Eli shudders as the forest canopy devours the moonlight. Though the early-summer warmth abandoned him at forest’s edge, the young boy clutches his parcel and presses forward, the flickering lantern’s glow dancing upon the trees with gleeful menace. With each step a silence grows, as if the trees still to watch. “Deep in the wood…
The villagers would do anything to see rain again, even if it meant wounding a god. They’d tried begging their sky deity to end the drought, but his clouds had simply hung above, as idle and gray as the nearby mountain. Their next prayer was less reverent. Gathered in a dead yellow field, the villagers…
A man stood on the street corner, preaching about the end of the world. Most people ignored him. Some because they couldn’t hear him, others because they’d heard it all before. To me, it sounded more like wishful thinking than anything else. I was in too much of a hurry to listen. I needed to…
I keep my parents in the bottom drawer of the commode, next to the pump. Every Sunday, just after I finish preparing the pizza, I take them out and bring them into the living room. Fully inflated, sitting at the table, they look endearing. Before we start eating, I load the last updated copy of…
The blonde sniffs. “You solve parachronic mysteries?” She’s on screen. It’s not the old days, when a dame would sweep into a gumshoe’s office, settle her gams on a wobbly chair opposite the Steelmaster desk, and spool out her story. Nowadays, we videoconference. Still, I get a sense of people. This bird has a voice…
I held my mother’s hand as I stood over her grave. Her fingers drifted against mine, half-intangible in neon; the admins hadn’t synced her Sensiform matrices in over a year. Other pale forms wandered nearby, flitting between the graves; other, more solid figures, like me, stood near them, regretting. She gave my hand a squeeze….
When Death walked into the End Times Tavern, Pestilence was waiting for him. The specter of disease raised one pale, bloated hand and waved her colleague over to a table with four chairs near the bar. “You the first?” Death said and plopped into a leather chair, his bones rattling. Pestilence nodded and took a…
Zephaniah smoothed the sapling’s shading, caressing the tip of his middle finger along the edge. Warmth bloomed in his cheeks as absenthe rose from the meager dust pile next to him and swirled around the sketch. He glanced up at the actual sapling in his apartment’s small greenhouse to get the perspective perfect and then…
The sea called out to me that evening as I walked along her silver shore. She spoke no words, yet I fathomed meaning in the soft hiss of waves and the cries of gulls. Come to me. Let us be as one again. As though I had barely been alive until that moment, I felt…
Legend has it a dose of epiphany sent Archimedes streaking naked from his bath into the streets of Syracuse shouting Eureka! Newton’s falling apple, Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, Darwin thinking up natural selection during a carriage ride; epiphany’s shaped human knowledge in blinding flashes. Of all such revelations, Soba Dee had the most profound…
