Those who won the bid to ask questions first were wayward priests seeking to discover the forbidden answers—ones the truly faithful would never seek.

“Is there a god?” The first asked nervously.

“Yes.”

The priest rejoiced.

“Is there only one god?” The second asked hopefully.

“Yes.”

That priest rejoiced.

“Oh no…” muttered the third priest despairingly, then asked: “…Are you a god?”

Death and Lucifer had been friends for a long time (he liked her devil-may-care attitude; she liked his morbidity). So how, Death wondered, do you break bad news to a friend?

“Lou,” she said over her untouched coffee, “I know you think you’re sending good people to Heaven when you kill them. But you’re not.”

“Really?” Lou said, leaning back in his chair. “Because they haven’t come my way.”

“That’s the bad news… Heaven’s not taking them. They’re wise to your new experiment.”

“Damn,” said Lou. “So where’re they going?”

“NOWHERE,” said the ghosts crowded into the cafe behind him.

“So,” said Lou, “to what do I owe this pleasant visit?”

“That should be obvious,” said Death. “I’ve received over a dozen souls from this church in under a week, and they all told me the same story, that they were imprisoned by a maniac running an involuntary self-help group. So I thought I’d come see.”

“Humans Anonymous,” said Lou proudly. “I figured, if humans sin constantly like Father says, I can help out by stopping them from doing anything at all!”

Death nodded, calmly regarding each of the captive humans wriggling hopelessly against their bonds on the basement floor.

Her brown curls flew in the morning’s sharp wind, and her free hand–the other being upon my arm–kept her hat from joining the gulls that rode the gale above our heads. We walked alone on the beach.

“No Mrs. Grotton today,” I said. “I suspect the wind is too much for her.”

“The wind is too much for you,” Lydia retorted, “and yet, here we are.” She turned and smiled at me, the battered brim of her hat plastering itself aside her cheek.

We strode in silence a minute or two more before Lydia let loose a cry of wonder.

“Look, Bert!” She said, squeezing my arm tightly with one hand and pointing with the other, so that her hat at last made its escape and flew behind her.

“Your hat!” I said, turning, but Lydia seemed not to notice it had gone. Instead, she released me and bolted forward, insensitive to the sand she kicked up with her heels. As I turned once more windward to regard her flight, that sand came into my face and eyes, so that squeezing shut my eyelids only worsened the pain.

“Lydia!” I called out. “You’ve blinded me!”

I stumbled, disorientated, sure that my lungs would momentarily mutiny against their stricken captain, but I kept my balance and, producing a handkerchief, dabbed at my eyelashes until I had the courage to try parting them to see what had caused my sister to so callously abandon me.

Through my tears, I saw her kneeling on the sand, her head bowed to look at something on the beach just beside her. I ambled forward, blinking, attempting to focus on whatever it was. Lydia must have heard my approach but barely seemed to notice; rather, she spoke in hushed tones that barely came to me on the breeze.

“Bert,” she said, “It’s beautiful.”

What little I could see confirmed her sentiment, for the object at her knees was golden, shining brighter than the grey sky should allow. Though metallic, veins of some mineral similar to quartz crystal permeated its bizarre form, all twists and curves and strange angles that seemed at once to reject cohesion but still orchestrate a meaningful whole. One two feet long, the object seemed to imply a vaguely humanoid figure, though aberrant in its dimensions, twisted into a pose that conveyed power and majesty but bursting with the potential for violence like a coiled snake.

“What is it?” I asked, my voice tremulous and insubstantial against the wind.

“It’s mine,” said Lydia. “You got the house and the estate and the firm–this is mine.”

I thought this a strange and disturbing non sequitur. Lydia knew I would freely give to her whatever she required from my inherited estate. Having discussed the subject at length, I’d considered her, in fact, more than satisfied at our arrangements. Then, I thought, this is just a product of the girlish excitement that’s come from finding some treasure in the sand; Lydia was caught up in her own adventure story, and, despite being the sickly bore I was, I would not hamper her well-deserved moment of fantasy.

“Of course!” I shouted, trying for all the world to sound the amicable companion to the intrepid explorer. “Why, this discovery will bring you fame and fortune, my dear!”

I saw her reach down and gingerly lift the thing in her arms. As she did so, I noticed what I had not, in my sand-blinded state, seen before: a gold chain, its links twisted and gleaming. It lifted lightly from the sand as my sister stood with her prize, which struck me oddly since my sister, though healthy, had never demonstrated much strength, yet the myriad links of metal, which stretched into the invisible depths beyond the shore, seemed to ignore completely the powerful gusts that tore at my jacket and trousers.

“How mysterious!” I shouted, still attempting to play my part, though at this point some unspoken warning had begun to climb my spine toward a place where it might be recognized and heeded. “What do you think it’s attached to?” I asked, pointing with my cane toward the shallows into which the chain disappeared.

It was then that Lydia turned to face me and I saw, in her face, that which I had not expected to see: resignation; dread; sadness, as though the wisdom of a millennium had suddenly heaved itself upon her shoulders and whispered debilitating truths into her naive and unsuspecting ear.

“I can never let it go,” she said. Her stare bore into me, her brown eyes seeming to plead for forgiveness.

And I glanced at the thing in her arms, the impossible thing, and I admit shamefully that for a moment my heart desired it, and I forgot my sister and the gulls and the shore and knew only that to possess this object would be tantamount to enlightenment, that it was a key to unlock the true world and it was within my reach.

“I… I…” was all I could murmur before I saw the chain grow taut and jerk Lydia a little off balance. She took one feeble step, her foot sinking into the soft, wet sand at the surf’s edge.

“I love you, Bert,” she said, and then she was running, stumbling through the shallow water, trying to keep pace with the chain that now quickly and relentlessly receded beneath the substantial waves. I knew now intuitively that the other end was not in the shallows but beyond, somewhere deeper, hidden from the world of ships and fishermen’s nets and divers, the kind of place seen by the lifeless eyes of sailors who had drowned over the deep sea. The kind of place from which nothing can return.

“Lydia!” I shouted, the trinket’s spell upon me at last broken. “Lydia, let go!” I pursued her and quickly lost my cane in the soft earth, but I kept after her, splashing, kicking, and wheezing, until my lungs at last gave in and I fell, face first into the waves.

My last memory of Lydia is the sight of her brown curls splayed momentarily upon the frothy surface, letting the heavens once more admire their innocent beauty, before being pulled beneath the water, never again to be seen by any man, woman, child, or–I suspect–anything good or native to God’s natural order upon the Earth.

As I walk along the grey Atlantic shore, which I still do daily, I watch always for the glint of metal amid the seashells and water-worn stones. And I wonder, when I see it, will I look away…?

Play Fox, Goose, and Beans

In the morning, though her body ached, she sang in the shower. She would follow the example of the brazen bull and transform her pain into song.

I’m in pain, she explains.

I know, I say, and I uncork the bottle.

We don’t often drink the wine we produce—that would be a vicious circle! Instead, we drink other people’s wine, stomp drunkenly on our own grapes until they become wine, then sell that to afford even more wine.

Tell us it’s wrong. Go ahead, try! We’ll taunt you from our viny hideaway, jeering, giggling and crying in unison.

We’ll remain unkempt. We’ll dance away merrily and howl at the moon.

This is love.

But each journey is the same:

Each returns to Earth.

It’s hard to think of ways to describe her, like when you play Scrabble and you could get a load of points if only some impossible word were real. You can try to will that word into existence, but when she looks it up in her dictionary it won’t count for much. So you have to try your best with what you have.

She has pleasant curves.

There’s that beautiful, shapely leg.

When you see her you want to say something smart but you can only make a kind of pathetic hissing noise in the back of your mouth. She’s the kind of girl who does that to you.

Oh, there’s a string of adjectives to try… quick-witted, equal to none, quivering (like an aspen), quintessential the-girl-you-love.

In the end, what makes you so lucky is,

she goes well with you.

People say about mirrors, maybe that other world is real, but it doesn’t scare you because you know.

…I don’t have much longer; I heard feet landing on the roof. It might be Superman, or Spider-Man, or any of them. They’re all here, and they’re all after me.

It’s been two weeks. The details are complex; the plot in which I am embroiled cannot be described on a single used napkin.

They’re coming. I need to escape. Or I need to make them think I’m already dead.

I wish I’d listened.

The Queen’s reasoning went thus: No one could have removed my bed without permission. Thus, somebody gave them permission. However, this person did not send for my permission or consent, so they wanted me to discover the missing bed myself. Surely this person expects me, then, to seek them out and inquire about the missing item.

