Photo by Mark Voorendt
HEARD ON HIGH
The sweet irony, the old archivist says in passing us the book, is that when the game was called on account of darkness, the angels were up on the devils by 1.
Exhibit A
THE NIGHT IN QUESTION
“Of course I was stirring,” said the mouse to the stunned courtroom. “Why do they keep insisting I wasn’t stirring?”
Delicious
CRUEL AND UNUSUAL – PART II
The last we saw them, a princess, a witch, a dwarf, a king, a thief, a fairy, an orphan, a giant, and a swan and a tailor and a magical baker all crossed paths in a dark, dark wood. They thought, collectively, this is important, this means something.
Nope. Not really.
CRUEL AND UNUSUAL – EPILOGUE
The swan was eaten, and the princess and the dwarf are currently in a codependent relationship.
Photo by Nick Smith
CRUEL AND UNUSUAL – PART I
A princess, a witch, a dwarf, a king, a thief, a fairy, an orphan, a giant, and a swan and a tailor and a magical baker crossed paths in a dark, dark wood. Oh, this can’t be a coincidence, they thought. Something meaningful was about to happen.
Photo by Intothewoods29
NO DAY AT THE BEACH
In October the woman came to the beach to kill herself, but she wanted a tea first, her last. She sat by the café window facing the water, to watch the tide glide over the sand, and imagined herself washed up there after failing to sink to the bottom. She supposed she might have to let go of her notion that rocks in her pockets was too theatrical. Besides, she asked herself, what was a beached, bloated corpse buzzing with flies? She didn’t want to try to give that a name. The tea, she remembered, she should drink her tea. The woman raised the mug to her lips–no, no, still too hot.
Setting it down she saw a little girl bundled up for colder weather toddle onto the beach from the parking lot. She was alone and no parents or siblings followed after her. Mom and Dad sent her out of the car so they could have a proper quarrel, the woman thought. But this was another notion she had to reconsider, as the child moved with prepossession, premeditation, despite being thick in everything she wore: coat, hat, gloves, even her eyeglasses. She stopped exactly at a red plastic pail half-buried on its side, which the woman hadn’t noticed, even though her view of the beach from the cafe window surely was superior to that of a myopic girl’s from the parking lot. The woman scolded herself, why wasn’t she taking in every detail of her final moments?
She didn’t give an answer, she watched the girl bending her knees and tugging the pail upright and out of the sand by its handle. The cafe window was too thick, the woman couldn’t hear it, but she saw the girl squealing victoriously and then emptying the pail of its old summer contents and lumbering like an astronaut on the moon to the shoreline. The tide was gentle enough the child could meet it with the pail between her feet, filling it with saltwater. The woman noted this with mixed emotions; congratulating herself on a detail taken in, and also concerning herself that the tide wouldn’t be strong enough to push her body back into shore, that she’d be picked out of the ocean by randy, unscrupulous fishermen gone 30 days at sea without sight of a woman, dead or alive.
Her tea was still too hot to drink.
The little girl was active again, lugging the pail back to its original spot on the beach, oblivious to the water streaming through a hole in its bottom. For some reason the woman couldn’t ascertain, the girl wanted to dump water on the sand and when she overturned the bucket only trickles and dribbles came out. She was confused, the woman saw; however, rather than investigate the pail the girl ran back to the water and filled it again and returned to the same result. When she did it twice more the woman was going to knock on the window and help the poor girl, use her mug as a visual aid, but what poor girl? The glass wasn’t too thick for laughter. Yes, if she leaned closer the woman could just barely hear it and now she could clearly see it, the girl was laughing as she filled the pail and the pail drained itself in a matter of fifty steps. Back and forth she continued, delighted, as if she were carrying a magic trick she had no interest in learning the secret to.
