Finally, the door swung open. The light was brilliant and painful after so much time i the dark; not so brilliant as His, of course, but the effect was much the same.
"DO YOU LIKE IT?" His voice boomed. "IT ONLY TOOK ME A WEEK. SIX DAYS, IN FACT."
They stared stupefied. Where there had once been nothing, there was a giant celestial body, a blazing fire fixed in the heavens. Closer, there was a spinning blue-white sphere orbited by a pockmarked satellite.
And upon that globe, tiny things moved about, hunting, gathering, eating, sleeping, fucking.
"What?!" They screamed incredulously....
We made a little church of our own when we promised to marry. You asked me when I barely understood how to love you, and I'd been innocent so long that I think the moment you told me you loved me you became ever more desperate to snap me up. Three days after the initial declaration came the proposal. I ran away from you and hid.
You're a terrible boy. Everyone says so. I'd heard the talk since the beginning of time and I'd seen the queue of sobbing girls you left behind you. And yet.... you told me loved...
My four-year-old son was out of control. He tried to climb EVERYTHING, he made crazy yelling noises all the time, he had about a ten-word vocabulary, and he slipped out of his room every night to sleep with his pet jungle cats.
And it was all his grandpa's fault.
I should have seen it coming the day my son was born. I held him in my arms, showed him to my father-in-law, and said, "Hey, Dad, ain'tcha proud?" And he just twinkled his eyes at me, and ran his hand through his dreadlocks, and grunted bemusedly to himself.
I should...
They were trapped for seven days, four storeys down, in a subway car.
Just the two of them.
Midfight, mid-breakup, mid-life-altering-altercation, the lights had flickered. Then gone out.
In the darkness Jake had offered a tentative "Hello?" and chuckled quietly.
Cooper had shouted back. At the moment they realized the darkness would not abate, that help would not come, that they were trapped, they'd retreated to opposite ends of the car.
Cooper flipped the emergency switch and forced open a door. A rotting stench flooded the car.
Doors shut again they studied the opposite end of the car.
On the...
The results were in, and the guy she voted for came second. She wasn't one bit surprised. Kate was never the lucky one.
At school, her younger sister was the academic one, and of course this was the attention grabbing trait where their father was concerned. Acheivements, medals, gold stars, good grades. These were the things that made a child great.
Kate was bestowed with other virtues. Naturally blonde hair, a pert, rosebud mouth and breasts at fourteen. Her male attention had come from another place altogether, usually behind the science block under the watchful gaze of Gary Spivey and...
The alien craft exploded invisible to the human eye. The inhabitants had exited over an hour ago, running amazingly fast past the animals lying lazily on the sun scorched land who barely gave them a glance, such was their speed.
Marsha's mom said a second rosary just before going to bed after the long and happy day that was Marsha's wedding. She had never believed that her plain yet loving daughter could have made such a good match. Tom was not only clever, strong and good looking but he was such a homely man, loved helping with the farm, crops...
"But why are there cracks?"
"Each of them is a single stone."
"Where do the stones come from?"
"Stones are made by the Earth. These stones..."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why does the Earth make stones?"
"Time and pressure."
"Not how. Why?"
"I don't know. But these stones are shaped by people."
"Why?"
"To pave the road."
"Why?"
"So we can walk on it."
"That stone is broken."
"It will be replaced."
"They have more stones?"
"They will make more."
"What if they don't?"
"What if they don't what?"
"What if they don't make more?"
"They will make more."
"But what...
Sal knew it was too late the minute the whistle blew. That train had been keeping time in Millersville for twenty years and when its screech filled the air, everyone knew it was one in the afternoon. An eclipse could turn the day to night and no one would doubt it was in the PM if the train sounded. Heart racing and pulse pounding, Sal made a desperate dash down the road, passing the stable and skidding to a halt. "Now there's an idea." If some idiot wanted to leave a saddled horse loosely tied to this hitching post just...
"Mister Cloone?" said the sergeant as he sat down. "You know why we're holding you, right?"
Cloone shrugged and leaned back. "Fascism? Something something smokes?"
Sergeant Miller took off his own glasses. "We're stopping you here at the Richford/Quebec crossing because you were smuggling Cuban cigars into the country. Why would you do that? You didn't even try to hide them."
"It's the Hemingway in me. Cuba. And 'fuck the system'."
"You think that smuggling cigars makes you Hemingway?" asked Miller.
"I think it's a good start," replied Cloone.
"We have the boycott in place for a very good reason....
In hindsight, the solution was obvious.
Anyway, that's what I thought when I awoke, face and hands already sweaty, the dark and humid air beginning already to claw at my face.
There was no light. I didn't have one on me. Didn't think I'd need a phone, with no reception. No, that wasn't part of the plan. And I don't smoke.
So, unlike the movies where there is in-scene lighting when the hero is trying to claw his way out of the coffin, it was nothing. It was dark and moist and stiflingly, oppressively silent.
The plan had been easy:...