She clapped her hands. “Dress me for sleep,” she said, and her commands were realized. While hands worked at her garments, she ruminated upon her resolution.

Do not do as expected because someone else expects it.

The Queen lived by that rule; she would die by that rule. Debt, her father had told her, is an expectation of payment by another. It follows logically, then, that to gain wealth one must propagate the reverse, which is to cause all others beside yourself an unexpected loss. The Queen had become Queen in this way. She had risen above her father’s station in this way, even caused his death in this way. Never did she do what others expected because they expected it; no one would cash in on bets placed at her expense.

This person will come to me. And with that conviction, the debt had been reversed. Another would pay, but not her.

And so it came to pass that at around midnight a handmaiden opened the Queen’s chamber door and admitted the King, alone. He observed his wife through cautious lids, tipping his brow carefully to catch her expression. The Queen wore a mask of stone, she knew; the King would not break it. He did not have to: he had already come to her, which meant he knew he had already lost value. That he came so quickly spoke volumes. What could he want so badly?

“I had your bed removed,” he said.

“Is that so?” the Queen replied. “I was sure something had gone missing. And here I’ve been, getting ready to sleep and having no bed in which to do it!”

“I have come with no advisers, no councilors, no wise women, no friends long unseen. I come only as a man, this time, you see?”

The Queen squinted.

“I have come as a man comes to his wife.”

“And how is that?”

“Humbly.”

“Humbly! By that you mean humble thievery? Or humble sabotage?”

“You know well I cannot steal nor sabotage, for everything is mine to do with as I please.”

“You are like the visage of Humility herself.”

The King gestured to the handmaidens, not a sweeping gesture but a series of personal allowances. “May we have privacy?”

“No need to ask the property to leave,” said the Queen. “Why not call back the men who removed my bed?”

The King said nothing more until the rustles of soft shoes had disappeared down the corridor outside, then he spoke.

“I have truly come here in humble form,” he said, “though you don’t yet know it.”

“Prove it.”

The King nodded. “Very well.” He moved to sit on a short chest of drawers, found it an awkward height, and stood again. He cleared his throat. “I had hoped… you might share my bed tonight.”

The Queen met his gaze, which soon fell to the flagstones. He told the truth; winning her to his bed was the only thing she could think of that would cause him to act so rashly. She let down her guard, easing her posture. The King caught this slight motion in his periphery and looked up. She allowed a trickle of softness to bleed through the wall between them, which had been erected by months of prideful bickering and unintended harms. For all that the Queen lived by her father’s rule, she did not want to include the King among the party labeled “all others”. However, circumstance, as of late, had necessitated as much.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I can’t come to your bed. You haven’t figured out how to call me there.”

“I’ve sent you flowers.”

“Many.”

“I’ve written you poems.”

“Lovely as butterflies.”

“I’ve gotten down on my knees and pleaded.”

“Hyperbole, but accurate enough.”

“So I thought I would try this one last, desperate attempt.”

The Queen shook her head sadly. “At least you know it’s desperate. There must be a hundred other beds in the castle I could requisition at a moment’s notice. What makes you think that without my bed I’d choose yours?”

The King waved his hand. “Oh, the bed has little to do with it.”

“Then, pray tell, to which desperate attempt do you refer?”

“It’s something new I’ve decided to try. A habit that could use forming, especially in this time of war. I don’t mean between us, you understand, but out there.” He gestured toward the window.

The Queen shook her head expectantly.

“It’s listening,” the King said. “And I know I haven’t done it before.”

The Queen shuffled, waiting for more words, but none came. Of course, she thought, he’s ‘listening’ now.

“Darling,” she said, “I do appreciate this gesture. But listening is a process, not something that can happen in the span of an evening.”

“But what if,” the King replied, “I could prove to you that I’ve been listening for longer than you think?”

“I did already make known my predilection for proof,” she said.

“Alright, then. If all my machinations tonight had nothing to do with your bed, but I still surreptitiously removed it from your chamber—why would I do such a thing?”

The Queen shrugged.

“Might it be,” the King continued, “because in order to gain something you want, you must cause all other parties involved to lose something unexpectedly?” He smiled, then, a last, desperate smile.

And the Queen smiled back.

“Now that,” she said, “is a start.”

“A start is better than nothing.” The King shrugged, a gesture she’d not seen since the early days of their courtship.

The Queen crossed the room and kissed her husband. “If my father were here, he’d point out that, if a start is better than nothing, it follows logically that nothing is worse than a start. So be careful what you ask for.”

The first in-focus image I have, she’s strutting down the aisle of a decrepit theater, the remains of a factory dead and bequeathed to the arts. She has her hands in a long jacket. Her eyes are much deeper than her hair is long, and equally as bright. Nothing obstructs her face; she bears it to the world. I think, she’s out of my league.

At this point I’ve spent many evenings wandering Boston by myself, restless and unsure of what I want. Even after I’ve noticed this pretty, vivacious girl for the first time, I still don’t know. I’m here because I’m an actor. She’s here because she’s written music for our intermission. I have a love-hate relationship with my job; she’s good at hers. She intimidates me; she reminds me by contrast that I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with my time. I don’t know how to speak to her, so I don’t. Better that way. But when she asks one evening on her way out the door if anyone’s interested in writing a sketch comedy show with her, I raise my hand, because that’s a habit I’ve formed: I do things that scare me, to find out who I am. This girl scares me. Comedy scares me. I’ll find something out.

I will.

I don’t need to tell you that this is the story of how I met the woman I’d marry; that probably already occurred to you. You may have also noticed it’s incredibly me-centric for a story about love; it doesn’t even mention her name. But meeting another person isn’t a two-way interaction, is it? Sure, you both shake hands, you see each other’s faces at the same time; that’s how it goes down in the textbooks. The real universe, though, discovers itself little bits at a time, without the mutual consent of its parts. By the time we’ve seen a star, it might already have blown itself out of existence. By the time we meet our parents, we’re already grown up. And sometimes, by the time we meet the most important person of our lives, they’ve already met us, and tried to get our attention by casually inviting us to co-write a sketch comedy show.

I’ve matured since then, fostered by circumstance, luck, and blind trust. In this way, the world raises us from infancies we don’t yet recognize, only to look back for a glimpse when it’s almost too late; the station from which we departed slips out of view as the engine bears us on a journey begun without our knowledge or consent.

Cling, if you can, to those moments that coalesce into something relivable. Nourish them; cherish them; pass them on for progeny to hear so that they might learn to plant the seeds of memory while the soil is still freshly turned. Vintage wine, Frank Sinatra called them, in fine old kegs.

She had short, blonde hair.

She could write music.

She wore a long coat.

Behind the curtains, she walks… up the spiral stairs, to the control booth.

She’s confident, radiant.

This is me, noticing her.

I’m just an actor who doesn’t know what he wants.

She’s out of my league, I think.

A bird flutters by, looking lost.

“What’s wrong, little bird?” I cry, but it doesn’t hear me; within moments it’s out of earshot.

They say swifts never land; they eat, mate, and do everything else in the air. Could I learn to live like that? I wonder what it’s like to look at that plain of Earth stretching beneath you for your whole life and not want to land on it. Humans want to fly; why don’t swifts want to walk? Perhaps it’s the unyielding nature of stone compared with the nearly incorporeal touch of air. Solid ground is a law; thermals are gentle suggestions. By that rule of thumb, the world has gone full anarchic.

Good luck little bird, I think. If you’d ever wanted to land, it’s too late now.

I look again at the sky, though I have little choice. It’s above me, beneath me, beside me, everywhere. I wonder where the Earth went. I wonder why there’s still a sky. But mostly, I wonder where, oh where, I’m falling toward.

I’ve seen others, falling like me, but I don’t know how to reach them in this ocean of air. I suppose that, like the swift, I’ll have to learn.

"Good morning, mother," he'd say, crossing the shrubby floor of the hut to the bathroom. She'd answer with an mm-hmm and keep staring through the window across the fields. In the bathroom Jacques would do his business then slather himself with clammy, liquid garment until he was decent. Then he'd wander back into the living room and stretch, feeling the clothes start to dry against his skin. He wished he could spend all day naked but there was a farm to work and there was his mother.

She spent each morning on her social profile posting photographs. To Jacques' augmented eyes they swirled above her head, a publicly-shared gallery of color images she'd snapped with her contact lenses during the night or the early morning while Jacques slept. Each photo depicted something Jacques had failed to fix around the farm: a gap in the wall of the hut where the photosynthetic vine mesh had withered, an unwashed eating utensil, or perhaps a reopened scab on one of the cows. This was her "good morning" to Jacques, timed so he would see the photos as he came out of the bathroom each morning and be reminded that he was being watched, judged, and publicly shamed for his shortcomings. Jacques couldn't imagine, though, who read his mother's posts. He supposed there was always someone. Let them see, he thought; he had long ago numbed himself to that particular embarrassment.

