The car stalled. The roads were half washed out and the rain pounded like a blacksmith's hammer on the hood. The storms began a few days ago, but before that it had been a dry summer. After the first downpour, people started smiling and stopped fanning their faces. Life strained under the drops in vegetable and flower gardens.
After the first whole nights of dark heavy clouds, the constant grumble of thunder, people were still trying to be positive. Good for the forests, dry as tinder, they'd say. The river was too low anyway.
After a week and flooded basements,...
"One scoop chocolate, one scoop..."
"Let me guess, vanilla." the man behind the counter grinned at me.
Was I really so predictable? I felt the colour rise to my cheeks.
"Erm..."
"I was right. I remember." he threw his head back and laughed.
"Actually..."
"2.53 every afternoon. One scoop chocolate and one scoop vanilla. Like clockwork."
He was starting to annoy me now.
"Actually, I was going to ask..."
I stopped. I was going to ask for vanilla. Truth is I only like vanilla and chocolate ice cream. Always have. But now I had started something. Alex was right, I...
his father painted the top of the lighthouse himself. with the last concise stroke of the red paintbrush, his father had a concise stroke of his own, and slid off the roof to his death, colliding headlong into the rocky ground, and tumbling into the choppy water. his body was never found, though toby often imagine a blue man, with nibbles taken out from fish schools, and skin as loose as kelp on his bones. with equal sincerity, toby imagined that his father had not died at all, and was merely hiding in the system of caves eroding into the...
Locked door. Single occupant, female, age 27. No signs of a struggle. Cause of death was strangulation. Body found face-up on the bed.
Three suspects. One witness.
Cal sighed, his breath cutting a thin passage through the haze of cigarette smoke. He rewound the tape and pressed play once again. In all the surveillance tapes, there was nothing to positively incriminate any of them.
He'd tried isolating them, questioning them individually. Good cop, bad cop. Threats. The works. They were all lying about something, but they wouldn't say what Cal wanted to hear. At least one of them, probably all,...
"But do you love me?"
Love? What is love? Love is a social construct. Love is an excuse to screw someone you think is hot. Love is a joke, a trap, an illusion. Love is what you wish for when you don't know how the world really works.
I see your skin and I think of you naked, wish for you to fall into my arms so I can possess you. Part of me wants you now, part of me wants you always.
There's only a limited extent to which these parts overlap.
Lust after you, to be sure. Like...
With fifteen minutes until the start of the hearing, a bagel stop was inadvisable. The queue for the espresso machine was exactly as long as usual, and the trainee behind the counter should have stuck with the chai order. His bladder screamed in that unmistakably shrill screech added urgency to an already pressing situation. "Ignored again! Be better if I was free trade, huh" When an onion bagel and a cafe con leche appear on the counter there is only one choice to be made. As he pays a skinny fallow skinned sidles up to him and opines, "You was...
Chaz and Elinor tear-ass through the forest, hands raised ineffectually above heads, sodden shoes slapping on undergrowth, alternately laughing and yelling "Ow. Ow. Ow!"
The hailstorm pelts them from above, chunks of ice the size of large coins, not nickle-and-dimeing today but quartering and Susan B. Anthonying. Chaz gets a Kennedy fiftycent piece to the top of the skull and takes a header, facefirst into the soggy pine needles below.
"I think that one actually trepanned me," he shouts.
"What? Get up!" Elinor hauls him to his feet and they keep running.
The tent, they're sure, is just over this...
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...
She walked angrily down the path. She heard a twig snap in the woods to her right. Turning her head, but still moving at a ferocious pace, she decided to disregard it. Perhaps that was the wrong decision but there was no other choice in her mind. Who, after all, has the authority to say what a wrong decision, if there is such a thing, is?
It was a cool night, the only light was glaring from the lampposts along the path. She pulled out a cigarette from the box in her pocket. Pulling her hair back and tying it...
The wind blew across the plains, picking up clods of dirt as it ran past, and I gripped my son's shoulder, as if by some instinct. Soon the dust would blow through the cracks in our log cabin, and the kitchen -- the tiny corner we called the kitchen -- would soon fill with what looked for all the world like soot. That we could take. The ground and the wind had been trying to kill us for years. We were used to it. But lately we'd had to contend with spiders. Tarantulas. Tough sons of bitches that put their...