She'd always come running when I called especially on the beach after a thunderstorm collecting amber. Knowing that I'd get worried because of the deep rockpools. As this was a different time, after the apocalypse, it was the other way around, she called out to me, worried that as an aging scavenger I'd come to harm on the shoreline each morning.
Keira, my beautiful grand daughter wanted me safe, home in front of the fire reading a newspaper, instead saw me beaten with fatigue, stumbling around the barren landscape hunting for food.
I love her.
Finally I had reached the moment that everyone could only dream of. As I stood in the white room, memories of the past kept going through my head. All the choices I had made to get to this moment; all the things I didn’t do when I could; all the things that led me here. When she walked in, my thoughts ceased. As the angel in white was walking towards me, tears began to fill my eyes with a smile appearing on both of our faces.
“Sorry I took so long to get ready.” Her hair was grey and...
The hillsides have been finger-painted
with Larch trees turning yellow
like smears from a child's hand
that Mother Nature will bleach away within the month
I stare, thinking there must be a pattern to it.
Birds eating seeds from cones and dropping them in flight?
Early colonizers after a fire?
Unwilling to believe in beauty without structure and reason
Dusk arrives with its gift of quiet
As if hosting it here in this small moment of time required recompense.
A perfect moment of stillness
before I turn to go inside and life's motions begin again
PUNCH
Graham Pererson was a murderer. He killed people. Often.
Under the guise of a little old man he scoured the late evening streets for his victims. He carried a small bag and a walking stick.
He had a nicely worked out system which had, to date, never failed him.
And so tonight, April 1, he locked his door behind him and headed towards the suberbs.
They were starting to head home in groups of two and three from their nights of debauchery. He hated them. All of them.
A young woman seperated from her group and turned a corner....
Good night…
Good morning…
Good afternoon…
Chet had to find his own fun while working as a department-store greeter. Sometimes he said “Good evening” instead of “Good night” to the fancier-looking customers. Sometimes he said it to the disreputable customers, too, but a bit sarcastically, to see if they’d pick it up on it. They usually didn’t.
Every now and then Chet would greet someone with the wrong time of day. “Good afternoon, sir,” he’d say, as the sun was peeking over the mountains. “Good night, ma’am,” while the sun was burning hot overhead. And usually people just continued on...
It was difficult getting to people to understand that actually you wanted to be in the cage. That the cage was the safest place at the moment.
The rest of the world had gone mad - or at least, it seemed that way. Maybe the world had always been like this, maybe there had always been something in a stranger's eye, maybe there was always something in the rain that made it taste funny.
Maybe the drugs were wearing off, maybe he was finally waking up to the reality. Or the drugs were taking effect, maybe he was devolving (he'd...
"Come here often, do you?" The old man said. He was sitting on the iron bench waiting, like me, for the bus. His clothes were a little ratty and he smelled faintly of moth balls. I didn't know what to say to him being as this was my first time here.
"No, sir. You?" I replied, awkwardly.
"Been coming to this stop for, oh, must be twenty years now." He said, shifting his cane a bit. His dark glasses hid his eyes and I wondered if he were blind.
"Ah...well..." I trailed off. I've never been one for socializing with...
You know damn well the head is in the box. You know damn well how this movie will end. But her legs are across yours and she shaved. They're smooth like you could have only guessed, because in winter she was all jeans and tights.
You've been hovering with your hand on her knee and she's so into this damn movie that you've seen one hundred times. She hasn't mentioned that she thinks about sleeping with Brad Pitt, but you see the way her eyes get when he comes on screen. She has yet to give you those eyes, but...
The gate closed behind them. Ahead of them stood the fearsome Morley house, said to be haunted with the ghosts of the former occupants, who had been killed years ago.
Jana, the youngest of the four, turned pale. "Are you sure it's safe to be here?"
The second-oldest, Robert, scoffed, "There's no such thing as ghosts."
"I'm more worried about Dad finding out we're not in bed," Jason, the second-youngest, said.
"You guys are such wusses. C'mon!" Angela, the oldest, ran up the hill to the house, opening the door. As soon as she stepped in, though, she ran out...
It was Andy from the grave.
"Can you speak up?" Caroline, distracted anyway by something on TV, couldn't understand him.
"I said it's Andy. From the grave. That's the muffling, the grave."
"Well, it doesn't help you're such a mumbler anyway. Wait, do you mean you're actually calling from the coffin?"
"Not really," said Andy, "but I am dead somewhere. I don't feel like I'm in a box. I feel like I'm in a cloud."
"That could be the coffin. I saw it," Caroline remembered, "it was plush."
"That's nice."
"Listen, did you want something? I've gotta head out in...