Jacques' mother dyed her hair because she said she should look as old as she felt. Jacques supposed that, once upon a time, all people had looked that way when they got old; now that only happened in storybooks. Now, nobody ever died unless they went outside the walls of the city-state. Inside, nobody died except the cows and they didn't much care.

He found them where they always were, giant, egg-shaped lumps of flesh kept alive and fresh by hearts that pumped away merrily without a care in the world. No brain, no problem, that's what Jacques always said. It seemed cruel that once people had slaughtered thinking, feeling animals for food; then again, they'd had little choice. Jacques walked to each cow and checked the collar around its non-neck; the indicator glowed green if things were good and yellow if things were bad. The complicated science of organic meat farming. Yellow could mean a fungal infection that would kill the cow in 48 hours but they had antibiotics for that. Jacques rolled each cow a couple of meters, checking that the symbiotic ants had grazed the grass beneath during the night and marched the bits they tore away into each cow's neck-hole. It took a lot to keep a supra-bovine metabolism sated between mealtimes. Jacques could still see some of the ants marching around on the dirt; that was good, it meant no early warning signs of a fungus. His inspection done, Jacques would pump a gallon of fallow mash into each animal then tenderly wipe its neck-hole. He'd stand, surveying his work, say "Looking good, girls," and breathe the scent of wet meat and musty dung. That was the smell of a mediocre living at the edge of New York City-State, in the small town of Arden-once-Delaware. It was a life with few joys. On the northern horizon, the skyscrapers of Philadelphia-once-Pennsylvania loomed.

In the house, breakfast would have already grown cold. Jacques' mother would have moved from the window to the table, bowls and spoons laid out, her eyes aware of him but fixed on some empty point above the recycler. Jacques would sit in front of his porridge bowl and eat without even looking. It wasn't organic meat and produce but synthetic nutrients (we don't eat the merchandise, was his mother's rationale, but Jacques knew differently; she liked hating what she ate). Then came the chores, checking the walls, laser-mowing the weeds in the garden, and other busy work while his mother stayed inside to think, or brood, or whatever it was she did. Day would empty into night and silent meals would soak up the time in between. At night or in early morning Jacques' mother would take her photos of his failures. It was a life Jacques tolerated only by keeping his head empty.

But one night, Jacques' head was full. He dreamed of the Moon. He had never seen the dark lunar forests except in tourist ads, but in his dream he bounded through them, leaping from tree branch to massive tree branch. He climbed a tall ash until he could no longer see the ground beneath, but then an enormous serpent was slithering up the trunk after him, eyes burning with the fire of stars. Jacques tried to jump away but the serpent caught him in its jaws, and as he struggled to breathe in the slippery darkness, fighting for air, he felt himself dissolving into nothing.

When Jacques awoke, his heart beat furiously in his chest and his neck ached. His eyes alighted upon the gray bun of his mother's hair, and for the first time in fifty years, Jacques did not feel angry. Rather, he felt something else.

He did not walk to the bathroom but instead pushed through the hanging front door of the hut and out into the morning, naked. He walked around the hut, letting his fingers brush the leafy vines that wove the outer wall, until he came to the east window. Through it, he saw his mother's face, wide eyes gazing from the other side.

"Good morning," Jacques said cheerfully, pulling the window open.

"You don't have clothes on," his mother said. It was the most Jacques had heard her say in months.

"True," Jacques replied, "and I've decided not to get dressed at all today. In fact, now that I've gotten some fresh air I'll be returning to bed."

"But what about the cows?"

"Today it's up to you."

"I can't do it myself."

"It's not quantum physics, mother. Green light good, yellow light bad. Roll them like you'd roll a barrel."

His mother's eyes glazed over, acquiring the sheen that meant she'd decided to defy reality.

"It's my farm and you'll do as I say," she commanded.

"It's my life and I'll do as I please," Jacques replied, and shut the window.

He wandered back through the front door and stepped around his mother on his way to the bathroom, ignoring her protests. After finishing his business he climbed back into bed, pressed his thumb against the medicator and let it fill him with a dangerously large dose of soporific.

"Goodnight, mother," he said, and closed his eyes. Take me, he said to the serpent. I'm not afraid this time.

Jacques awoke, stomach twisting with hunger. His mother sat by the window posting her photos to the social networks. Jacques checked the time on his contact lenses: nearly three days had passed and nothing had changed, which meant he'd won: the farm had continued on without his constant, unappreciated labor. He sat up, stretched, and rubbed his eyes. His face felt warm and puffy.

"Good morning, mother," he said, and visited the bathroom. He dressed and pushed through the door into the living room. That's when he saw the pictures swirling above his mother's head: large, egg-like shapes, a field of them, pale green and dead-looking, topped with a sprinkling of carrion birds.

The cows.

Jacques cried out and ran through the front door. Wings flapped and dark shapes rose into the dusky evening expanse. With a thought, he commanded the house computer to release the brightbugs and the swarm poured from its kennel, a red glow diffusing across the entire field. The cows were dead; although they hadn't moved much in life, now they were still as stone. The air stank of death and Jacques had to cover his nose and mouth to get closer. Black streaks ran down the bloated corpses from where crows had torn ragged holes in the flesh. Every collar blinked yellow, on and off. A forest of white fuzz had grown beneath the neck-hole of each cow. A fungal infection. But why hadn't his mother simply administered the antibiotics? He turned and saw her standing with hands clasped serenely.

"You let them die?" he asked.

"It's your job to tend the cows."

"But you could have saved them!"

"It's your job to tend the cows."

Jacques' blood boiled.

"You would rather let us die of hunger—"

"I?" she asked, voice trembling, "I would rather? You abandoned me!" Then she began to cry. "We have nothing left and now we will starve!"

Jacques wanted to hit her, to rip her apart, but the sound of her sobbing cooled him, as it always did. Poor, pathetic woman. He nearly told her then that they would never need to starve, that they could live comfortably in the soup stalls in the city proper, but he knew his mother would rather die. And she would, if only to spite him. Although he knew the feeling was unjust, guilt stirred in Jacques' stomach and began to inch up his gullet.

"I'll take our savings," he said, "and go into town."

"And buy what?"

"Perhaps I can pay to have new calves grown, only three or four but enough to restart. I'll take samples for them to copy, that's cheaper than commissioning them from scratch."

His mother only continued to cry. She would stand there, Jacques knew, until he left.

It was a short ride from Arden-once-Delaware to Philadelphia-once-Pennsylvania and Jacques' taxi left him at the edge of Starr Garden, a small, ancient place with trees as thick as his cows had been. Here, woody archways led deep into a maze-like root system where a clever shopper could find the best deals in the region. Consumer protection laws didn't apply in the Root District except to written and verbal statements so merchants tended to say very little; that was the down side. The up side was, goods sold there were tax-free. Mostly the things one found in the root stalls were rarities, items unique enough to draw shoppers away from the security of the surface bazaars. Quality could also be a concern but Jacques felt confident he could find the service he needed at a price that suited him.

Jacques ducked under the Northwest Arch and his world became a narrow path lit by phosphorescence. Stalls stuffed with wares opened into the earthen walls on both sides of the tunnel. Soon other hallways crossed the first and Jacques let himself wander. Now and then some item would dance into the aisle or some near-irresistible smell would turn Jacques' head. Sometimes it was food; sometimes it was just a synthetic odor designed to get his attention. At last he found what he was looking for: a biogeneticist, her stall filled with cages draped in opaque cloths.

"Excuse me," Jacques said to the merchant, "I'm looking for a clone job."

The woman shook her head but pointed Jacques down the hall to another stall with a collection of turtles whose shells doubled as lock boxes. The merchant took a sledgehammer to one as a demonstration.

"That's not why I'm here," Jacques said. "I'm looking for a clone job."

A discussion ensued and the merchant made an offer. The price, though, was far too high; Jacques could only buy two calves and the man wouldn't guarantee their survival. He continued his search, trying every stall known to dabble in genetics, but every conversation ended the same: Jacques couldn't afford the job. He had underestimated the price.

Defeated, Jacques wandered back toward Starr Garden, following the blue line his eyes laid out for him. He wondered what he would say to his mother when he returned home.

Then a hand thrust itself toward him out of a dark corner and Jacques jumped aside. He excused himself and continued to walk but the hand's owner overtook him again.

