I had to bind myself together. I could feel pieces of me falling away, an arm, my left toe, my sense of grace under pressure. My lips struggled to speak as my tongue became unattached, my teeth loosened in my gums. My heart threatened to beat itself right out of my body, and I feared that it actually would.

The curse of unbeing is a cruel one indeed. I thought this as I wound the linen around my eyes, working to keep them in my skull. I wondered what I could have done to anger someone of such great power....

The fire engine arrived too late. The pile of ash and debris that had once been a column of flame and once been my home was done. Everyone agreed that no one had ever seen a fire burn so quickly, so hot, and so cleanly. There would have been an investigation, but there was nothing to investigate. Just a lot of tiny pieces that were my life.

I knew that it was a bad idea when I had first tried it. Language is not to be taken lightly, even at the most abstracted level it's a dangerous thing. But at...

Mary Ruth had been alive for one hundred and two years, and she knew things she shouldn’t know. She knew where the fairy rings of mushrooms sprouted in the woods. She knew that twenty years ago, Mr. Wilkins the shopkeep had been operating a still on his land. She knew why Ms. Perry, the beautiful young war widow, had died at the bottom of a cliff, and why that handsome new Reverend Taylor had run off.

She also knew how to keep her mouth shut. She knew the value of silence, and the value of listening. And sometime in her...

My mother said she would never give up her famous chili recipe, not even to me. Her own flesh and blood. To my six other sisters, she had given her legendary cookie recipe, the secret to her delectable gravy, and a pasta dish that had once made the mayor cry tears of joy.

But the crown jewel of it all, her chili recipe, that she had held back. I was the oldest daughter, and I had always wanted it, worked for it, I had earned it. Who was it that had stayed in the kitchen helping to roll butter into...

A mysterious box was sitting on the doorstep. I mean really, the box couldn't have been more mysterious, it was meant to be mysterious. It was a dark blue, almost black, with silver question marks that sparkled all over it. Two feet on each side making a cube, it wasn't wrapped, the box itself was crafted this way, some sort of plastic that fit together tightly.

It took me ten full minutes to figure out how to open it, some sort of complicated locking mechanism that open elegantly, like a Chinese puzzle box. Inside the box was a mish mash...

The footprints in the snow suddenly ended. Or rather, the snow ended, suddenly and strangely. The footsteps continued, singed into the dry winter grass. Black footsteps continued, an at an even pace, all the way to the dunes.

At first, I thought that they would disappear at the sand, but as I got closer, I saw that they had continued, but the sheer heat had melted the sand into glass. Glass footsteps, glittering and shining, clearly the shape of a human foot, worked their way over the dunes, without any seeming regard for the angle of the dune. I climbed...

No one had ever heard the wind blow like this before. It rushed through the delicately carved holes of the sculpture, Driaz's final piece. Made of metal and glass and plastic and wood, it looked like some insect eaten tree, the haunted remains of a mighty forest. It was shot through with holes, some tiny, some massive, some which threatened the very structural integrity of the piece, especially as the wind was blowing through it.

No one really knew why Driaz's Will demanded that his piece be set up way back in the desert like this. It was certainly a...

On the fourth day of the invasion, the defenders opened the gates of the zoo. Let those bastards contend with lions stalking them, rhinos charging at the sound of gunfire. Make them fight in a storybook, where hawks might dive down on them, and elephants would trumpet victory for the city.

That was the idea certainly. But these were zoo animals, most born in the zoo far from any jungle, and the rest had not stalked since they were young and foolish. They yawned in the heat of the day and wondered when the man with the feed would come....

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...

I was there the day that the idea of nation ended. When the black flags went up next to the reds and blues, the stripes, the stars, the figures, and all the rest. It wasn't just the black flags of course, it was the greys, the oranges, strange symbols that might not have even been human, but expressed a very human idea, "This is mine."

It seemed to happen all at once really, old boundaries didn't matter anymore, people were now brought together by an idea, or ideas more accurately, no longer separated by false lines drawn on old maps,...