"What's the worst thing you ever done in a Church, Sunshine?"
I looked at Beloved, I shrugged, although goosepimples and ice water prickled my body. "I killed a pigeon once."
"What?" Beloved laughed, his mouth pulled, his cheeks puffed and he pinched one lens of his glasses, pulling them up his face. "You're kidding."
"Nope," I said and I walked away from him, my arms clasped behind my back and I looked back and forth, up and down, and touched the smooth paint of the white-washed pews. "I killed it dead."
"WHY?" Beloved was still smiling, I did not have...
They had forgotten to close the window flap on the tent the night before. It was early morning now, and the light had started to come in; a cool, damp air had already come in and settled into the corners.
She had been awake for about 20 minutes, annoyed by the light that irritated her even through her closed eyelids. Michael was curled up in the corner, half in his sleeping bag with one leg hanging out. His shirt was undone and had spilled open, and even now he smelled like booze. His bandage had bled through the night and...
They were listening. They children, huddled in the hallway on that November night, heard every word their parents said to one another. Well, yelled at one another. The children were used to the fights by now but this one sounded more serious. They were fighting over the money - as usual. Money had been tight lately and their father had been working extra hours just to stay away from the fighting. As the four children walked back to their bedrooms, they could still hear the words being thrown across the room between their parents. As they slipped into a fitful...
She cradled the faun's head. She listened to its soft breath, listened to its complaint, listened its petition. But what could she do? What judgment could she give that would hold in the face of her ever-shrinking kingdom. Every year she shrunk, every year there were more men, and every year there was less.
At night under the moon she called her sisters, who had all once been close, close enough to be one, but now far and spread. They came if they could, sent emissaries if they could not. They talked until the edge of the sun, bloated and...
Sunday was when we went. Dad wanted to leave on Sunday so we could avoid the McDonald family, who spent every Sunday molting on the front lawn. Last year, Mr. McDonald's head fell off. He grew another one the next day. Only now his hair was green and he could shoot laser beams out of his eyes. Also, he shat turnips. But enough of that.
We climbed into the station wagon and turned right onto Fallinott Street. The street was named after Lucas Fallinott, who lived in Detroit. He invented the toothbrush in 1762.
As we drove, we saw Mr....
The first few days she hadn't noticed the bars. She'd noticed very little about her surroundings other than that they were wrong. As her head became less fuzzy and she began to understand why they were wrong, that this wasn't where she was supposed to be she tried to learn everything there was to learn about this unfamiliar environment.
It was on the tenth day that she'd counted, that the sun shone for the first time. Whereas it had looked grey and dreary outside, the glowing sunlight made it look full of possibilities. The bars were on the inside of...
Please do not ask me to write some fluffy SciFi romance. Nothing will have changed by 2070. I will probably still be alive, I will probably still have this fucking job.
Remember when you hired me, based on the screenplay in my application? I worked hard on Zilly and Jack. For years, my every step was fueled by the thought of Zilly and Jack seamlessly executed on a Broadway stage. (A production, I mean, not a beheading.)
"Such wit!" you exclaimed. "Such cutting-edge quirks! We love the way Zilly listens to movie soundtracks while she studies BioChem! Dun Dun DUN!"...
There had been a time when he could have named all the seas on the moon, and pointed them out. That seemed to be in another life. He curled into a ball as tight as he could go and tried to ignore the pain in his leg and the weakness stealing up his body. He tried to ignore the cold seizing his limbs, and instead recited lists of constellations, dragging them from the pits of his memory. He even managed to get a couple of the moon's names. He uncurled one hand and the claw-like fingers groped blindly for his...
Capriciously, I repudiated the sky and all its lighting and thunder, snow and rain, and changing colors.
The paradigm wasn't there. Or was it?
Well, if it wasn't and if it were grounded by gravity, then so many Big Things are just frivolous.
Like love.
And losing a lover.
And even being born here, gasping for breath at first, and fighting through a mob just to climb some ranks and "make it." And those were the Big Things, too.
The paradigm here can't hold such Big Things if it was made to only hold such small, ambiguous entities like eating,...
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...