"What do you want?" Jacques asked. The merchant was cloaked and hooded in black, her face disfigured as if it had partially melted. The woman did not answer him but only thrust a scarred hand into his chest and opened her fingers. Instinctively Jacques caught what fell out: a clear packet of small, yellow seeds.

"Hey," he protested, "I don't want—"

"These will bring you great fortune," she said. Her voice sounded surprisingly normal. "Plant one seed and I promise you it will become the most valuable object in New York."

Jacques only stood, open-jawed. The woman smiled, the dried cracks in her skin widening.

"Pay me all the money you intended to spend here tonight and they're yours," she said.

A protest formed on Jacques' lips but then his brain caught up with what was happening.

"Wait," he said, "you guarantee I will possess the most valuable object in New York? Like, monetarily?"

"Yes."

"And you know that, down here, verbal guarantees still count as—"

"Yes."

Jacques smiled. Clearly this woman was crazy but if he made a monetary transaction with her and her promises went unfulfilled he could sue her for twice the amount. He'd heard of such cases going through in a matter of hours. In a few days' time he'd file a complaint and then he'd have enough for the calves he needed. This was, perhaps, Jacques' best available course of action and fate had dropped it right in his lap. So he said, "Sold!", made his trade, got confirmation that the woman's DNA had been attached to the record of sale, and left the Root District with a bounce in his step. He strode through the front door of the hut with a grin on his face and held up the bag of seeds for his mother to see. She took the news stoically but when Jacques awoke the next morning the seed packet had vanished from his bedside. His mother sat at the table in front of a single bowl of steaming porridge.

"Mother, where—?" Jacques began.

"I threw your seeds in the composter," she interrupted, and smiled.

Naked, Jacques bolted outside and around the hut. He threw open the lid of the composter, nearly tipping the rain barrel beside it, but saw none of the small, yellow seeds when he peered inside. Frantically he found a shovel and scooped the contents of the bin onto the ground. He sifted through the warm, green mush for half an hour, eyes wet with tears of frustration, until he pounded the dirt and screamed at the top of his lungs. Without the seeds he had no evidence of fraud.

His mother had ended their lives a second time.

For three nights and three days Jacques lay in his bed, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep. His mother, ever constant, sat by the east-facing window and posted pictures of the cows and the seeds over and over again. Jacques wondered, again, if anybody subscribed to her updates. He felt bad for whoever did.

On the third afternoon since the disaster Jacques grew restless. He got up, slathered on some clothes, and went out to wander among the stinking corpses of the cows. After that he walked the perimeter of the field, brooding. Now and then he would glance at the luminous buildings of Philadelphia-once-Pennsylvania on the horizon and wonder how the woman in black had spent his savings. His walk took him back to the hut from the south. The small living space was self-sustaining, using photosynthesis to power its basic functions, but anything beyond the most menial tasks required extra energy he could no longer afford. Goodbye, showers.

Then Jacques noticed something new: where he'd piled the compost, a plant had grown. Jacques' pace quickened. A stalk had risen from the ground, thick and fleshy, and at its end a wide seed pod more than two meters long rested upon the earth; a green bean that could feed a giant. Jacques stepped around the plant, wondering what valuable prize it might contain, when the pod snapped open. A shrubby smell assaulted Jacques' nostrils and he nearly gagged. When he looked inside the pod, it was empty.

Empty meant his plan had worked; the seeds he'd been sold were worthless.

"Mother!" Jacques called, whooping, "We're back in business!" He knew she wouldn't answer but he didn't care. Dizzy with elation, Jacques stuck his head into the pod, not minding the smell. In fact, he inhaled. A sweet, tantalizingly tart odor hung in the back of the pod and something about it tickled his memory. Images began to swirl in the blackness. And sounds. And tastes and smells and feelings. Someone was calling him. Was it mother? No. Come in, it said. Come in and sleep. Was it written on the back of the pod or was he hearing it spoken?

"Hello?" Jacques said. His own voice filled his ears. He climbed all the way into the pod and pressed his ear against the slick, black wall.

Hello, it said.

And snapped shut.

At first the pod only squeezed him so tightly he could not breathe or scream, then the burning began. Agony drenched him and Jacques would have given anything only to be able to writhe. His feet and hands melted, his eyelids and eyeballs melted, then the pain stopped when all his skin had sloughed away and his brain, too, drowned in the constricting chaos.

The next Jacques knew his father had swept him off the ground and tossed him high in the air. Jacques' stomach surged and his whole body tingled. His father caught him and Jacques sang a squeal, again! And up in the air he went once more, higher this time. Sitting next to his father sat Behemoth, tail wagging and long snout bobbing with the bouncing child, and when Jacques laughed Behemoth barked once, twice, and then a sliver of light sliced Jacques' father in half as the pod reopened and light once again touched Jacques' eyes.

He tumbled forward into dirt, screaming. His skin burned. He gasped for breath and air returned to his lungs. White light faded into treetops; his heartbeat slowed. The fear melted and trickled like sparkling water down his spine into his toes.

He sat up.

He could no longer see the hut, only trees. He turned. Behind him, a large rock face loomed. This was not the farm. Feeling dizzy, Jacques tried to stand. When he put his hand on the ground it hurt. Looking at it, he saw it was red and blistered. In some places the skin looked almost as if it had begun to melt. His sleeve was torn and frayed. And then the memory of the deformed woman came back to him. Jacques gasped, hands flying to his face. He felt shallow contours like scrapes from a tumble on pavement but nothing like the extremity of the woman who'd sold him the seeds. But he knew immediately that this was what had happened to her. And it'll happen to me, too, if I ever get back in that pod. He swore that he would not.

His job now was to get home. First, he checked the pod. How had it moved? It appeared to be rooted into the ground. Had it walked? Flown? Burrowed? Something about the way the pod looked bothered Jacques but he didn't know what. He gazed through the branches at the sky above. Jacques lived only a few kilometers west of the Delaware River; walking east would either take him to that river or to the ocean and he would certainly hit some houses before reaching either. How far could he have gone? It seemed to be getting darker, which meant the brighter sky was west. Jacques began to walk. After only a few minutes the trees parted and Jacques saw he was on a hilltop. The City-State of New York sprawling before him, its huge wall running Southeast to Northwest as far as his eye could see.

And Jacques was on the other side of it.

He was in the wilderness—the Reclamation, serious people called it—where the laws of the city-states did not reach.

Terrified, Jacques almost made a dash for the city walls. There was a chance he could get there before anything found him.

But then he stopped.

Jacques was a man in a predicament, a man with a mind attuned to valuable things, so before the panic could make him run screaming he stopped to think. Nobody could leave or enter the city-state carrying objects that matched a staggeringly long list of banned genomic sequences and chemical compounds. The entire point of the city-state was that it was a refuge for what some people called "classic humanity," the kind of civilization Earth had enjoyed before the excesses of the genetic revolution—before the Reclamation. Someone coming back into New York from the outside was usually subjected to a full scrub-down and confiscation of everything down to clothing if they even breathed the wrong kind of pollen while outside. But Jacques had somehow left the walls without passing even a single checkpoint. He was outside, wasn't he? And he had his clothes, ruined as they might be from the journey. Perhaps, then, he could return home the same way? He knew from documentaries that the Border Patrol was formidable. If he had found a way around them… Plant one seed and I promise you it will become the most valuable object in New York. This could be his ticket to greatness. Or it could be his ticket to prison.

Jacques turned his back on the city and returned to the pod. Again he checked the roots, looking for a clue as to its method of locomotion, but there was none. This isn't the same pod, he realized. The plant hadn't moved; Jacques had. He remembered the feeling of being dissolved, of melting. Somehow he'd been transmitted from one plant to another outside the walls of the city-state, undetected. But it was an expensive journey; his skin still itched and burned and he realized with horror that bits of clothes now stuck to his flesh. He pulled skin and cloth apart while gritting his teeth and blood dripped down his arms.

Jacques would have to make this trip count; he would have to go deeper into the Reclamation and find something worth bringing home, if he had to go through the pod again to do it. He gazed up at the cliff. Then, fighting the pain, he started to climb.

As Jacques' feet scrambled to find holds in the rock face, an otherworldly apprehension tugged at his primal instincts: every centimeter brought him farther from the laws of classic humanity. Jacques had seen the horrors and wonders of the Reclamation documented on the internets; the space between city-states held an equally diverse number of ways to prosper or die. Here, people too old for the tameness of civilization had reworked themselves and the world around them, recarving nature to suit cryptic purposes, and the progeny of those shapers still wallowed in the deep etches they left.

