In 1921, he flew from the Great Rift Valley, along the trails left by the ancient Martians, to find the Temple of the Sun. It was buried, like so much else on Mars, in red sands over the course of millennia, but that meant nothing when you had a native to escort you to their ancestral home.
"So, how can we breathe here?" Pete asked the small, silver creature before him.
It sat in the biplane, strapped in, looking ridiculously small in the pilot's seat. "Air bubble," it replied, fiddling with the dials.
Pete had never flown in a biplane...
Six minutes...
Was that really all he had left? Three hundred sixty seconds? Well, less than that, now.
He looked into the eyes of his family, gathered around him atop the hill.
What was a man supposed to do in a situation like this? Pray? Meditate? Impart wisdom? Plan some last words? They'd have to be really special... You only got one chance at Last Words.
He thought for a moment. Two hundred seconds, now.
He nodded imperceptibly, straightened his back, and reached for a pair of scissors. With a confident, even snip, he pulled away a handful of hair...
Giving in wasn't an option. "2,4,6,8! We don't want to integrate!" shouted his T-Shirt. Well, the left hand side. The right blared out "We're ALL in this (body) together…"
Both the Prosecution and the Defence barristers sighed at the witness's garb, shuffled papers, breathed slowly, and were grateful he was wearing anything at all. Both were getting paid. From the same bank account, in fact. They both rose as the Right Honourable Judge Jewel took  in the room, and then her seat.
The clerk stood and announced in a notably less bored tone than usual, "Giles #3 versus Giles #1,2...
It was the fall that surprised me the most.
The winter, she was fine. Spring, slowly getting sick, Summer, even sicker.
In fall, she fully recovered from stage 3 liver cancer. There was someone to thank. God or someone.
It could have been the praying, or just hoping we didn't lose her. She was only 7. 7-year-olds aren't supposed to just die from liver cancer. Ella's better now, though. It's easy to believe in something when a dying child makes a full recovery from something so evil as that.
So God, or someone, thank you. It was God or someone...
They gathered in the woods. The darkness entwined itself around everything it touched. Filling every hole, every space it could claim.
It was not the darkness that was so frightening, it was that which hide inside. Using it as a clever camouflage.
Something hid, something stalked and watched and he could feel it. It was looking at him, watching and waiting. Its gaze crawling across his skin like tiny spiders.
He hid within himself not wanting to accept it. He built up the layers to keep the darkness out. He would not fear the thing in the dark. he would...
I couldn't sleep, so I went out for a late-night walk around town. When I got to the bridge, I stopped to look out at the bright lights in the city.
Suddenly, a woman came up to me and gave me a hug. Not wanting to be rude, I hugged her back as we both looked off in the distance. I'm not sure why, but she began to move her hand lower down my back. I tried to hint that she was making this even more awkward than it already was by moving my arm up, almost to her neck,...
"can you get my squeaky toy for me?"
"OK. where is it?"
"under the couch"
"OK...geez Pancakes...how many toys can you fit under here?"
"i dunno how many are there?"
"Six!"
"well then...six i guess."
And thus began the story of Tall Guy and Zeke Andrew Pancakes.
It started out as a bit of a joke I suppose. I opened a Facebook account and a Twitter account for my dog Zeke. I posted semi-regular interactions between him and I, and much to my surprise everybody played along without even being asked. Everybody treats Zeke as a separate entity and never...
She blew out the candles on her birthday cake, and the world we knew was extinguished. The next day, streamers and half-deflated balloons still taped to the walls and ceiling, Dad came home and pulled Mom into the kitchen and they spoke in whispers.
Jenny looked at me and snuck up to the television and turned down the volume, so we could hear was they were saying, but Mom knew and stuck her head in and told us to go down to Grandma's for the afternoon.
We walked down the block, turned right at the corner store, left after two...
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...
He didn't know that yesterday was the last day he would see her. He had no doubts about the marriage, but he knew that his life would change in a way he wasn't sure he was ready for. He couldn't live without her; he knew that. He couldn't go a day without hearing her laugh or seeing her smile-her smile that made her eyes twinkle and her dimples flash. He thought about how much he loved her smell. Whether it was the smell of her herbal shampoo, the smell of her sweet sweat after she got back from running, the...