Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway.
Another time, in Cincinatti, a small wire-haired dog sprinted across a parking lot.
Last week, a gigantic monster on a small planetoid in the vicinity of Proxima Centuri ate a ham sandwich at a local monster-cafe.
On a nuclear sub beneath the ice of the Arctic, a captain of Hungarian descent vomited up the contents of his stomach, ingested the night before at a going-away party for a member of the crew.
On Broadway, a dancer in a leotard nervously practices for an upcoming performance, her...
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...
She found the key on the internet.
It seemed silly, a little, to buy a physical and tangible thing like that to open up a locked trunk in a dream. But it was necessary, she was sure. She'd been trying to get into the trunk in the bedroom of the house of doors - the house she returned to over and over again in her lucid dreams - for years. For as long as she could remember.
The trunk, solid and wooden, banded with brass and locked. It was impenetrable. She'd tried peering through the keyhole, picking the lock, everything....
The man in the yellow shirt entered the elevator and pressed the lowest button, which was marked 'B3'. The light next to the word 'DOWN' lit up, and down we went.
"Down?" I exclaimed in confusion. "I don't want to go down. I want to go up. I pressed 31. Why is the elevator obeying you and not me? I was here first."
"It likes me better," said the yellow-shirted man.
"Why would it like you? You're ugly looking and your shirt is stupid."
"How do you know what an elevator thinks is ugly? Maybe it likes my shirt."
I...
It was cold. Freezing, really. There at the stoop, on the street, glowing in red. Dark, straight hair raking her face. She shivered, stood and walked down the street. To me, this place is foreign. To her, she knows the environment like the stories her mother told her. She walks down the road away from the doorway. Where they threw her out. Spit on her. But now she walks down the road trying to keep warm. She coughs. The shivers shake her again. The cold day drops her onto the street, rejecting her and the brightness of her clothes. The...
My eyes were tired; I rolled over in my bed, and stared briefly at the moon.
I turned back to face my fan; the 90-degree summer heat only dropped to 78 overnight, enough to make me sleep in shorts and a tank top.
My phone buzzed and lit-up its orangy color. Message from: Alex. I clicked to read the message, and it was some drunken rambling. "Oh boy," I thought, "what now?"
Our messages would go back and forth with when we would meet again, to what each other did that day or night. That was the summer I owed...
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...
"I'm in love with a robot!" "Oh, Barbie, congratulations!" Woody exclaimed, "but what happened to Ken?"
You see, Ken just didn't cut it anymore. Barbie had loved him for so long despite his all-polyester wardrobe, but recently she discovered that he had the hots for Bo Peep.
"What's his name?" asked Mrs. Potato Head. "Alfie, Alfie the spelling robot!" Barbie screamed. "I'm in love and I don't care who knows it!" "Awww," sighed Slink, "another romance in Andy's room."
"Have ya kissed em yet, Barb?"
"Yes, Skipper, I have."
"Awwww." said
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...
"Can you believe it?" she breathed, eyes wide enough to take in the whole panorama.
Venice was empty. The sun hazed behind a gauze of clouds, glinting off the bows of the gondolas that knocked rhythmically against their moors. As we walked across the worn cobbles, I pointed out the bridge of sorrows. Years ago, prisoners were taken from some sort of religious court to their plight, and their wails left echoes that hadn't quite dispersed yet.
The plaza was magnificent, rid of all people - and the pigeons were scarce too. The bell tower was mighty and the palace...