Eye Witness

Sarah watched the invasion passively, from the same armchair she watched TV. The bugs were large, maybe the size of a Volkswagen, but that might have been her perspective. They couldn't have been that big. Her memory was exaggerating.

They were shovel-shaped and had what looked like a hard, chitinous substance as armor. They were crawling up and down the building across the street, consuming the structure in their giant mandibles.

Sarah supposed that some scientist would win a Nobel prize for decoding their DNA or anatomic structure. She would look forward to watching the documentary on the nature channel.

Eternal Regrets

The shuttle pulled away and rocketed into the distance. The orbiting station would never be visited again. It had been abandoned to the cold, unforgiving emptiness of space. It was no longer an active laboratory, but the most expensive piece of space junk ever conceived.

Nadia looked up at the station with nostalgia. She had been among the last cosmonauts to leave. She wondered why they didn’t bring it back to Earth. They could turn it into a museum piece. It certainly would be worth the cost. And it was the only way she’d ever get her house keys back.

When A Lie Becomes The Truth

We wrestle with conviction. It's twisting in our teeth, fighting for a life of its own, but we desperately want to own it for ourselves. We have no choice but to believe.

Every turn, every wobble, every retreat, is endlessly battled. Neither will cede any ground to the other. We contrive and convince and cry and construct our personal visions and we won’t let go for anything. We each must be the sole owner of the truth.

We fight for our own carefully crafted version of reality. Neither wants to be the first to admit the end of our love.

The Summer The Circus Came To Town

Jessica fell in love with the third clown from the end of the line. He had his face painted with a smile, suggesting he was frivolous but gallant. No sad clown for her. They had sex in the small tent where they kept the donkeys and goats and other uninteresting animals. It's not how she imagined it would be, but the animals didn't seem to notice, and she was in love. You can make anything romantic in the retelling when you're talking to your grandchildren. The fact they drove him out of town with pitchforks only added to the romanticism.

Citizen Watch

Let me start by saying nowhere in the United States is it illegal to film the police in public spaces. I'm sure if you asked Quincy Adams, he would tell you acting as a watchdog against an intrusive government is not only your right but your patriotic duty.

So I took to following cops in the neighborhood with my video camera.

I didn't last an hour. They must have put in a call to their buddies, because suddenly I was surrounded. They beat me straight into the hospital.

Needless to say, it's the best thing that's ever happened to me.

A Darkness Of Mind

Drake's fate was determined the day his father was killed.

Ghosts do not often commit murder. They haunt. They instill fear. They might so inhabit a person's psyche as to drive her to suicide. But actual slaughter is rare.

Drake’s father was murdered by a ghost, and on that day Drake became a ghost hunter.

He inhabited the darkness. He learned about betrayal and lonely hearts and the isolation of eternity. He drank in whispers and sang of misfortune.

He became a lost soul. So it was that upon his death, he knew that he himself would become a ghost.

In Pen, For Your Convenience

It's the last thing I'll ever write, the second to last marks I'll leave upon the Earth, before my ashes cloud the sea.

I'll clamp my mouth shut, bite my tongue. No intemperate words will sully the immortality of these last utterances.

This page is for you alone. I seek forever in your trust. My soul passes on to you--a flash, a fire--that I ask you to carry into the dark.

I leave my legacy in your mendacious hands, to do with as you will. Everything I am belongs to you forevermore.

I hope my memory haunts you.

Don't Talk To Me About Love Spells

Everyone knows when it comes to doing magic, widows are the worst. They're always going on about love spells or hunting down unicorns and mermaids to achieve eternal youth. None of it ever works.

You might consider my complaints a narrow-minded view and accuse me of the worst kind of chauvinism. I agree with you whole-heartedly that gender prejudice has no place in our enlightened age. But the fact is that widows just aren't any good at magic. Even when it works, it doesn't work anything like how it's intended.

And that's how I ended up with these golden testes.

This Isn't Happening

The man shambled into town. He was weak from exhaustion and covered in blood, though the lack of obvious wounds suggested it might not be his own. A few of the townspeople recognized him as coming from the neighboring community a few miles to the west.

"Everyone's dead. I'm the only survivor."

"What happened?"

"It was the trees. The attacked us. But not physically. They did something to our minds, made everyone go crazy. People started killing themselves. It was awful.”

“I don’t mean to make light of your situation, but that sounds exactly like the worst movie ever made.”

Death

Death. That was all his card said.

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

He knew the machine was perverse, playing with a person's fate in the most ironic ways possible. Academics and the intellectually insecure called it the Sophocles, because only the ancient Greeks could match the machine for its macabre sense of humor.

But Death?

Was he supposed to die from fear. Was the machine getting philosophical? Should he avoid anyone in a Grim Reaper costume for the rest of his life?

All in all, Bill could think of better ways to have spent that twenty dollars.