“You’re looking down in the mouth.” Teddy had said. Earnest waited. He knew more was coming. More was always coming. Teddy sidled up to it.
“Bill and I were just saying… ‘Ernie is looking *decidedly* down in the mouth.’ he said to me.”
Earnest, who *decidedly* didn’t like anyone, least of all Teddy, calling him Ernie, sighed and waited some more.
“You need a pick me up. A tonic. Bill and I both use Blinko-wide-awake(TM)… and you can get 5% off. Just tell ‘em I sent ya…!”
“Are we done he…” Earnest started to say.
“Remember, that’s Blinko…!” his work...
I held it at arms length. A scruffy business card in battered Russian. Something like “путешествие во времени”
(“puteshestviye vo vremeni” in my mother tongue. It had been a long time. I was rusty.)
“So, you’re telling me th…”
“That time travel is possible. Probable. Inevitable. Yes.”
“Ok, old man. I’ll give you a beer. Spill…”
“Well, Sonny… that would be a waste of good beer.” The ‘old man’ smiled. “Yes, yes. I know what you mean.” He shrugged.
“We know the universe is expanding, right? And that expansion is accelerating, yes?”
“Dark energy.” I snorted.
“Precisely, and no one...
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” Smith quipped. “The Tempest. Act four…”
“…Scene one. And it’s ‘on’ not ‘of’.” I retorted. “It continues. And our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
Smith snorted. “Ever the pessimist. And yet.” He paused for effect. “I propose to travel forward in Time by one second.”
“Smith, you can’t. Except by the traditional route. Which just takes one second to do. Except we are moving in Space-Time. Not just Time. Only light can do that without feeling the time pass.”
Smith shrugged. I tried to explain. “The Earth spins 460m/s....
”Beware the Bwgan Fawr.” the old Vicar sighed. “Every chapel has to have its ‘Ysbryd capel’…”
“Its chapel ghost?” the younger clergyman replied. His pronunciation was still more ‘gog’, more Northern, than the man he was replacing felt comfortable with. Too… foreign. If such a phrase could be used for a fellow Welshman.
A shame, his body was found the morning after his first Midnight Mass. Just outside the chapel door, lying as if it had carried a great weight across the threshold, and then collapsed with the release of his burden. A heart attack, they said. Strange in someone...
The dress blue uniforms were itchy. They were tired and hot and couldn't wait for the ceremony to be over. The captain looked across the water at the setting sun. At least that part would be over, and they'd get some respite from the day's heat. But yet...
He looked down, into the cool depths of the ocean waters surrounding the metal monstrosity he had called home for almost three years now.
"And do you, Mark Wallace, take this mermaid, Jasmine Petals, to be your lawfully wedding wife? In sickness and in health... forever and ever, by Neptune's Trident?"
The...
This is a confession that I wrote for you. Only you. And I know you won't understand this because your heart doesn't race at the sound of my name or voice. But I wrote this because I hope you do understand this. That you do feel something when you hear my name or voice.
I always seem to be behind you. It's not even one step that's separating us. It's a million steps that I'll never be able to close up because your expectations are slowly eating me up. Everyone seems to love you and I'm afraid that I do...
That part of New York was home to several artisan outlets and small, incubated, cottage industries. Rather like a hipster vision of battery farmed chickens, Wilhelm noted. Right next door to his bakery - Purveyor of the Finest Home-Baked Goods* (* all dietary requirements catered for) - he was aware dimly of a bespoke micro brewery, although no liquor of any kind had passed his ancestor shudderingly German lips in over forty years. Wilhelm didn't approve of alcohol. Not for a long time, though he had once courted the hop and the grape until their avoidable, but probably inevitable divorce....
Edgar watched the raven as the raven watching the moon. Silhouetted against the clouds, she was a beautiful sight: a black winged goddess caught within Diane's silvery glow. Little did he realize that the raven was taking orders, orders that Edgar himself would soon come to regret. The onyx bird turned predatory eyes upon the human that spied upon her, and he quickly closed the window, latching it from the inside.
Not that it would do him any good at all.
It was the quiet way Fron did the simple things - anticipating a glass of water, settling to a joint task, silently prompting something urgently forgotten - that Wilhelm noticed more than anything else. She would just eye smile at him when he, yet again amazed at her casual thoughtfulness, would gratify his mutterings. As if words were not necessary.
It was as bewitching as it was uncanny. He felt she could pluck a dropped desire out of the air, well before its longing weight would shatter it on the hard stone floor of the bakery. Slowly, quickly, her careless...
I'll do anything… No, not that!