Some people have never touched the snow, or swam in an ocean, or taken an elevator to a rooftop.
I once watched it snow on the ocean from a rooftop. I took the elevator to the lobby and walked out to the beach.
First I stood in a sandstorm. Then I ran in a snowstorm. Then I fell in the snow and the sand.
The snowflakes looked like stars falling from the night.
"You heard me right, friends. The evil that is draining our country of vitality is NOT Wall Street, NOT Washington D.C., NOT the Chinese or video games or foreign oil! No sir!"
I looked out at them, every one of them shocked at hearing this deviation from the party line, hearing my "lunatic heresies", as the bloggers and cable news harpies would no doubt dismiss them.
"NO SIR!" I thundered, rocking them back in their seats. "I tell you that the greatest threat to America and TO THE WORLD is this scourge, this pestilence, this new opiate of the masses:...
Heavy midnight. The crawl of the planchette under our fingertips. The triptych was coming alive. One creature sprang from the painted panel. A beast, horned and elephantine, illuminated by the moon through the cellar window.
It spoke to us through the board:
“Extradimensional bovine dreamfeeders graze upon fronds that sprout from the heads of sleepers. These dreams—long, lush, iridescent fancies rooted in neuronic soil and flowering up into the night—are their food.
“The beasts lumber through a meadow of musing at night, their jaws drooling plasmic sludge, their snorts ruffling moppet heads from across the chasm of dimension. They pass...
We danced until the mimes came home. It was Halloween and the mimes owned the bank. They ate the bank because the bank was made of chocolate. There was no place to go. It was snowing.
So Jenny, my dance partner, grabbed one of the mimes and tore his stomach open. Blood and gore flew everywhere, but that wasn't important. What was important is that inside the mime's stomach was a warm motel where we could stay. The proprietor of the motel was Hulk Hogan. He rented us a room for $5 plus a bag of pretzels.
In the room...
"Wait, so he hit you?"
"Girl, yes! And do you know what else?"
Amber was now at the edge of her seat. "You better tell me, girl."
Quanta proceeded to pop her gum as she said, "Girl, yes. He hit me, and had the nerve to tell me that I deserved it! Can you believe that madness?"
Amber's neck should have popped from the force of her head falling back. "Oh, no he didn't!"
"I know!" Quanta rolled her eyes. "He said I deserved it, because dinner wasn't ready when he got home. What kind of mess is that?"
"Sound...
She opened the envelope and screamed. She could not believe him, she simply could not believe that he was still persuing her after all this time. Even though they were living miles and miles apart, he still insisted on writing her. He was the reason that she had left their small town for a big life in Paris. Why couldn't he just leave her alone? Why did he always need to have her? She couldn't understand him. But, as much as she hated to admit it, she was still in love with him. The timeless quote, "Absence makes the heart...
"Wait, so he hit you?"
She hadn't meant to let it slip. She'd done so well hiding the cause behind the bruise on her cheekbone for the past few hours, passing it off as nothing. She couldn't even remember what she'd said that had revealed the truth... something about getting into a fight over something stupid. Shannon had put two and two together and, well, there was no denying it now.
Lacey waved a hand through the air, discarding it as if it was nothing. "He didn't mean to," she sighed, turning to the mirror to examine the extent of...
There is a crow somewhere in the trees, unseen but seeing all. There are a million tiny eyes beneath the grass that feel our footsteps and send out warnings.
Somewhere in the world is a man who would do us harm if we were to cross his path at this moment. It's midnight. A few cars drive past us, and each might contain a demented murderer.
The moon shows its bellyful of craters, and some of the stars are planets. There are a million tiny eyes up there somewhere looking out at us.
This is the eve of something momentous....
White bedsheets flapping in the heavy breeze. Orange shrapnel from withered branches impotently scrape the stiffening linens.
I never saw an owl in my backyard, nor a black cat elbowed and shrieking on my fence.
But I can smell the wet detritus of autumn by the cellar windows and drip, drip, dripping from the gutter.
The doorbell. A banging on the screen door. Shaving cream in the middle of the street. These things, too.
The singer still held onto his microphone as he slumped to the stage. He felt as through a very large hand was pulling him very quickly through an ocean of green water. The crowd retreated, their faces elongating. Their cheers elongated, too, as though one corner of the cheer had been nailed to a doorway and then stretched around the world.
The world is elastic, he thought, and couldn't imagine why he hadn't noticed this before. Everything has a soft suppleness to it if you look hard enough, or perhaps if you learn not to look so closely.
Even the...