There was blood on my pillow. A lot of blood. A ton of blood. Where did it come from? It seemed to be dripping from somewhere. I looked up. The celing was dry. I looked around, I felt my own face, hair, ears, nose...all dry. What the h*ll was going on? Then, I heard something. A step. Two steps. Steps moving across the wood floor near the staircase downstairs. Was this the source of the blood? Was it the cause of the blood? Am I next? I was not injured, but I was still terrifyed. Suddenly, something came bounding around...
You're forgetting what happened and remembering what didn't
I'm now your memory and have given up mine
When you're gone
Will that be a blessing or a curse?
I lash out in frustration
But the strike is soon forgotten
And I'm the one left wounded
Twice over
You forget what happened
And I remember for you
And in doing so
I have given up the last pure memory of childhood
I'd trade, you know
You take mine, I'll take yours
But I think you'd find my memory
A bitter thing
You forgot
I remembered
What happened?
The canvas of black engulfs the sky. What once was light is now night. The eggshell-white circle, the great illumination of midnight, is painted on the empty expanse, plastered in place to wane and wax. Across the night, the small dots twinkle and shimmer. In a dance of celebration, they tumble across the sky, taking a ride through the night. And, all around, all around is the night. It's just us and the night, and, all that is right happens tonight. n this spaceship of civilization we cross.
I'm dead. Really dead. Not in the "There'll be a twist at the end and I'll be saved" kind of way. Just dead. I am out of food, out of electricity power for the radio, and abandonded in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. I do not know how or what happened that led up to the plane crash all I know is that I managed to survive two weeks on the scraps I found in the plane and a nearby pond. This is my last statement to the world if anyone finds this, I am going to travel north...
The last time she'd seen pink butterflies, she'd burned down the church.
She told them the headphones helped with the hallucinations.
She lied.
Dr. Weber had first suggested the headphones, and he'd told her to compile a playlist and to choose the songs based on certain lyrics and words, and to use those lyrics and words as cues to control the hallucinations. If she couldn't completely erase them now, she could at least learn how to hold them back, get that subconscious moving until the scary ones became mildly disturbing and then from there they would lower in degree until...
When I see these flowers, and this man standing here (that's me, by the way), and I see all the men with guns walking behind me, I'm supposed to say that the flowers remind me of a lady. I'm supposed to taste the dust in my mouth, remember my comrades who gave their lives, understand the difference between pride and loyalty, duty and identity.
Mostly, I remember not knowing where I stood with any of these things; thinking that this was the process to figuring it out.
We're all figuring it out, aren't we? To know where you stand is...
Time starts... now.
She took a deep breath, and put her head under water. Her robes flowed around her, clinging weightlessly to every crve and bone, floating up around her ankles before settling, like her, at the bottom of the tank.
Beneath the water, everything seemed muted. She could ignore the audience, the leering faces, the peering eyes, the raucus, crude carnival music hummed softly through the water, muted and beautiful, a world within a world. She liked it in here. No pressure, other than the water around her, slowly increasing on her lungs. She began to breathe out, a...
I saw the thing. It was preserved in the glass case, the only one of its kind. So faithfully had the curators touched it, applied the special fluids, made sure that never again, never again would it be forgotten. It had been once before, after all. After all, memory is a sieve. And this was memory itself. It shouldn't have been forgotten.
I can't remember the thing itself especially now. I suppose that's expected. My memory's not special in anyway, no, not at all. It doesn't matter, anyways, just that it was a record, so that people wouldn't forget, wouldn't...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway.
The warm dirty mist saturates every poor. Across the street relentless construction of new industry raged on erasing the remnants of an older time.
The girl tries to imagine the world as it was, as she has learned in her history books. But now only progress and drives her world. She can not hear or picture the silence or the wildernesses she imagines and longs for. She grows weary of the diminishing magic of the unknown.
In the beginning, there were no gods.
A human boy named Micah, not yet a man, was the first to make the discovery that if the Earth existed, then there must be a heaven; a divine source, a metaphysical origin of the crude, material plane that we inhabit. And so, partly by accident, and partly by perseverance, he discovered the doorway to heaven.
He went through it without a second thought. His other human peers had always mocked him for being too short, too weak, too strange. His family ignored him. He had the time to uncover the doorway because...