No, this will not do, the woman thought, up from her chair, her thighs bracing against the table. She rapped on the window. The child looked up and the woman closed her hand except for her forefinger she pointed into the glass. The girl, that fool girl, wasn’t looking at the window but in the direction of the parking lot, and she dropped the pail without losing her buoyancy and ran off the beach under someone else’s orders. The woman let out a hot, sharp breath as she sat down, and for a moment she fidgeted and couldn’t figure out what to do with her hands, leave them in her lap, on the table, clasped, unclasped.
She settled for her lap, unclasped, and she glared through the window at the beach and the pail with a hole in it the child had left a mystery. The woman told herself not to look at the pail when she went out there, she was to walk straight ahead into the water and keep going for as long as it took. She should get going, she thought, get her tea in a to-go cup. It was still so blessed hot and that damn fool little girl. The woman called over the waitress for a cup of ice, sounding angrier than she meant to, and for a bloody lunch menu while she was at it.
Photo by Oregon Dept of Transportation
SINKHOLES
I just hope that when my sinkhole comes to take me, I don’t pull a Gary Dahlrymple. When the Little Free Oracle announced that our neighborhood was next, that the Great Mother was calling her children home, it’s obvious “children” was a metaphor—obvious to everyone but Gary Dahlrymple—since nobody’s seen any actual children around here since the Acid Blizzard of ’76. But there was Gary, sucking his thumb, soiling himself, and then the bawling started. Wet and drippy, snotty, humiliating on so many levels when, given our water-deprived anatomies, it should have been scientifically impossible. Granted, the earth had just literally opened its giant maw underneath his house while he was in his Despairing Room, already despairing, but jeeze-loueeze, I don’t think anybody watching wished he’d been swallowed any later than he was. I’m just glad that Mrs. Dahlrymple’s sinkhole got her the week before, so at least she didn’t have to spend her last days trying to explain her son’s behavior to her friends on the Prosthetic-Ag Council.
I’m preparing for a more dignified exit. I think most of us are. We don’t know exactly when our sinkholes will appear, only that they’re inevitable and that it’s useless now to start shutting off the lights in the rooms where the coal-fired curtain fresheners can run unsupervised, or to stop filling the tar lakes with the Styrofoam containers our Styrofoam Mourning Chairs are shipped in. But when it does happen, I’m definitely going out with my head held high, and not only so that when I’m sucked into my own personal gaping abyss I’ll strike rubble immediately and fall unconscious for the being crushed into dust part. I’m still working on the other reason. It’ll come to me, at night probably, when I’ve lit the Melancholia and I’m chewing the last of my daily jellyfish ration, ah-ha! here’s how I can face my sinkhole with my chin up. Maybe it’s as simple as I gave Her as good as She’s going to give back to me. Hey, now that’s something. Yeah. I think we can all take some pride in that.
By Andrikkos
100 MINUS ONE
I have only 92 words left to live. After this, there will be but 85. Shall I be flamboyant, go out with a flourish? Call you my mavourneen as we enjoy drink supernaculum? You say I shouldn’t speak at all anymore; you’ve decided quiet, I might not be so bad to have around. Thinking twice, even thrice about putting a foot in my mouth, causing the other shoe to drop; ah, my demise awaits 23 missteps away! The old woman called it a curse, but death is not the curse, it’s the choosing the last word to die on.
Photo by Keith Evans
PAST ON
This time he’s the one who runs out for milk and never comes back, and centuries later when he returns, she has dinner waiting.
Photo by Pwlps
THE BOY WHO REFUSES TO BE WRITTEN
The boy who refuses to be written may not be a boy at all. Maybe he’s a wolf, tornado, dragon 90-feet tall. He could also be an avalanche, submarine, he could be the moon. He’d prefer to be the time of day, tomorrow, someday soon.
The boy who refuses to be written may not always know his name. Maybe he’s unsure, the rules always seem to change. He wonders if he’ll ever feel at home inside the world. The boy who refuses to be written is happiest when he’s a girl.
Photo by Just Curious
DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH
You remember when he’d close your hand in both of his and blow so hot you could blush his cheek after with just a fingertip. He coughs and asks again for your glove size.