The paradox was that while we had been sitting in a cafe in Paris, waiting for the kick, our future selves had reprogrammed the jukebox to play nothing but St. Etienne. So we sat and we drank our tea and slowly, little by little, we became our own dream. The future died there amongst the earl grey and gilt picture frames, and with it, so did she.
She wasn't more than 10 when the meteor struck Beijing, the meteor we should have been there to stop. Huddled in a doorway, she died wrapped in red silk and fire. She was...
Look, I admit, I'm at least partly responsible for the situation. It's my fault I'M here, and not his, er, mine.
The pronouns can get really confusing, so maybe I should just back up. It's not easy being a clone, or, shall I say a time-displaced duplicate of him. I mean, of myself (see?). The accident happened a while ago, really long enough for him, the other me, to get used to it. We both decided that we'd stay in the same house and have the same life; he owed me that much, for saving his (my) life.
I DON'T...
She had read somewhere that there were lands beneath the seas, that it was where wishes hid themselves ("Fishes, you mean fishes."), that is was where dreams lived, that it was where pearls of happiness lived.
Pearls were the perfect metaphor; beauty and perfection, born of irritation. Born of an age of suffering.
They had stopped believing in mythical lands that lived beneath the waves, and so she stopped talking about them - there was a look in their eyes that she remembered, the same look her mother had been given.
Mother had tried to take her to the land...
We speared our forks on the tablecloth stained with soy and spice and duck sauce as the waiters took the picked-over "Chinese" dinners from our sight. The restaurant catered to American tour groups whose beef and corn tastes fall too unrefined for authentic foreign dishes and who long to travel thousands of miles just to conjure a memory from the hole in the wall Taiwan Garden down the end of Mulberry Street, across from the courthouse.
As our servants sprinkled the remains of our feast in the dumpster like fish food to the swarm of street children eager for their...
“Pob lwc.” the elder of Saint Joseph’s had wished me, after his strange warning. I presumed he meant for my first Mass to be held, as traditional, at Midnight on Christmas Eve. It went well, the service, with a fuller than expected attendance, to see the ‘new man’, I presumed.
Later, sat still in just the candle light, I sighed, thinking I’d found a final home. It was then that the Bwgan Fawr sighed too. A man of middling years, he seemed, from one of the middling centuries, but as translucent as chip paper fat.
He pointed at the great...
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....
Chaz and Elinor tear-ass through the forest, hands raised ineffectually above heads, sodden shoes slapping on undergrowth, alternately laughing and yelling "Ow. Ow. Ow!"
The hailstorm pelts them from above, chunks of ice the size of large coins, not nickle-and-dimeing today but quartering and Susan B. Anthonying. Chaz gets a Kennedy fiftycent piece to the top of the skull and takes a header, facefirst into the soggy pine needles below.
"I think that one actually trepanned me," he shouts.
"What? Get up!" Elinor hauls him to his feet and they keep running.
The tent, they're sure, is just over this...
The pistol was cocked, ready to go. It was a bit overwhelming for me, having the power to just end a life. One pull of the trigger, and the poor sap in front of me had slipped from the mortal coil. Such great power.
The man in front of me slid down the wall, the blood trailing from the back of his head creating a noticable streak across the brickwork. Someone had to have noticed the noise, because sirens started blaring and spinning red lights activated.
I ran and jumped out of the window, crashing through the glass. I could...
It comes from fearing science.
In America of 2025, the faithful had won. No one believed in evolution. No one believed in vaccination. No one believed in soap.
The foreign countries had taken to calling them "Potatoes" because they were white under the thick film of dirt that comes from refusing to wash.
The potatoes were in a panic. Some potato, venturing beyond his or her front door, with a long lost telescope discovered in a storage room, had pointed it at the sky and seen something move. Watching further, the potato did a bit of empirical deduction and derived...
Dane took another well-aimed pump at the car. The iron pipe splattered headlight glass all over the curb.
"Good fuck!" I sputtered, "What's wrong with your freako eyes?"
"I'm sick. Some sort of crow disease. Can't be helped. Hand me that roll of tape." He pumped his fist while taping diapers to the antenna with his free hand, reeling to some invisible unholy orchestra. Probably electro. Probably some sort of depeche mode shit zonking around in his gourd. His eyes bugged yellow and I knew he had finally gotten news that yes, it was cancer, and yes, it was hereditary....