I jumped. I left the rope ladder up in the treehouse. I'm scared. Leaving it will stop me from not going to Mummy. I'm not crying. I am a big boy. I will go to Mummy, even if she is still mad, and walking like Daddy.
Maybe she will hit me like Daddy and I will tell people I fell downstairs and tomorrow she will buy me candy and Daddy will come home.
She is near Mr. Grant's shop. Most of the other angry people have given up looking for me, or where looking in other places, or have fallen...
Baby, it's just one of those things. You dream of hexagons and get triangles. You hope for a bit of moonshine on your paperback and a black cloud splits her in two.
You concentrate on windows and carbon paper and a pigeon drops dead on the ledge. It's not the city or the suburbs. It's just everything.
Me? I work in a cubicle. That's the shape I'm in.
"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...
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....
Away.
He'd escaped.
And not in the usual way.
Home from school at 7:30pm, another long day of detention for crimes uncommitted (who ever did anything really deserving detention – and when has detention been worse than the alternative. Questions he wrestled with with his head on his desk) – home long after sunset, he pressed his head against his pillow and cried.
The tears awoke the empathy of the waters in the room. His fishbowl grew stormy. A glass of water shuddered with tsunami. The poster of the ship on the wall erupted in gale and he could feel the lash...
Mr. JoJo had dreamt of owning his own ice-creamatorium for years now. he had gone into the family business after high school, trading pencils and books for stainless steel and embalming fluid. At first he found it as good as any other job available to him, living in the small, isolated hamlet that he did - 50 people in his senior class. But as the years passed, he grew to hate it with an ever more ferocious intensity. So three months ago he made his decision, two months ago he'd signed the lease for the storefront on Main Street, and...
WHAP!! The sniper rifle cracked harshly then a second later an echoing crack sounded back across the valley. A few hundred feet below a crawler's head exploded.
Daniel smoothly reloaded and set his eye back to the scope. "Clear for now. They'll be confused by the sound, but look lively. Your boy's on the High Street heading into trouble."
Off to the edge of his vision, a runner… Runner Five? Runner Eight? broke cover, trailed by Peter. They reached Luke just as he turned the corner where a lone Zom was shambling by the corner shop.
***
I see Mummy....
She knew more than she was letting on - then again, that was her weapon. That was the way she lived her life, mostly on her wits.
He'd been watching her for longer than he should, longer than he'd been contracted to. He'd taken the case on (and that sounded ridiculous, he wasn't a detective, he was just a man) and had found himself captivated.
It wasn't lust. Wasn't love either. Neither of those things interested him, especially not with her (she may have been beautiful, once, a long time ago, or maybe she would become it when she grew...
When he'd signed up to visit strange new worlds, he'd never envisioned this. He turned slowly in the glass globe, devoid of even snow or glitter, and bemoaned his fate.
He should have known better than to answer an ad for interstellar traveller posted in the local classifieds.
Crap.