Also, they were out of coffee filters...

COFFEE

Aubrey’s muse returned on a Thursday. No word on where she’d been, no word on why the muse had left. Just one day, bam. The muse is back. Sitting at the kitchen table, in some random person’s red plaid shirt, and Aubrey’s underpants, drinking coffee out of a white china tea cup encircled with delicate English roses, quite unlike anything in Aubrey’s cupboards. Aubrey looked at the empty coffee pot, then back to her muse, the question evident on her face. “No,” the muse put the cup on the saucer. “I didn’t save you any and I won’t make more.”

The suburbs were full of surprises...

UNDERGROUND


“I don’t think we’re going to make it home for dinner,” she called out to her partner.

“Oh?” he yelled from the top of the basement steps. His voice echoed off the row of coin operated washers and driers between the creaky stairs and the hole in the wall I was standing in, staring down a damp corridor.

I looked back his way and saw him lumbering down the steps. He really needed to lay off the doughnuts. “I mean, unless all suburban apartment complexes now come equipped with skeletons stacked hip-deep in hidden catacombs. And rats. So many rats.”

It was mob country, so they say...

SWAMPED

The ooky part wasn’t that we were standing in a swamp. I was too young to have the good sense to really realize what diseases, pests and vermin inhabited it. All I saw was lush green undergrowth, verdant thick overgrowth, and a long tree with a thick trunk laying on its side, across the thick, damp bottom of the swamp. I crossed it carefully, not daring to think of how much it would hurt if I fell. When we got to the end, I encountered the ooky part; the shoe sticking out of the over-turned earth. With toes in it.

She wanted to be a vegetarian..

LURES

Sometimes, it just wasn’t worth it. At least, that’s what I concluded as I ceased my singing long enough to reach up out of the water, and drag down the man who had spent the last several minutes listening as I distracted him long enough to lure him to his watery grave. The mermaids had it better; for them, it was all flirting and developing feelings of unrequited love to feed off of. Life as a siren wasn’t easy. Not only did you need to lure them in with your voice, but then you had to feast on their flesh.

Sometimes, they over-produced the complex kind...

HARVEST

The haze hung around the fairy lights like full bustle skirts, protecting innocent eyes from the fairies’ naked forms with tulle and muslin made of humid air. The tiny figures flittered from flower to flower, smelling the closed buds to check for pollen and magic. The magic came with the pollen, and had to be gathered before the bees arrived; they soiled it and made it good for little more than simple love potions. They gathered the fresh magic to their naked bosoms to make complex love potions. The world was ever in need of more unrequited love and triangles.

Science made things less fun...

DECIST ORDER

We’re sick of you humans, really. You keep taking magic out of the world with your “science” thing. I don’t understand this “science,” but every time you people get involved with it, and come up with some explanation or another for the way the universe works, we have to think up some new mystery for the universe to hold. We’ve been so busy in the last two hundred years. I haven’t had a nap in the last fifty. Erasmus hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since you people invented the transistor. Stop with the scienceing! Get back to wondering amazement!

Then the world continued on...

CLOCKS

The world stopped on a pin in that tiny sigh between the ticks of the second hand of Wesley’s Grandfather’s grandfather clock. It pendulum froze in mid swing, twelve and one half strokes before midnight. Midnight could do that; it could let the dead walk and the unbewitched be bewitched. Midnight could stop hearts and start time and make miracles unfold. But those seconds before and after meant nothing in the grand scheme of time-magic. But somehow the world stopped. And did not start again until the Time King finished his falsetto rendition of an old familiar 80s power balad.

It's patriotic diabetes...

WHOLESOMENESS

"Crispy, flakey, tender, moist, filled with molten sugary goodness melting in my mouth. That is the yumminess of pie. Also, pie contains fruit, and therefore it is good for me. Unless it contains cream. In which case, cream is a milk product, and therefore has protein, and therefore is good for me. See? Pie is good for me. You know it. It has protein and fruit and goodness and wholesomeness. Like America and mom and everything that’s good in the world. PIE IS PATRIOTIC, DAMNIT. Why won’t you just let me have this? My country needs me to eat this."

She had him dead to rights...

APATHY

"I don't hate you," Fnil told the man with the jagged, swollen scar ripping down his face, from brow to chin. She took a step back from him, her hand tightening around her still-sheathed sword. "Actually, I have no feelings about you what-so-ever. Which is why this isn't personal. You understand, don't you?" he looked her over with one dead, clouded eye, and one twitchy, skeptical one. But he said nothing. "Well, fine then," Fnil said, pulling the sword from its home and slashing it through flesh and bone in one impossibly fast and forceful beheading motion, ending it.

The fairies hated taffy...

TREATS

Cupcakes were not necessarily the food of the gods, but they were the preferred treat of five out of seven clans of forest fairy. In fact, most fairies ate them. they'd even turned the local wood elves onto them, most of the dwarfs that lived under the kingdom, and even the mermaids had been known to poke their heads out of the Sea of Sighs for a vanilla cupcake with lavender icing and tiny fruity sprinkles. The gods, for their part, were to busy eating saltwater taffy to really notice, or care, about their irrelevance with the sugar-filled masses.

Finding meaning...