Above the cliff the forest looked much like it did below. Somehow that surprised Jacques. He walked due West, looking about warily. He half-expected to meet a dragon or a wizard but all he saw were chipmunks and flies. He walked for maybe ten minutes, not daring to hum or whistle. He would have played some music through his audio implants except when he reached out for the network it wasn't there. That frightened Jacques more than anything, perhaps even more than the thought of being ripped to shreds by some terrible creature.

What Jacques first took as the tinkling of a brook resolved into the wild pluckings of musical instruments. He slowed his pace and doubled his vigilance, listening closely as he sneaked nearer to the sound. Before long the trees gave way to a shallow gorge in the center of which towered a stone needle encircled by dark windows. Jacques' breath caught as he saw, standing upon a balcony jutting from the tower, a tall, golden figure of a woman, her fingers dancing upon the strings of a harp. Not many instruments, Jacques realized, but one instrument playing an impossible melody. The cacophonous solo blanketed the valley. At the base of the gorge, campfires burned low. Jacques lengthened the focal length of his eyes and nearly yelped when he saw what slept next to them: large, half-human, half-animal forms. Thropes, the documentaries called them—self-bred, animal-human organisms that thrived on fear, rage, dominance, and submission.

Jacques looked at his hands, still cracked and bleeding from his journey in the pod. He had to make this trip count, whatever the cost. Keeping as quiet as he could, he crept past the monstrous, unconscious forms until he reached the entrance to the stone spire. Then he slowly ascended the narrow, winding stairs, until he arrived outside a brightly lit room from which a deep rumbling issued. Was that snoring? If so, the creature making the noise would have to be the size of his hut. Jacques passed the half-open door to the room and walked, instead, to the balcony. He emerged in daylight facing the golden harpist. She was only a meter tall, and Jacques saw with surprise the harp was not separate but part of her body. Was she biosynthetic or mechanical? Then Jacques realized he hadn't considered what the harp would say when he appeared. Quickly he tried to calm her.

"Hello, my name is—" Jacques began, but the harp put a finger to her lips.

"Silence," she sang, words weaving into the melody, "my keeper sleeps within, sated by my lullaby. Wake him and you'll die upon his horns. Take me from this place and I will play you sweeter songs than you might dream of."

Jacques needed no more convincing. He tucked the harp under his arm and descended the dark stairwell until he stepped once again into the cool evening air. The harp still played and nothing in the camp stirred.

As Jacques tiptoed around the sleeping forms—some clawed, some horned, many with gold and silver jewelry looped through beaks or hanging around tails—Jacques noticed a crudely built pen in which sat a small flock of headless geese. With surprise he noted each of them was perched upon a nest.

"Do those lay eggs?" Jacques asked. All headless livestock in New York were infertile; replacement stock could cost years' worth of savings. Natural reproduction so far had proved inviable. But if Jacques could breed his own animals…

"Yes, they do," the harp sang in response to Jacques' question, "but we must go."

"I need one," Jacques whispered, "for the farm."

"How will you carry us both?"

Jacques had no answer to that. So he continued walking on tiptoe, the harp pointing the way, until they'd ascended the valley wall and stolen into the forest.

"Now go," said the harp, its fingers leaving the strings, "for soon they'll wake without my song to lull them."

Jacques ran, all the while keeping a close watch for the cliff edge above the pod. It came up fast.

"Hold onto me," Jacques said, and solid arms wrapped around his neck. Jacques climbed as fast as he could but carefully enough to avoid a long drop to the ground. Just as his feet touched the cliff bottom a symphony of bestial cries carried over the precipice above.

"Hurry," urged the harp, but Jacques had already climbed into the pod and laid flat. The pod seemed to talk to him again.

I missed you, it said, and snapped shut.

"This may hurt," Jacques said, and then the pain began and Jacques and the harp were screaming.

This time Jacques did not see his father but the serpent from his Moon dream. It slithered toward him until the heat of its eyes charred the hands Jacques threw in front of his face and in its mouth, where teeth should be, were harp strings.

Then Jacques felt soft compost beneath him and despite the searing agony that wrung his flesh into knots he laughed because he was home again.

The liquid garment remover Jacques applied to peel his clothes away burned like fire and Jacques screamed as it ate at the parts that had merged with his skin. His mother, in an unprecedented act of maternity, poured cool aloeplastic on the gashes. Jacques' entire body grated upon itself and he felt if he put his full weight on his legs they might snap. His vision blurred, his fingers and toes bulged plumply, and spikes of pain shot up his spine when he walked. Jacques' mother led him to his bed, laid him down, and questioned him.

"I went outside the walls," Jacques croaked, voice hoarse. "And I've made us rich."

His confession met with disbelief until he bade the harp to play its music. The harp, having recovered quickly from the journey, struck out a song much different than the one it had played in the thropic settlement. The notes floated through Jacques' skull and wrapped around his brain and the fibers of his nerves and muscles twitched and vibrated with the song. Jacques' mother sat in her favorite chair and he watched her head loll as she fell asleep. Soon, the song overpowered Jacques as well and he slipped into his own deep sleep.

A string of insubstantial memories followed. Jacques would awaken, empty of anything except the warm, sexual contentment left by the harp's aural kiss, then roll over and sleep again until he'd done so a thousand times. At last he rolled out of bed, hit the floor, and pushed himself unsteadily to his feet.

"Mother," he called.

How much time had passed? Days? Longer than that?

He found her still sitting in her favorite chair by the window.

"Mother," he said again, but she did not answer. She's asleep, he thought, like I should be, and he nearly laid himself down again but a voice in the back of his head spoke up. Open your eyes, Jacques, it said. That's a clever boy. And then Jacques was flying at the harp. He clapped his scabbed, gnarled hands upon the strings and shouted, "Enough! Enough!"

The harp protested but Jacques grabbed a blanket and wove it between the strings so she could not play. Then he walked to his mother and leaned down to inspect her, dreading what he would see. Her face shone pale in the morning sunlight; her cheeks had sunk and bags hung under her eyes. Dead, Jacques thought, until she lifted a hand to rest upon his arm.

"Oh, mother!" he cried. "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry!" He raced to the kitchen area and squeezed the porridge dispenser but what came out was watery thin. Jacques glanced around the hut and saw the vine mesh walls had shriveled and dried, uncared for and no longer producing energy from sunlight. Jacques fed his mother the sorry meal then rested his head in her lap and sobbed. He had made the wrong decision, he knew: he should have taken the headless goose and left the toxic harp behind. And now he was too broken to return to the forest.

"I've killed us, mother," he spoke through his tears.

"I know," she whispered, and stroked his hair.

But when his mother's hand fell away and he saw that she had fallen asleep, Jacques dragged himself to the bathroom and opened the medical chest. Inside he found two portable medicators of adrenaline intended to counter allergic reactions in the livestock. But Jacques would need them for himself now if he ever wanted to have any livestock to tend again. He slipped the vials into a satchel hung over his shoulder. Besides that he was naked. He would not merge with any more clothes.

Outside, the pod snapped open and Jacques' tears dripped into the black interior. He did not want to go in. But what choice did he have?

Come inside, said the pod. I want to taste you.

Jacques did not scream this time and he saw nothing in the space between the pods. When he opened his eyes the familiar cliff towered above him once more. Jacques pressed his thumb on one of the adrenaline medicators and his brain buzzed. He started the long climb. As he worked, dull pain bit at him. He made the top in five minutes then ran through the forest, driven by hormones and urgency. When he arrived back at the camp he peered into the gorge but saw only ashes and the crude woodwork that sheltered the livestock. The thropes must have left, but why? To hunt? To make war on another tribe? It didn't matter; Jacques had his chance.

Adrenaline seemed to slow time so that the short scramble to the goose pen seemed to take hours. Tiny rocks bit at his bare feet but he hardly felt them. Finally Jacques stepped over the rickety fence of the goose pen and made his selection of the headless animals. He chose one of a medium size, small enough for him to carry beneath his arm, but the weight of it surprised him as he hefted it. The warmth of the feathers and the beating heart beneath felt good, though. It reminded him of the cows.

To Jacques' relief the camp remained still and quiet. But as he stepped back over the fence, the goose slipped from his arm to the ground, bounced, and let out a loud squawk. Headless animals normally didn't make sounds but Jacques barely had time to process that thought because from the tower above him a roar issued, echoing in the tiny gorge. Jacques' blood ran cold. Quickly, he picked up the goose and made a dash for the slope from which he'd come, taking a moment to look back over his shoulder.

