"Well...that happened," thought the little pup as he watched his owner be eaten by a sharktopus. At least, he thought it was a sharktopus. His owner had been talking about it over and over again to random objects in the house like the small, hard thing that glows and vibrates every five minutes or the really loud block that holds the other block. He did very much like his owner, but he was often quite dumbfounded at his owner's abilities. For instance, whenever talking to him, his owner changed his voice as if he were someone else. Sometimes, when he...
It had to be the bumblebee parachute. I wanted one with Hello Kitty on it but Al said no. Black and yellow clashed with the sky. That was important.
Good choice, given the photograph above. Man, I thought Lady Liberty's presence was so commanding that she'd always be the focal point. Not true. It's me and Al in our parachutes.
Yep. We landed on Liberty Island and there's a whole throng of well-wishers around us. Someone asks if someone watched that old David Copperfield special where he made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Nuh uh. That was a long time...
Our city used to have one psychic, an old blonde woman who read palms and tarot out of her ground floor apartment. Her name was Liza and she spoke with a rolling California speech, peppering every other sentence with "fer sures" and "gnarlies".
Since the housing crisis, the population of palmists has grown. There is a stretch of road on Congress Street where seven women ply their trade, each operating from their own storefront. They are the only profession that seems to be growing, buying up empty retail locations.
It's worth noting that the women are just mere footsteps from...
"The river's on fire," said my son. The river did seem to be on fire, if you were only looking at the river.
"No, the sky is," I told him. A reflection from above. He shrugged his shoulders.
He didn't ask why the sky was on fire, just bowed his over over the rowboat's side and continued looking for fish. Small, darting, the color of the river bed, the fish beneath the fire, the river beneath the fire.
My eyes toward the sky, waiting for the fire to come down.
2070. Last digits of the code. No matter what they did, I was not going to tell them the rest of it. My undercover mercenary training would allow me to live for longer than the other hostages.
On the last day of the siege, everyone was dead but three of us. Now they wanted us to fight against ourselves to the death, only way we could be given life saving water. Jackson saved us the guilt, died at 10 am. Lewis, a meek accountant, killed himself. This wasn't the way the captors were expecting to spend their afternoon so decided...
"No. He didn't." I hid the bruise on my face with veiled hair. I didn't want to admit the truth. It was harsh.
"Then what happened?" The sternness of his voice almost made me flinch.
"No one hit me, Joe. It was my own stupidity."
"Stupidity smacked you in the face?"
My laugh was curt. "Yeah, I wish. That would've helped."
"Lena..." With disapproval heavy in his tone, Joe stepped forward. His hands were warm on my arms. "Tell me."
"An accident. I fell."
"You're lying."
He was right. I was. He always knew when I lied. I almost hated...
The daring were punished. They were punished with exactly what they wanted, and found out the paucity of their imagination and desires.
It was near midsummer when the djinn arrived in Baghdad. He promised to each person, exactly what they wanted, the one thing. There were no rules, no catches. This was no monkey paw to wish upon, but a djinn in all his smoking glory, blue fire leaping from his eyes and his ears, red lightning visible from his mouth when he spoke, and a long rumbling thunder when he laughed at those that came to make their wishes....
He set the plate before her. He watched her eat it clean.
"Where have you been?" he wanted to know.
Instead he said, "It's good to see you again."
She nodded at him, said something about being tired, bouncing around too many places, too many people. But he only heard, "I've spent every free moment with him, letting that stranger come inside me."
So his response probably sounded non-sequitur to her. "When's the last time you had a weekend to yourself?"
"A while. I don't know how long."
"Four weekends," he thought. "The weekend before that we went to the...
You had me at 'ox bow lake'. But the time machine accidentally switched itself on and didn't stop until I was back in 2012 where I started. I spent months in regret afterwards, looking online at the black and white photos of you with the rest of your Native American tribe, uncomfortably posed for the camera. I could not mend the glitch in the machine, could never return to a life with you. Sometimes I spend time with your ancestors, I have made friends with little Jimmy, your great great great grandson. I can imagine that he could have been...
The lights fled all over the world; it seemed as if the whole was stars. Everything blended into the night. All people could was stare admire beauty beyond imagination. The night didn't seem like the night; it looked something else. Something different. Blues were covering uo the black. Black was covering up the blue. But everyone didn't notice, because beauty is all they could see. A lady stood in the balcony, which would be one of her only moments alone looking at the beauty. All she could do was, and admire she did. Her eyes seemded glow in astonishment, but...