"Light. I feel light"

"I should think so, you lost about half of you."

I struggled to open my eyes, afraid to see what had happened. The last thing I remembered before the darkness was the light, the bright light that had surrounded and suffused me, that had seemed to consume me. A hand waved in front of my face, and at first I was certain it wasn't mine, couldn't be mine. I had never been that skeletal, I had always been a rather large man.

"Easy there, you just did something stupid or amazing, and you're rather week. We...

Some people think there is a trick to self-hypnosis. There isn't. The whole thing is a trick. You need to want to be hypnotized, let yourself be hypnotized. But you can't want it so much that you are unable to be hypnotized. It's like living in a zen koan.

There are many different ways of hypnotizing yourself. Some people can meditate themselves into a trance. Some people use drugs. But most people use recordings. And for many people, self-hypnosis works because they can hear their own voice, it works better than a stranger's. Your own voice, some comfortable and common,...

Everyone tries to be funny and make jokes about the magic beans. "Trade a cow? How about my wife?" they say. But magic beans, and the vines that grow from them? That's no laughing matter, and my garden is a mess.

You ever known a weed to go away by cutting it down? No of course not, you cut the weed, and it will just grow back. You have to pull the thing out by the roots if you're going to have any hope of getting rid of the thing, and even then it's usually back in a week. Well,...

When the colors first started disappearing, no one noticed. After all, the first to go was chartreuse, and no one ever used chartreuse. Almost no one even knew what chartreuse was, most people thought it was a purplish-red color anyway.

So when a few bottles of French liqueur went grey, no one could tell, it might have been a trick of the light and the glass. A particularly terrible shade of salmon, popular for a brief period in the mid-40s was next to go. But most examples of that were already buried beneath years of garbage, or hidden behind five...

I couldn't sleep with her next to me. The heat of her, the weight of her, the pressure of her next to me, none of it was what I had known before. I could barely believe she was there, breathing softly and quietly, but the signs of her seemed to be irrefutable proof.

I couldn't think with her next to me. Her brown hair splayed out on the pillow around her, curls and ringlets that covered her ears, ran down to her neck and then to her bare shoulders. Her presence, her pink lips parted just slightly, none of this...

Drawn in black and red on rice paper, she eggs me on from page to page. Her ruby lips start as an M, become an oo, before becoming an O in mock surprise as I jot down something flirty and sexy.

She peeks between my letters, between my notes and sketches, and I am not sure if I am going mad or not. My muse of letters and lines, a nymph of ink. I simply saw her sitting there on a bench in the temple garden, and was struck by the need to put her down into my little notebook....

The day after tomorrow, this will all be over. Again.

That's the problem with this repetitive eschaton, once you've seen one end of the world, you've seen them all. I've seen the world end in fire and in ice. I've seen it end with righteous fury, and with an uncaring whimper. Our bad decisions have come back to reward us, and the thing we never saw coming came. All these and more, and in one memorable occasion, a giant kitten.

It's hard to care, hard to even pretend to care when the world keeps ending, and for me keeps going...

She knelt on the tile floor, carefully picking up the shards of glass. Why did it have to be this one that broke? The dust swirled from the broken jar as water trickled out, bits of greenery carried along with it. World jars were expensive, and none to easy to make or acquire.

Another small little universe left to dry on the floor. She wept a bit as she tried to sweep the glass together with her hands, avoiding the sharp edges. She really should get a broom, but the strength to stand seemed to have left her. Why did...

Oh to drown in ones finest. Her shawl spread around her like tentacles, the pearl necklace, restored to its natural place shimmered under the sodium lights as the diaphanous skirt became squid-like. To prepare for this moment, to understand that you will be suspended in front of hundreds, thousands on a good night. Perhaps there is no better way to die than in front of an adoring gaze.

There would be no death of course, no final throes, no panicked look. The calmness of the water as she let herself go limp, felt herself carried by the eyes of the...

She opened the envelope and screamed. Lick, lick, and sealed it tight. His address she wrote in delicate red ink, a thin spidery scrawl which crawled over the front of the envelope and crept over to the back, coming together into a pair of bright red lips over the seam.

Emotion-paper was still a new thing, the idea of some crystal-wearers out in Sonoma that actually seemed to work. Like a flat mood-ring, it imprinted with the feelings of the person using it. And with the proper equipment, a helmet that transmitted some harmless electrical impulses to the reader, those...