Flood Story

            Three hundred whale-lengths beyond the colony, there’s an island. You set off for it one morning, pedaling your bicycle smoothly through the deep water, past the abandoned mall, its flooded halls decaying yet still smelling faintly of popcorn, and before long you’re there. You take one last breath of salt water in anticipation of the surface and climb up onto the perfectly smooth, rounded structure. It doesn’t bob under your weight, though you saw no anchor binding its inverted dome to the sea floor as you approached.

            A tiny piece of island breaks off in your hand as you pull yourself over the edge, into the hollow center. The piece begins to melt and smear. Sitting in the hollow, you lick your fingers, then place the piece of chocolate in your mouth, savoring rich sweetness with a buried bitterness that somehow makes the flavor even more beautifully rich. You find it difficult to swallow without breathing in.

            Your limbs feel heavy, especially in the lightness of air. You’re determined to stay above water as long as you can, today. Everything looks paler up here, faded and drained of intensity. You seem large and cumbersome and clumsy by comparison to the fish that flit in flocks through the delicately open sky.

            Your lungs are starting to lose water. You think for a moment that it wouldn’t be so bad to drown, to fade away and become part of this gentler above-world. It would certainly be easier than going back down to the endless ocean. You stay on the island until your skin begins to dry. Your hair becomes hundreds of loose, fluffy threads. It’s lightening to match the above world. You’re a little jealous of it. It will take much longer for all your guts to be as dry.

            You’re feeling light-headed from lack of water. You’re certain the sky shouldn’t be rippling like the sea. There’s a sudden loosening around your chest, like you’re falling apart. You’re gasping for breath now, spitting up great gouts of water until your lungs are empty. You aim yourself at the side of the island, but cannot drag your body over the steep ridge. You’re swallowing huge mouthfuls of air. This isn’t what you wanted at all.

Maples

            When I was little, by which I mean about eight years old, I read a book you’ve probably heard of since it’s fairly well-known called Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder about her early childhood, by which I believe I mean when she was six, in the big woods long enough ago that there were bears and horses and deer and cows and apples for Christmas and home-made maple syrup you boiled fresh out of the trees.

Liverpool

            Then, my dog died. I took him out to the forest. The leaves were all turning goldeny and freckled, reminded me of Nora’s skin back in 1995. Nora’s happy these days, in her neat London flat, with the purple pillows and the packet of confetti she keeps in the drawer under the kitchen counter. In her letters, she says she goes out every night to the club. There’s a guy there who sings karaoke and she thought she maybe was in love with him, until he sang that one Rick Astley song Never Gonna Give You Up. Nora wasn’t even born when that song came out, but she ranted about it in her next letter. She seemed to think it was some kind of cruel and unusual April Fools’ joke. When I mentioned how it was just a song, she told me to google rickrolling, and the song’s been in my head ever since. I s’pose this is the miracle of the internet.

Dramatic Opening

The boy stands at the edge of the cliff. The wind struggles to feather his too-greasy hair in the proper decorative form. The ocean crashes at the foot of the cliff, foamy and seething. The boy takes one last look behind him, and an almost hopeful expression crosses his face as he sees the yellow car on the road. He turns back to the sea, waiting for the slam of the car door, and the noise of the girl yelling for him to stop. When he doesn’t hear it, he sits down, less than six inches from the edge, leaning back against the metal safety railings. He looks at the watch on his (faintly scarred, as if this setting weren’t obvious enough) wrist for a while. Six full rotations of the second hand pass before he loses interest. He looks at the grass instead. It’s mostly dead grass, in sharp yellow tufts. The earth beneath them is dry and dusty. He eventually gets bored with grass. Stares at the road, which is totally empty of traffic. Finally, he turns back to the sea, waits a handful of seconds longer, and jumps. He floats through the air, trailing a subtly-emphasized hand still reaching back toward land. Then, his body slams against the rocks below, snapping his neck almost instantly. The awkward angle of his head makes it impossible to deny that he’s dead.

            Five minutes later, a bright blue VW beetle pulls up, leaving skid marks as the driver parks too rapidly. A girl gets out, obviously beautiful because of the way her shiny brown hair blows in the wind. She runs to the edge, and stares down. Unfortunately, a wave has already swept the corpse three hundred feet up the coast. There’s nothing for the girl to see.