An enormous, bipedal shape bound out of the doorway of the stone needle. It was black-furred, tall, muscled like a god, and when it spotted Jacques it roared again and pointed at him accusingly, its long, white horns catching a ray of sun. Jacques did not look again. He was scrambling back up the steep rise when the hand of the terrible thrope closed around his leg but he managed to wrench free and the creature slid away on loose rock, bellowing with rage.

Having scaled the slope, Jacques sprinted through the forest, angry hollers close behind. As he approached the cliff he realized with horror he had not factored the climb down into his escape; he would never be able to make a careful descent with the threat of death so close behind.

That left only one choice.

Seven steps before the precipice Jacques' thumb found the tip of the second adrenaline medicator. Three steps before he felt the prick of the dispenser. Then he was in midair, falling, his only thought that he must not land on the goose.

Something cracked as Jacques hit the ground but it did not hurt, then he climbed into the pod.

I'll save you, it said to him. Now the voice was easy to hear and understand. I love swallowing you, Jacques.

"Just get me—" Jacques began but then his words became cries of pain and melted, along with the rest of him, into the pod's acid.

"Didn't I tell you?" the hooded woman from the market said. She sat across from Jacques and wore her hood back. Her face, once scarred and twisted, offered Jacques a charming smile.

"Yes," Jacques said, and sipped his tea. "But only half of it."

"I didn't want to ruin the other half," she said. "More fun that way."

"Did you get rich, too?" Jacques asked.

"As rich as you."

"I wonder if the goose will lay eggs for us," Jacques wondered.

The woman shrugged. "Even if not, you will always have this," she said, and lifted her cupped hands. Jacques leaned forward to look into them.

"Water?" he said, but instead of an answer the woman laughed and flung the water in Jacques' face. As he spluttered he watched the woman laugh so hard that her mouth split wide, opening at the seams and belching white light. Jacques blinked against the harsh glare as it resolved into the morning sun. He was lying on his back, on the farm, with his mother standing over him.

"Get away from that plant," she growled. Her face appeared a haggard blur as Jacques' eyes adjusted.

He sat up, looked wildly for the goose, then saw it trembling next to him. Laughing, he picked it up. Blood dribbled from his mouth down his chest as he spoke, but he was just happy to be alive.

"Mother, a goose!" he proclaimed, but his mother had not heard; she was hefting the golden harp into the bean pod.

Jacques hadn't even heard it screaming, but now he heard it call his name, pleading for him to stop his mother from sending it back to the forest. But as his mother was about to force the harp inside the pod, the flesh of the plant snapped shut. Jacques' mother pounded on it, commanding it to open, but it did not. Instead, it began to deflate. It shrank until it had all but lost its cylindrical shape and lay like an empty balloon on the grass. Then, as if becoming filled with water, it began to regain its shape.

"Is someone coming back with you?" Jacques' mother asked him.

This one is big and juicy, the pod said in his mind.

And then it dawned on Jacques what was happening.

Panicked, Jacques stood, ignoring the pain that racked his entire body.

"An axe!" he shouted, spinning in a circle. "I need an axe!"

His mother looked confused.

"We don't have—"

But Jacques had remembered the laser mower under his bed. He raced around the hut to the front entrance and darted inside, tripping on the threshold and sprawling face-first into a chair. Trailing blood, he crawled to his bed and yanked item after item from beneath it until at last his grotesque hand emerged gripping the laser mower. He kicked the override as he ran back outside and around the house where the pod had swelled to three-quarters its full size.

"Stand back!" Jacques shouted, stood the mower in front of the bean stalk, and switched it on. Light sheared the stalk in half and a bright yellow liquid fountained out of the stump, burning Jacques' skin and causing both him and his mother to yelp and leap away.

Why, why, why, the pod screamed, and its voice trailed into nothing as it leaked its mysterious fluid onto the grass, which smoldered and smelled like urine as it dissolved.

And then the pod split open and the greasy, half-formed figure of the gigantic thrope spilled onto the ground, unfinished, eyeballs hanging from its skull and muscles leaving wet, red streaks on the grass. It looked at Jacques and bellowed a gush of intestines. Then it crawled toward him, arm outstretched, visible muscles shifting and pulsing with every hateful movement. Jacques only backed away, eyes wide, until, with one final heave, the thrope fell face-first onto the ground and lay still.

The harp screamed and vomited gold.

Jacques turned to his mother.

"You know, in some ways," he said, "that thrope kind of reminded me of you."

Hours later, Jacques learned who subscribed to his mother's social networks. The Ministry of Food and Drugs arrived with photos of unregistered bioforms including an anthropomorphic instrument and a giant, podded plant with unrecognized phenotypes. They were also shocked to discover the corpse of an exodenizen, as serious people called things that lived outside the city, mangled and sprawled on Jacuqes' mother's property (and it was, after all, her farm, as she had always been so fond of reminding him). Many questions were asked and in the end Jacques had to undergo quarantine and sterilization. His mother, on the other hand, went to the courts. Jacques felt confident that she would have a brand new place to wallow in self-pity, except that place would have bars and a bevy of public servants paid to do just what Jacques had had to do for the last fifty years: keep his mother alive, for some reason. Some time apart from each other would be good for their relationship, he decided.

For the time being, Jacques' life had new meaning. Although he could barely walk at times he felt he had a new lease on life. The adventure outside the city walls had energized him in a way nothing had for as long as he could remember.

The police never found the woman who sold Jacques the seeds; somehow the DNA attached to the transaction matched nothing on record. Jacques wasn't surprised; he was sure his DNA wasn't the same after traveling through the pod four times, either.

Since the reproductive goose passed inspection, the Ministry returned it to Jacques when he left quarantine. A day later he got a phone call from a private bioagriculture firm interested in purchasing the goose for more credits than Jacques could ever spend. Devoid of his cows, Jacques had formed a sentimental attachment with the goose, so he settled on letting the firm borrow and return it a week later for half the price.

Although not the richest man in New York, Jacques had plenty of money. He moved out of the farm to downtown Philadeliphia-once-Pennsylvania to a penthouse apartment overlooking Starr Garden, but not before he'd found something wonderful on the farm where the authorities had neglected to look. Remembering the dream where the scarred woman had thrown water in his face, Jacques had checked the rain barrel next to the composter before he left the farm for the final time.

"Disappointing evening?" A hooded man asked a forlorn-looking woman leaving the Root District by the East Tunnel.

"Yes," she said, "But I'm not interested in whatever you're selling." Then she saw beneath the farmer's hat and drew back from his severely disfigured face.

"I think you'll find this will bring you great fortune," the farmer said, producing a small, yellow seed in a clear bag.

"What would I want with those?" the girl asked, wrinkling her nose.

Jacques smiled.

"Trust me. Plant this seed and it will become the most valuable object in New York."

“So,” said Death, “You live in the basement of a vacant church.”

“That’s right,” said Lucifer.  “Home sweet home.”

“Does it hurt?  Can you even touch the walls?”

“Actually,” replied Lucifer, “I find this place quite comfortable.  For two reasons.”  He held up two fingers.

Death just looked at him.

“Guess,” Lucifer said.

“Alright.  The first reason is… spite.”

“Usually, yes.  But not now.  I’m trying to be good.”

“Okay, then.  You like things that have fallen from faith.”

“Bingo.  And second?”

“You feel at home living far below God.”

Lucifer thought.

“I was gonna say ‘no landlord,’ but… yeah.”

On Earth angels and demons walked free and Lucifer found that a bother.  Earth made him feel closer to Heaven, for which he longed, but Heaven was closed and Hell wasn’t home so Lucifer made do with Earth.  But he needed a hideaway.

At first he felt a pull toward the homeless, thinking they’d understand.  But the homeless made poor cohorts and he toyed with them more often than identified with them.

Home.

“You live here?” Lucifer’s date asked.

“Yes.  Come in,” he said.

So the woman stepped through the door into the basement of what had once been a church.

“Spare change?”

The girl held her hand toward Lucifer.

“What constitutes ‘spare change’?”  Lucifer asked.

“Um… you don’t want it anymore.”

“Ah.  Then you and I are spare change.”

The girl looked perplexed.

“But,” said Lucifer, “I’m going to fix two problems at once.”

He produced a check for $6.16 million.

“I’ll give you the spare change you want.  Then society will want you.”

He handed her the check.

“Now give me your blessing, mortal.  I need points upstairs.  Trying to change.”

But the girl walked away.

“Hey!” Lucifer called, but she turned a corner.

So he shrugged.  And took her soul.

