And beyond that...

MOUNTAIN


The mountains of Kerris were far away. The edge of the known world. At least to Zen. Certainly, they were something of the sort. Otherwise the adults would not warn the smaller dragons never to fly there. That bad things would happen. The going theory, among Zen and his clutchmates, was that the meadow of Kerris and the faded white mountains beyond represented the edge of the known dragon universe. It was why the map on the wall of their one-room school-cave ended at the mountains. Zen spent his class time dreaming of what was beyond. Maybe nothing?

He'd done other things too...

DRIVING


In twelve long years of life, Huxley Bigglesworth had been accused of many things. Laziness and sloth, short attention span, urinating in the front garden (he hadn't), defecating in the back garden (he had), and knocking over an open can of bright yellow paint onto the brand new carpet in the living room (there was absolutely no proof it had been him). So when the police pulled him over in a wood-paneled station wagon doing fifty in a school zone, he simply looked up at the officer innocently, barked, the drooled a little. Dogs never got tickets for speeding.

The whole affair was like that...

BEARS

The newspaper had received fifteen complaints in two weeks regarding the use of the word "grizzly" in reference to the series of murders that had left a string of bloody and masticated bodies across the city since the beginning of the year. The editor was fresh out of ways to describe chewed p bodies left on desolate stretches of road, far away from street lamps, but was tired of getting daily letters from the Grizzly Anti-Defamation League, claiming the use of the word was libelous against Grizzly bears and other predatory wildlife. Those goddamned bears just wouldn't shut up.

She was a very sad fish-lady...

MERMAID

Eros knew it was odd to keep a fresh-water mermaid in a cast-iron and ceramic tub in his basement, but he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with her. She was lonely and sad, since she’d washed out of the canal during the last flood. He asked if she wanted to return to her people. She said no, her people would not want her back. A few times, in the month since he’d rescued her, he’d thought about asking why. But did not. Something in her magenta eyes helped him hold his tongue. He thought, sometimes, that he loved her.

Now the night is so dark...

MOON

On an early autumn night, just as the weather began to turn cool, I made an arrow.

As the sky shifted from powdery blue to a depthless royal, I shot it at the moon. It wobbled as it span, up through the evening air, past where men could breathe, into the layers of heaven usually reserved for the gods.

It passed uncontested from their now-empty domain, and toward its target, which hung in the sky like a golden lantern, guiding lost souls home. Through the nothingness, onward and ever onward, up.

My arrow hit the moon, and the moon deflated.

He liked his sweets...

COOKIE

Erin’s dad

Was feeling sad

Due to his lack of cookies.

Erin’s dad,

When he was a lad,

Had chocolate chips fro his grannies.

One made them crunchy,

One made them chewy,

And Erin’s dad ate them all.

Whenever he was grouchy,

They baked up something munchy

Like peanut butter cookie-balls.

Erin’s dad

Thought about times he’d had

Eating grandmommie’s pastries.

So, for her dad,

Erin tried something rad

And made a chocolate chip pie

Erin’s dad

Was extra glad,

It was so good he could just die

So delicious, in fact

He soon forbad

Any cookie that wasn’t pie.

He liked the cherry on top...

TASTE

Michael’d always been taught to avoid houses made of gingerbread, gumdrops, candy canes and licorice strands when traveling alone in the woods. His fairy godmother had actually been rather ardent about it, and had schooled him very early on in the various types of witches, crones, wizards, mages and hermits that occupied the forests of their fair land, so that he’d be fully aware of the many woodland inhabitants that suffered no compunction about eating young men on their way to grandma’s house. She’d said nothing, however, about cottages shaped like cupcakes, that tasted like vanilla. So he went inside.

They chained her up at night...

DRUDGERY

The dwarves didn’t find Snow White and invite her back to their cottage as abduct her from the clearing in the wood, chloroform her, and drag her back to their cottage. They forced her to wash their dishes and cook their meals, clean their coal and dirt-covered tunics and massage their ripe, leather shoe-baked feet. And the girl did it. Out of fear, mostly. She was equally afraid of her captors, with their pickaxes, as she was of stepmother finding her, if she strayed too far in the woods. Snow White spent most of her time praying for death.

No one went in that section anyway...

ARCHIVED

Everyone had assumed that Mrs Humphrey had met an unfortunate and perhaps untimely end by the third day that she failed to show up for work. On the second day, a coworker went round her house to see if anything had happened to the elderly librarian. But she was not home, nor was there any sign as to her whereabouts, other than a hungry cat. Her son hadn’t heard from her, the women’s knitting group at church didn’t know she was even missing. But everyone was startled on day five, to find her upright, and dead in the 700 stacks.

Then they demanded water from the people...

DROUGHT

When the well ran dry, they dug a new well. They dug it deeper and wider than the last, considering the first a failure due to a lack of ambition on the part of the town’s founders. Those men and women who had forged the town out of the very earth were good people. But they had not looked ahead and seen the needs of the growing populace. When the new well dried up, they ordered people to fetch water from the river, telling the people they couldn’t expect to get their water free forever. Then the river ran dry.