            Hovering just outside the scene, the author slams her palm into her forehead. That girl had better have a damn good reason for being late. On second thought, no reason was good enough. What had the girl been doing?! And what the hell was the author going to do without her protagonist?

Today (Voice Piece)

            I am not speaking today. This is not Making a Statement for any great Cause. It is not meant to symbolize the darkness of my soul. It is not any symbol. I have simply decided to take one day of silence, maybe for my past or my future or my joy or my sorrow or maybe just for my existence. Maybe it’s a social experiment. Maybe my throat is sore, or my brain. Please don’t ask me to elaborate; I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything more complicated than just these words, today.

            Tomorrow, it won’t matter.

Zombiepocalypse

The dead rose one day. It wasn’t a virus; viruses with the power to raise the dead always seem terribly improbable. If something as strange as an undead army is going to exist in the first place, you might as well call it magic and be done with it. So, magic. Rose the newly dead, the ones with a bit of flesh left, because honestly, if every skeleton in the world reanimated itself, it’d be over for humanity like that. Tempting, but too anticlimactic.

            As it is, there are women screaming and little girls with no irises walking down the street with blood oozing out of their mouths as they approach our* hero. He’s in his early twenties and blond, and naturally fighting off zombies with a hockey stick, his best friend in tow to watch his back and die dramatically in ten minutes or so.  The little girl with the oozing problem is his (the hero, not the best friend) sister. She seems pretty intent upon reuniting them in the moaning, shambling afterlife. And our hero likes his sister and all, but he doesn’t like the look of this particular afterlife. Dying is meant to be more peaceful, he thinks.

            Nevertheless, he has some serious qualms about hitting his now-undead sister in the head with a hockey stick. His knuckles turn white with the force with which he grips the handle; he tears up a little, his friend says something about how she’s not his sister anymore in the background. This is nonsense. They still share genetic code and a lifetime of experiences. People don’t go denying their siblings status when the siblings acquire Alzheimer’s or amnesia. Meanwhile, the sister, being dead, and therefore less aware of dramatic tropes than our heroic duo, continues shambling ever closer, not bothering to get tangled in some kind of unlikely obstacle, even though there’s a convenient pool table in the way. (What’s a pool table doing in the street? Well, maybe it got dragged there during the big siege scene just now.)

            At last, the zombie reaches the friends and calmly rips them to tiny pieces. Her brother doesn’t even have time to lift the stick and fend her off. The friend gets in a good wallop with his broken chair back, but it doesn’t do enough structural damage to be any form of impediment in the slightest. Before long, he too has been torn apart. Soon after, hero and companion alike will rise, no longer humanity’s last, best hope.

*All bolded words specially selected to make sure you feel something.

Weeping Woman

            The man says, I am sorry for your loss.

            The woman says, thank you. I am too.

            The man says, I can help you to feel better.

            The woman says, I am in mourning.

            The man reaches out a hand, to lay it on the woman’s shoulder.

            The woman flinches away.

            The man says, let me give you what support I can.

            The woman says, you may not touch me. I am in mourning.

            The man says, I mean nothing more by it than a kindness between friends.

            The woman says, I am in mourning. Leave me to my grief.

The Cloud

            It began as a simple wisp of cloud. Lillianne knows it did. She watched it drift lazily across the sky, and was startled when it descended to butt its head against the window. She knows it wasn’t a wisp of cloud by then, because the head on the window made a sound like a drum. She let it in, mainly out of curiosity. It paraded around the kitchen, now on shiny white hooves, now on bird’s feet. She gave it a saucer of milk.

            It took three days to pick the form of a kitten, all the same. The kitten was small and white and fluffy, just like the cloud had been. Lillianne showed it to her mother, asked if they could keep it. It never really grew into a cat, but Lillianne’s mother just assumed its growth had been stunted by malnourishment before Lillianne found it. It never got sick or got into fights with the neighbor’s giant old tabby cat. Lillianne’s mother thought it was merely well-behaved. It never got fleas.

            When Lillianne grew up and moved away, she had to leave it behind. It ran away that very same night. Lillianne’s mother put up posters, lost white cat, reward available upon return. It never came back. Lillianne found it in her dorm room after her third day of college. She’d left the window open. It followed her through jobs and marriages (three of them, Lillianne always was a flighty sort of girl), and Lillianne began to almost not believe it had ever been anything but a little white cat. It seemed so very constant. When Lillianne died, it turned back into a cloud and blew away on a spring breeze.