Hell hasn’t existed forever.  Many think it’s the Yin to Heaven’s Yang but that’s mixing mythologies.  There is a Yin; it’s called Eternal Darkness.  But it never became Hell until Lucifer arrived.  It will revert when he leaves.

Make no mistake: Hell is a punishment devised by God for a single angel and it follows him everywhere.  Everyone knows he can’t escape it.

But not poor Lucifer, who wants so badly to return to Heaven.

Don’t cry, Lou.  You don’t mean to be evil.  It’s just your punishment.

Put down that man’s head, Lou.

You’ll sooner die than be forgiven.

“Needless to say, the Almighty Father crushed my little rebellion and banished me to eternal darkness.  I made it work for me, but ruling over hordes of miserable people gets old.  Now I seek to return home, to Heaven.”

“Wow,” says the bartender.  “That’s some shit.”

“Yeah.  Now comfort me,” says Lucifer.

The bartender mixes him some comfort.

“This is delicious,” Lucifer says. “What’s it called?”

“A Little Piece of Heaven.”  The bartender winks.

Lucifer’s eyes glow red.

“Are you… kidding me with this…?” he says, voice escalating.

The glass shatters.  The bartender screams.

“DO YOU THINK”—Lucifer stands—”THIS IS FUNNY, MORTAL?”

“So that’s what I do,” said the bartender.  “Everyone who comes in here, I listen.  And no matter what horrible shit they’ve done, I tell them everything’s gonna be okay and I give them one on the house.”

“So,” said the man at the bar.  “You’re like a priest, except you give away false absolution and booze, all at no spiritual cost?”

“Pretty much.”

The man at the bar smiled.

“That makes you, like, my kind of priest.”

“You got a story, then?” the bartender asked.

“Oh yeah,” replied Lucifer, “I do.  So listen closely, it’s one hell of a tale.”

Aw, look at his big eyes and adorable trench coat!  Look at the scruff on his precious little face he grew as a cry for help!  Maybe we should let him in?

I don’t think Dad would like it.

You’re right, but still.  He’s so adorable.

He’s flipping us the bird.

Oh, so he is.

I can see why Dad keeps him out.

I wouldn’t let in a dog that bit me, either.

“Are you two done talking?” Lucifer said. “If so, you’re blocking the door and I need a drink.”

The angels stepped aside and The Devil entered the bar.

I’ll be posting 27 Devil May Care fan fiction drabbles between now and the end of funding.  Look for the tag on each post.

(To whet you’re appetite, check out this Devil May Care fan fiction sequel I wrote back in 2011.)

Hope you enjoy!

A boy climbed the hill and asked Superman, “Why don’t you help us?  No one could stand against you.”

Superman replied, “Like everyone, I follow the path of least resistance.  But which path shall I follow when nothing can or will resist me?”

The young man thought.

“How about the path of greatest good?”

Superman looked at the boy.

“Don’t lecture me, you little snot.”  And he batted the kid off the hill.

Did I mention, this was bad Superman from Superman III.

“Mom…!” he pleads desperately.

“Kenneth,” she replies, brow furrowing.  “Kenneth… they’re just paper.”

We all wandered into the classroom and sat down.  The teacher looked ordinary enough.  “Pick up your pencils, please,” he said.  We did.

“Let’s begin with how I will avoid a trespassing charge today, since I don’t actually have permission to be here.”  He paused, grinning.

“Okay, how?”  I asked.

“It’s easy.  For killing a room full of people using pencils smeared with fast-acting, skin-absorbed poison, I’ll be charged with mass-murder.  But I guarantee the authorities will overlook the trespassing.  See?  Guaranteed success!”

One was long and one was squat
Together they did what one could not

They waited until the woman slept
Then out from under her bed they crept

And woe, for nobody understands
Those knives are at fault, not my innocent hands!

Hope you enjoy!

Once, I envied shadows. I envied them so much I wished to be one.

I sat as far as I could from sunlit windows because I hated to be seen by those outside. When one positions oneself in front of a pane of glass, one becomes an item on display. People stare; people point; people talk about you as if you couldn’t hear them directly through the glass… as if the glass separated them from you not just in distance, but in time; as if you represented some alternate future that could be theirs. You are not real, you are an object on display; an object to be observed and discussed and—if found pleasing—bought. It may sound ridiculous, but next time you look through a window at a stranger, ask yourself: would you look and talk like this—so blatantly comparing yourself with them—were the glass not there? Would you even consider eating what they’re eating or drinking what they’re drinking? Or would you pass them by without a second glance, or even a conscience recognition of their existence on this earth?

Now imagine that you are on a dark street, and you are looking through a glass window at a twilit room, and no matter where you look all the doors to this room are locked and sealed.

This is how I see the world now.

As a young man, I did not wish to model myself for society, so I sat as far away from the glass as I could. I did not care if sitting closer would bring more patrons to the restaurant, or the coffee shop, or the bookstore, or wherever I was.

Rather, I wished to be unobserved; to remain unmeasured by anyone.

Eventually I stopped going to real restaurants and coffee shops and decided to live totally in my subconscious.

My job doesn’t pay well; I work only a few times a month. When I’m at work, I do nothing except talk to other people, who do nothing but talk to me. Often times, we both talk simultaneously. Sometimes we’ll have the same conversation dozens of times and pretend like it’s the first time we’ve said any of the things we’re saying. We’re always smiling, always having a good time, but in the end—to tell you the truth—we’ve never really said anything. When I say this, I mean it: we’ve never really said anything. Our lips are moving, but no sound is coming out.

This is because I work as an extra for major motion pictures.

The motion picture industry as we know it is dying. Every week, more and more screenplays that would have been green-lit ten years ago are banished to a studio executive’s file cabinet instead. Someone poured their dreams onto paper and sold them, only to have them die slow, unsatisfying deaths in a manila folder. Some dreams never come true. Some flourish and grow into shared dreams, massively-multiplayer visions posted on YouTube by kids with no money and no movie studios but all the creativity of a thousand L.A. taxi drivers with screenplays burning holes in their back pockets.  And the dreams of the masses come true, and the masses share in those dreams and vote on those dreams and expand on those dreams. Imagine if your dreams were the same way. Imagine if your brain was a wiki that anyone could change. What you wanted to happen was only one small vote in an endless sea of vetoes.

This is much closer to the truth than it sounds. When was the last time you controlled a dream you had?

What makes me special, what makes me different from other people, is that I can control my dreams. Lucid dreaming, it’s called. Who needs money when you can dream up a mansion, a pool, a sports car, a life of luxury? Not that I ever dreamed of these things. Imagine gaining control over your dreams and not being able to come up with anything more creative than fancy cars. The thing we keep forgetting as humans is, the world outside is only half the game. I would argue it’s less than half. The other half of us doesn’t care what’s real and what’s not; it knows that sight and sound and touch and taste and smell are just interpretations; conscious dreams that are important only because they keep the unconscious alive.

Go ahead and try to stop your stomach from growling when you’re hungry. Try to make your heart stop beating. You can’t. This is because you are not in control of your own body. You—the thing you call “you”—is not your brain: it is a piece of your brain, a tool that observes the outside world and protects the subconscious from dying. The subconscious is the real master of your body. Every second you are alive it beats your heart, it expands and contracts your lungs, and it digests your food. It is the ultimate being, with no limitations on its existence. Physics? Material boundaries? These are limitations only to the conscious self. On the inside, you can be wild and free and nobody can stop you, ever, from doing anything you want—from seeing and hearing and tasting and smelling and touching anything—and using senses you can’t even imagine now.

I do not dream of sports cars.

Change is the currency of life. When you pass the boundary between conscious and unconscious, you change places with yourself. Think of sinking beneath the waves of a tumultuous ocean, then instead of finding water beneath, you sink into a pocket of air that has no temperature and no sound—the only movement is the swirling motion of the dark waters outside. Your feet touch the ground, and the pocket swells to the size of a large room. Now one end of the room begins to open into a funnel; a funnel of air and water, pulling you in, ripping apart the fabric of reason, leading first forward and then downward, downward, into a spiraling deep. As you pass into the mouth of the swirling tunnel, you have a choice: ride downward into the terrifying unknown or fight the pull and scramble to climb back into the disappearing air pocket and the surface of the water. The latter choice leads to sweet obliviousness, the dimly lit realm of dreams unremembered and unresolved. But the former choice, while the most frightening, puts you in control.

At least, this is how it happens for me.

