Man did so little with so much time...

MIDNIGHT

There were…twenty-two hours in a day. Well, twenty-two that belonged to Man. The other two hours belonged to the Parting King and the Bearing King, an hour each, respectively. The other twenty-two belonged to Man to do with as he pleased. But at midnight, the Parting King reined. He appeared from the hollow of the Earth’s oldest tree and swept the land, marking those who were to die. At the stroke of one, the Bearing King came forth, marking those that were to be born. His finger drew upon their foreheads the straight or winding path their lives would take.

Those were the days...

And time marched on...

TOCK

Tick, tick, tick…the sound of gears turning and clicking and moving and generally going about the business of telling time, one second after the next, with a steady certainty that never slowed or wound down. One tick after the next, over and over in perpetuity. The sound hit the white walls and carpets of the room, sinking into them, absorbed and remembered for all time. The walls were adorned with which time-keeping devices. Digital, mechanical, utilitarian and ornate. The electronic devices all blinked at 12:00 in red and blue and green. The mechanical, likewise, were also correct twice a day.

And marble floors and velor curtains...

Looking for a path out...

GRIDLOCK

They sat at rows and rows of long, thin tables and stiff molded plastic chairs. Each of them slid the blocks back and forth, up and down, until they got the darkest block out of the maze. At the end of each maze, a new one presented itself, appearing the moment the puzzle was complete. They had to do this, there was no choice. The men in the booth watched, constantly, to make sure a block was being moved at every single moment. Hesitation was not permitted, nor was looking away from the task at hand. And so life went.

They swooshed around so nicely...

PETS

The tiny mud-octopuses sloshed around in the murky waters at the edge of the riverbed, their adorable appendages waving around as their itty bitty suction cups pulsated as  they came in contact with leaves, rocks and other debris. There was no denying, they were awful cute. Often they were collected and kept as pets by kids who lived in the saucer-shaped houses on the edge of the river. Malcom had no idea why. They ate four times their weight in garbage every single day. They were murder to keep fed outside their natural environment. But they were all the rage.

Another day at the office...

TOES

“Oh.” Samantha closed the oversized bank bag just as quickly as she’d opened it.

Raymond turned from the bloody body splayed across the white sofa with its mouth agape and a stiffly wadded up hundred dollar bill protruding from its jugular. “What is it?”

Making a face, Samantha opened the bag again, and pulled something out, pinched between her gloved index finger and thumb. “A bag of toes.” She bit her lips together for a moment, contemplating the bag. “Eleven of them.” She looked in the bag. “And rest is quarters. Hundreds of them. Covered in coke. Or anthrax.”

They also sold action figures...

ELF-LAND

There were fourteen types of elf. That’s what the informational packet said. It had fourteen drawings with statistics under them, detailing the types of elves you might see in the Forest of Whispers. As you saw one of the main elf types, you asked him (or her, they weren’t sexist here) for a token, and if you collected all fourteen, you could redeem them for a special prize at the huge gift shop on the other end of the wood.  Mostly it involved a t-shirt that was always too small and shortbread cookies, but the cookies were kind of good.

Pirates came in twos...

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday was New Comics Day. And with New Comics Day came the weirdos. Not just the people so enthusiastic about comics that they showed up five minutes before the store opened for the day. Or the unkempt masses that would kill you for even daring IMPLY that Wolverine wasn’t the best character in the history of the medium. Ever. But the guys that insisted the store stay open after dark, even in summer, when that meant being open till ten, so the self-professed vampires could pick up their stack. And the grown men in pirate costumes. They were the worst.

Fieldtrips were TOO educational...

FASCINATION

Bennie was fascinated with zombies. If it weren’t so macabre, his mother would say that he loved zombies. He had books about them, watched movies about them, drew pictures of them, not to mention talked about them non-stop. His mother had only just convinced him (with a brief grounding, and absolutely no dessert) that zombies were not proper conversation at the dinner table, least of all for a six-year-old boy. She blamed his class field trip to the zoo. The new open-air zombie exhibit was the first thing he’d seen—all of them milling about and eating donated cadaver flesh.