saw him!"

We all said we believed him. Some even went further than that.

"Yes,...

"Mallard duck," she said, just before she placed the binoculars back down on the car hood. "No doubt about it."

This was the third time she had drug my out to this place to observe ducks. Or, in her words, to "administer some duck justice."

"Do we really need to be here this early in the morning," I asked. "I didn't sleep very well."

"This is when they're most active," she told me. "This is when they feed most, and that's when they pick on him."

"Him" was a duck with, so she said, a clipped wing of some sort....

The first thing he felt upon regaining consciousness was wet and prickly. He couldn't see just yet, and wouldn't be able to turn his head even if his eyes were working properly. In fact all he could move were the fingers of his left hand. So he was determined to make the best of that situation until he could do more.

If he could do more. A thought he quickly would not allow himself to hold on to.

He gripped the objects between his fingers. No, it was a substance. He flattened his hand and ran the back of it...

It is surprising how much three tiny candles can illuminate an entire temple.

When I walked in through the main hall to follow the giant flickerings the painted themselves against the soar vaults of the holy place, I could sense the enormity surrounding me. But I could also catch brief sites of the buildings columns, painted windows, and ancient stones stacked centuries ago one atop the other by an as yet unknown process.

I proceeded down the long aisle where many large processionals had many years gone by had passed on their way to making some offering or another to...

Not that I mind being dead. It's nothing to be saved from, really. Oh, at first believe me, I railed against it, bracing myself for whatever fight or hell lay before me. But after about an hour it seemed pretty clear to me that nothing was going to happen.

Literally, nothing happens when you are dead. To from your own view point anyway. Granted, I do not have a body to call my own anymore, but being dead feels surprisingly like being alive does. Only with less worry. And not taxes of course.

But if you can read this, and...