REPURPOSED

The teapot
wasn’t mine.
It wasn’t anyone’s
anymore
Really.
Just a teapot
(that wasn’t even
a proper teapot;
FTD had sent an
arrangement of
odd purple blooms
one mother’s day
in it) sitting
on a pile of used pie
tins, Tupperware
cake carriers and
old VHS tapes.
Very alone. Waiting
For purpose beyond
Looking pretty
On its way
To the dump.
We have that
In common,
The teapot and I.
In the wrong shape
Made for something
Completely different
Than we’re used for
Thrown away
Forgotten, in a metal
Box, waiting for someone
To
pour blazing
Hot liquid into me.

Earth flora were tricky things...

GARDENS

Her lover had given her a bouquet from the garden—just-blooming broccoli interspersed with the long, tall carrot stems and some actual flowers she was sure had gotten in to the bundle purely on accident. The Duke of Blatenhorn Six had chosen to arrange the bouquet himself, spacing each piece with a relentless obsessive-compulsiveness—each stem and bloom were an equal distance apart. He’d worked so hard at it, Madam Eleenolessa did not have the heart to tell him that he had mixed up the Earth flora again. At least it wasn’t like the time he’d confused bats and cats.

Time to give chase...

FIERY NIGHT

The boom rattled her eardrums before the heat scorched her skin in a wave of air that pushed across her skin like dry, sticky finger. The flash from the explosion snapped away almost as quickly as it came, leaving the cold night air rushing up on its heels, soothing the cheeks it the heat had just scorched. Letting out the breath she had been holding since the first bit of brimstone bit at her nose, she pulled the gun from her coat and coughed once as she ran toward to fire sprite at the far end of the alley.

They also hated ice cream...

GEOGRAPHY

It’s a little known fact that every world spanning the entire universe (well, all of the known portions of it, at any rate), have clowns. What’s more, said clowns tended to be hated and feared the vast majority of the time. Sometimes, like with the Clown-monks of Boris 3, that fear was probably unfounded. However, with the great Horde-Clown Armies of the Charris Empire (And All Night Disco), that fear was entirely understandable. They had torn across five systems, frightening children and leaving trails of dead bodies in their wake. It was rumored that they also liked to kick puppies. 

Warm gooy gods...

DIETY


Deep-fried gods were best in summer, drizzled with the over-played hopes of the faithful on the very top. They were sweet and fatty and tart, and contained all the things necessary to be good fair food. The outards were crunchy with misunderstood commandments and the woes of the wronged, and just below that was a spongy layer containing the remorse of the enlightened. The sweet and sour innard was the part Jerry liked most. It tasted like justice and sadness and the tears of the afflicted, which was all he asked for, out of food from an overpriced amusement park.

And he had needs...

DRINKING

The gallows had been built by eight pm. This was convenient for the executioner, since he liked to spend his nights before the big days drinking until he passed out. Not because of any moral qualms he possessed regarding his chosen profession, but because drinking was awfully fun. And if he did his weight and rope length calculations ahead of time, executing people’s a no-brainer. The only thing he wasn’t fond of were the cries of the crowd, demanding blood, or to see heads pop off that he could do without. He was an executioner, dammit, not a party planner. 

They also had parrots that sang sailing songs...

SAILING

The carnival was in town again. Not the cool carnival. The creepy carnival with the faded canvas tents that had seen a hundred summers in a thousand different little towns from Vancouver to Wichita to that weird little town in Maine. They had a mascot, a weathered mermaid they claimed was the albatross of a pirate ship some two hundred years ago. They claimed their tents were the old sails of that ship. They claimed the bearded ringmaster was the greatest grandson of that pirate captain, who gave his sails for tents and the wood of his ship for poles.

She did this thing with her tongue, and fire...

PORNOGRAPHY

The single-camera affair was typical of the trade; a bedroom, soft lighting, an open floor plan. There was a camera man, sound guy, makeup person, director, and miscellaneous production staffers, two robots and a dragon. Truthfully, the production was low budget; the robots were being paid in motor oil and most of the staff were receiving a percentage of the theoretical future profits (and their names in the credits, which was enough to get some people do anything). The dragon was the only one who got paid, real money, however. It was the only way she’d take her scales off.

He used to be an investment manager...

ADVICE

It was a duck. Well, a wooden duck. And it was a talking wooden duck. In fact, it continually insisted on giving investing advice to Sig, who really didn’t want any. Though he had to admit the explanation the duck had given regarding mutual funds and dividends last weekend had been really helpful. And maybe the bit about CDs with fixed interest rates. But that was it. And who had a talking wooden duck anyways? It made duck hunting tough as hell, and the other hunters laughed at him. Even if they all took the duck’s advice on day trading. 

Stupid weather...

PRECIPITATION

It looked like rain. The clouds were churning quickly in the sky like the gods’ fat, angry cooks stirring up the earth for a human-soup, it looked like. Gary wondered if he ought to be building an ark. The sky rumbled and the rain finally came down in globular drops, hissing and fizzing as each drop encountered a surface. Gary ducked under the metal awning of the Five and Dime, wondering if or when the acid rain would be finished, and the sun would protect them once more. He hated the acid rain, and the casualties it brought.