He'd also stolen a cat...

THEFT

Arton had… stolen a few faces. Nothing disgusting, like that fellow on Nidis 3 that had taken a rusty shard of ship hull and had relieved four tourists of their faces. Arton had done it the old fashioned way. He’d hacked into the security logs and had stolen their holo scans. From this, he had constructed life-like, realistic silicone masks with holographic retinal replicating contacts. It had taken him weeks. And then, he did what any sensible sixteen year old would do, if left to his own devices with a dozen fake faces: He drank himself into an early grave.

He also wanted to be a lumberjack...

SWIM

Simon was but a small fish, in a medium-sized pond. Truthfully, it wasn’t even a pond. It was an aquarium at the zoo. He was a small fresh-water piranha. That was evolution’s fault. If he had any choice at all in the matter, he’d have been a beautiful carnival fish with their downright ethereal glow. He felt like a carnival fish. He felt pretty, and like he ought to be swimming in salt water. Sometimes, when they cleaned or repaired his tank, he tried to escape. He was an aspirational piranha who dreamed of bigger, flashier things. In the ocean.

Death comes, in the end, for us all...

AUTUMN

The fleshy giant green leaves

eventually drained and faded to an ascetic

jade as summer died

beautifully and romantically of consumption,

going brilliant gold and fire and blood-soaked

red, before fading away into a tired ginger,

and then…death.

Like Camille.

Or Nicole Kidman in that movie

with Obi Wan Kenobi.

This is how Summer dies.

Some years, she dies happy.

Other years, she dies well.

But she always goes

like Sarah Bernhardt,

dramatic, pretty, self-sacrificing

on the unknowing behalf of winter,

and always center-stage.

She grasps at the dust caught in the carbon arc

spot light until the bitter end.

They also made knots...

NATURE

Everyone since the dawn of time knew that cats were magical. The Egyptians worshiped them. Myths grew up about black cats crossing paths and bad luck and such. But no one was entirely sure where their power stemmed from, or its exact nature. It was actually rather of a letdown to discover that cats’ sole power revolved around their consistent ability to make working things stop working. It may look like they’d pushed that clock off the mantel. It may look like they’d knocked that lamp over while they were playing. But that wasn’t it at all. It was magic.

Clowns had long memories...

OWING

The color leached from mother’s face. She didn’t go white, though, when she saw the man in the doorway—she went a strange sort of grey, like pencil smudges on copy clear white paper. She froze at the coffee pot, forgetting that she’d been in the process of pouring water in the reservoir as she prepare to start the day with a bit of generic French roast. And here he was—the man in the orange and green clown costume, returned to collect on the favor that we all knew that she owed. And clowns never ever forgot a debt.

There were no answering machines...

RINGING

The phone rang. Which was interesting, considering there was no telephone service in the house. In fact, all of the utilities had been shut off ages ago. But the sound echoed off the barren sitting room walls, the mechanical bell of an old black handset, like the kind Ma Bell used to make. In those brief pauses between rings, the bell vibrating from the force of the hammer striking it. It was so real, so present. But there was no phone. Which was why Tyron had no idea how to make it stop. God, he hated phantom mechanicals and electronics.

The elephant in the room...

FICTION

It was tough being a fictional character. First of all, no one believed you were real. They would go about insisting that elephants didn’t talk, especially toy elephants. They’d tell children that Wendy the Elephant and her adventures with Samuel the cow were just fairy tales, written in books, and illustrated for amusement, and not because said books were actually biographies of Wendy’s life. Yes, she’d gone to the circus and had eaten too much candy. Yes, she had splashed the town’s mayor on her trip to the pool. And yes, Samuel really had been the first cow in space.

They stole the more battered of the two copies...

THEFT

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Robbie whispered as he handed Jade the number scribbled on the paper side of an empty gum wrapper. “I swear to God. This is the stupidest thing we’ve ever done.”

Jade turned her flashlight from the paper to the numbers on the ends of the bookshelves, trying to figure out if the numbers went up or down. “Even stupider than the time we reprogrammed all the stage lights the night before the senior play?”

“Dude, we are breaking into a library at night. To steal a book.”

Jade shrugged. “It’s a really important book.”

This was no fun at all...

IRONING

I was caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock being, quite literally, a rock. Some sort of silicone-based sandstone rock that had been weathered to an abrasive but shiny surface over the millennia. The hard place was my space ship. And, yes, I was stuck between the two. It wasn’t really irony. But there was something sad and poetic about having your chest crushed between the two, and the only thing plugging the massive puncture hole in your space suit being the giant rock jabbing into your spine. I hated Tuesdays. Also, I needed a vacation. Desperately.

Dwayne also tap danced...

PRIDE

Dwayne was many things. He was a dinosaur, firstly. A red one. A T-rex, for anyone who was curious, or asking. But more impressively… he was a ninja. Which was something most people didn’t know about him. He didn’t go around telling people that, of course—ninjas relied on their stealth abilities. And lastly he was a cop. The last part was easy—the cap and badge gave him away. He tried not to bust too many ninja moves when he was on the beat. And he saved his fighting with other ninjas for the weekend. And his off time.