Ridiculous. Absurd. Absolutely and beyond all normal standards of decency, indecent. That was how I looked in the mirror the morning that I discovered my first gray hair. Or was it my third. I was faced with the overwhelming reality of a head of lustrous, youth-infused auburnness marred by the upright and wiry soldier who insisted on taking up some precious real estate in my brain that could have been much better utilized by a sudoku puzzle or a cure for cancer. How were things now to possibly proceed in a direction other than graveward? What was the sense in...
I was eating hot dogs on the dock. No problem, right? But this dude comes up and starts buggin' me, so I tell him to step off.
He Won't leave me alone, so I had no real choice but to grab the knife out of my jeans and stab the dude in the chest. Three times.
Police arrived soon thereafter and decided it would be much easier to just feed me to the sharks than put me through the system....
Lucky me
I'm in love with a robot. She doesn't have a physical presence, she's not some pile of servos shipped from Japan. She's an AI, the product of decades of research and development -- using tens of millions of online conversations as a template for her personality.
I know people tell me that she just scours all my emails in an effort to become what I like, and I know people tell me that she's nothing more than a neural network backed by a huge database. But is that so different from a human brain?
Ten! The crowd rose their voices to join the leader. Nine!Feet were stamped, hands raised in celebration. Eight! Faces were upturned towards Big Ben, the hands counting their lives. Seven! Some had tears beginning to roll down their cheeks. Six! Someone was screaming, but the sound was muffled by the bodies. Five! The mass chanting, the crowd undulating back and forth. Four! Liquid spattered down, someone's beer bottle flying out over the crowd, still full. Three! The chanting was getting louder. Two! Everyone was suddenly still. One. It was a whisper, Big Ben rang out as the hands came together...
With a roar of displaced air and grinding gears, the blast shields protecting the gun emplacements retracted, and the defensive batteries opened fire. A river of hot lead and explosive ordnance spewed forth at the oncoming creature.
It barely stumbled. What didn't explode harmlessly against its armored carapace whistled by as its eldritch powers deflected the bulk of the barrages.
Attack helicoptors and missile-laden jets zoomed by, but they were mere gnats to the attacker. It lumbered ever closer to the fortress.
General Davis grimaced as a swipe of its claws downed an entire Blackhawk squadron. It wouldn't be long...
The poor thing had followed a Marine from the wharf to the deck of the aircraft carrier; someone had put a leash on it and of course he was named Devil. He was the mascot for the Bravo Company and even the officers pretended not to see. And even if the Sailors had said anything, a Marine or twenty would have made sure they forgot, quick.
Devil Dog was a mutt, a half-starved thing that a Marine on leave had tossed a bit of bread at, to impress the pretty Australian broad on his arm. The Marine didn't get the...
Light. It was painful to look at; my hangover was tremendous. My hair was matted to the side of my face, and my pillowcase had collected all of the eyeliner I had on from the night before.
It was December 4th. I was 18. I had no idea how I got back into my bed from the previous night. I had lost my keys. I was spitting out blood. I was supposed to go to Toronto on a shopping trip that day.
I went. I felt dead. I caught pneumonia from being outside in December with hardly any clothes on....
The summer was in full swing, but since all his friends were out of town, it has been mostly television for him. His mother couldn't stand him in the house any longer, so she sent him grocery shopping. While browsing through the various different magazines at the counter, he noticed a couple of guys from school heading towards him, smiling. Though two of them were in his Spanish class, he had never spoken a word with them before, so he was more than surprised when they invited him to a party at the beach that evening. But parties weren't really...
The sheep were at pasture.
It was 0300 and the troops were restless. They wanted action, not this placid chewing of grass. Every day was filled with nothing but chewing and the occasionally terrifying sheering.
The ones that came back from the shed came back wrong. Nude and shivering, wild looks in their eyes. Year after year. Jimmy couldn't take it anymore. When they came for him the last time, he ran for it. He chewed and bit and growled his sheep growl.
He didn't come back. That night they looked in when they saw the soft lights come on...
They had only met a through days ago through the happy coincidence that they were staying at the same hotel on the same island at the same time. They had met at a bar, neither their friends back home would be surprised by that fact, and had become fast friends.
Gloria was twenty-one, a full time secretary who was travelling alone, just needing to escape the soap opera of a life she had back home.
Mallory was a second year student, on holiday with her mother, step-father and three much younger half-siblings. She had been relieved to find a kindred...