"Jesus Christ! Where am I now?"
As Martin gazed into the vast ocean in front of him, the broken teleporter still beeping in his left hand, he realized, that getting home might have just become impossible.
He tramped down an empty highway for hours, without meeting a single car, until he reached a gas station. Inside, there was no one. He went around the cash register, took out some change and dialed his brothers number from a pay phone next to the candy isle. It rang. "Come on, pick up." Nothing. He let it ring for a couple of minutes...
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....
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...
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...
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
"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...
It had been three weeks now, to the day, that Mira James had been absent from class. Mrs. Pendleton sighed with regret as she rubbed Mira's name off of her desk. Truancy was a sad reality that she was powerless to stop, and the school always needed to make room for new students.
She rummaged gingerly through the shelf, searching for the pile of junk that seemed to accumulate in every seventh-grader's desk. It would all be in the trash soon, leaving room for the next student's pencils, stickers, and other belongings.
It was empty. Clean, even. With a frown,...
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...
When Martin stood there in disbelieve, but she was deadly serious. "I understand that you have every reason not to trust me here, Martin, but I'm not kidding. If I bring you to the camp, you will never get that chance again. Your teleporter will be gone forever. So please, do what I told you. And come back." Martin thought about his brother all of a sudden, and how he always pranked him into doing something stupid. He felt the little scar on his index finger, where his brother tricked him into touching mom's iron. And he also thought about...
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...