The Twilight Palace

Sydney looked at the atlas. There was no denying he was lost, to the point where he couldn't even be sure he was using the right map anymore. His phone had lost service hours ago.

A flash of reflected light caught his attention up ahead: some sort of structure spotted through the trees. He hurried forward hoping they'd have good WiFi.

As Sydney entered the clearing, a massive palace stood before him, with intricately carved roofs, marble fountains, and gold latticework. A white-robed fellow standing in the entrance smiled in his direction.

This looked nothing like the photos on Airbnb.

Love Note

Even though the sign says, “Do not swim near seals,” we’ll have fun, go on a picnic in the hills, maybe spend the whole night there, so many stars that the sky looks perforated by cosmic buckshot, or we’ll sleep in and then helicopter over traffic jams, moving, breathing, shining from rehab center to wedding cake palace, while the angel of death rolls a cigarette and the border wall sinks another quarter of an inch, and this will happen again and again and again, people turning up at all hours to complain bitterly about being written out of our story.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press.