The first time you consciously change the world to lack gravity, or to exist without other human beings, terror grips you.  The change washes over you, blurring your vision and filling the pockets of reason in your mind with rushing adrenaline. You’ll give anything to make it stop. But if you resist and maintain consistency, if you continue forward with the world you have created, you eventually grow attached to it. You find that you’d give anything never to leave; never to be human again; never to be a slave to cold physics, restricted by earthly binds.

I digress. Yet this explains why I detested my life outside of my dreams.

To sit in misery is bad enough. To have others watch your misery and weigh it against their own is intolerable. This is why I sit in the shadows, to sulk in private, to dream of my dreams alone. Coffee is poison. It keeps me awake. Yet it’s the only drug that will let me stay awake, so I drink it. I drink it by the pot. I let it fill me with artificial life, forcing my conscious brain into frenzied labor: the higher the buzz, the harder the fall; when I return from an endless day of work, of sitting, and my high has worn off, I crash to the bed, or the floor, or the sofa, and into sleep.

And here are two of what seem to be abortive attempts at the first line of the story, found at the end of my document:

There was a time before all this—though “before” is a relative term that means nothing in the face of the horrific truth—when I envied shadows, though now I am consumed by it, I envy its…

Once, before this darkness fell upon me—before I was banished forever from the twilight that is this earth and condemned to peer at the world from afar, as if it were a play and I…

It seems I had a flair for melodrama.

“Okay.”

“Alright:

“This is a…?”

“Bird.”

“Bee.”

“Bee, right. Sorry, Dad.”

“What did we learn are some common indicators for bees?”

“Head, thorax, ab…domen…”

“Don’t just read the chart.”

“Okay, uh, the pointies.”

“Antennas. Good start. What else.”

“Clear wings. Four legs. Feathers.”

“Christ, Tim, feathers are birds!”

“I’m sorry, Dad!”

“No, I’m sorry… I shouldn’t get upset. This can be embarrassing for me, too.”

“I know. I wish we were just talking about vaginas, sperm, and condom application.”

“Me, too, son.”

I wonder this because I’ve certainly realized it myself.  What I mean is, I am most certainly a character in a science fiction story.

That is not to say I believe you, my reader, are somehow more real than I; I don’t mean to imply that I’ve fallen into a book or movie and you are outside of it.  Rather, somehow you are part of the story.  (Perhaps you’re a rather large part of it.)  Somebody, somewhere else, though, must be reading my life—page one starting a year ago.  I know this because in no other genre, especially nonfiction, does somebody routinely enter a room that is bigger—and far more wonderful—on the inside than it is on the outside.

Some of our favorite stories use this device: Narnia waits beyond the wardrobe; the Weasley family celebrates Quidditch in their magical tent; the Doctor travels the universe in his remarkable TARDIS.  All of those things are, without a shadow of a doubt, fictional, so besides the fact that I am now living in a science fiction story there is no other possible explanation for how or why, between six and eight o’clock every weekday, I walk through a door that transports me to a place that, just a year ago, I could not have imagined possible.

This place…  You’d have to see it to believe it, but like so many stories I think it can only be seen by a few people: the ones who discovered it—the ones who love it the most.

This place…  It’s bigger on the inside.  I can tell because the whole world grows when I’m there.

This place…  It’s an unending adventure.  I know because on adventures you are aware of the endless potential and possibility ahead.  It boasts creatures beyond my understanding, who are as likely to pounce as to purr, and with whom I play an endless game of wits—with the stakes being dominion over the magical world they inhabit.

This place…  It’s filled with music that nobody ever heard before.

This place…  It’s impossible because it doesn’t exist without the presence of another person.  (Since when was real life like that?)  She built it with me, piece by piece, and together we travel in it without ever walking out the door.  She lifts me higher than the stars, washes away all worldly troubles with nothing but a smile, and warms the whole world on nights when, outside this place, it is frozen and dark.  Without her, this place would not exist.  And my life would not be science fiction.  I would live in a house or an apartment, perhaps with a dog or a cat, watching television, perhaps nourishing some aspirations of my own.  But it would be nothing like this: my impossible life; my world without end; my dream within a dream within a dream.

I wonder if this is how Ender Wiggin would feel if he met Orson Scott Card, or John Connor James Cameron.  Perhaps this is what it’s like to meet your author.

Perhaps, for all of us, there is someone out there who has written us already, and when we stumble into them one day… creator meeting created; love meeting loved… together…

…we rewrite reality.

Short Stories at the Far Side of Weird

The podcast that inspired me to start writing drabbles in the first place has published one of mine, Impulse Buy.

I highly recommend The Drabblecast for discovering bizarre and exciting short fiction in the science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror genres with rockin’ producer and host, Norm Sherman.

He left a rose on the pillow instead of saying goodbye.  She never saw him leave; it was, to her, as if he’d become the flower.  Then the officer came to tell her his body would be brought home.

When they carried it, the coffin wilted and fell apart, pieces drifting like petals to the asphalt.  Nobody could explain but she knew: the body was only a remembrance.

She spins, bleeding from his embrace but she doesn’t care, she has him.  She laughs and the petals of his face seem to smile back.

Lamed

My family refused to speak to me about my grandfather.  He worshiped the devil—that much I’d gleaned from half-muttered sentences cut short in my presence—but my attempts to learn more met with firm reprobation and ultimately only my wild, untempered imaginings of what deplorable secrets my family kept from me remained.

Once, mildly intoxicated, my father spoke too loudly about my grandfather to some inquiring guests: obsessed with “seeing himself in Hell,” the old man left behind an impossible artifact which, years later, revealed an even more horrifying truth.

Now I hold that truth in my hands.

I gaze into a mirror pried from an old, locked chest in the attic.  A face, familiar but disfigured and screaming in silent torment, gazes back.

My grandfather didn’t see himself in Hell; he saw his grandson.

Vav

Some define art as expression of the imagination. I define it as the expression of ignorance. So often we label as “art” or “beauty” only things we cannot fully understand.

It follows that in seeking the impossible my grandfather trafficked with art dealers. What he found—a mirror with a jet-black surface looted from a shipwreck—has now made me a rich man. Scholars pay exorbitant sums to study what, once my grandfather activated it, transformed from a mirror into a window to my soul’s private Hell.

Swirling chardonnay, I watch my soul torn apart by demonic shapes again and again.
Every man must define “art” for himself. Empty, the window was art: beautiful; unknowable. Now it reveals too much; it divulges my eternal fate; un-unknowable.

What, then, is the opposite of art?

Yod

“It makes sense,” I replied. “Eternity is timeless. It follows that a soul condemned for eternity suffers even concurrently to its earthly life.”

“Astounding,” my guest breathed.

We gazed into an ornately framed pane resting on my mantle which, to the astonishment of the world, looked into my own private chamber in Hell.

My soul’s mangled body, encumbered by thick chains, struggled oddly.

“Is it trying to communicate?” asked my guest.

“I don’t think it can see us.”

I knew it could.

“You’re so calm.”

“What can I do? My fate’s decided.”

Yes, my soul was pointing…

…Pointing to my guest.

Then I understood.  My soul’s message was that my guest was the man who would send me to Hell.

I smiled at the mirror reassuringly.  Fate, it seemed, was not decided after all.

Tav

Television makes killing look easy.  “Just shoot him!” you might shout at the hero.  But murder entails consequence and conviction easily gives way to doubt.

(I’ve disemboweled six mannequins.)

Most people think killing is easiest if rationalized or justified.  But pulling a trigger or pushing a knife into flesh… these are not rational acts.

(I’ve attended six state executions.)

Human beings rely on experience; we’re memory machines. The simple trick, as with anything, is practice.

(I’ve strangled six cats.)

But as I disembowel this corpse I find myself rationalizing anyway. Was it truly self-defense? The man had done nothing to me… but he would have if given the chance. I was in a unique position to know that.

Well, I would have an entire lifetime, now, to practice rationalizing. And practice does make perfect.

Nun

The Father of Lies is named so because sins are miscommunications between the mind and soul.

Upon my mantle sits a black mirror.

I returned home, clothes splattered with another man’s blood, only to find that the mirror no longer showed, as it once did, my soul languishing in Hell.  My heart leaped.  Had I, by killing my future killer, avoided damnation—escaped being sent to my account, like the elder Hamlet, with all my imperfections on my head?

For a long time I thought so.  Now… I understand the truth.

Swirling chardonnay, I gaze into the mirror at the reflection that is still the image of my condemned soul.  It stands, as I do, within the confines of a lush apartment, doomed to an eternity in Hell for the murder of an innocent man.

“Oh, I forgot my wallet inside,” Chip said, and he raced into the living room where only moments before his elderly mother had sat on the couch, knitting, but where now there stood a grinning, sinister, hellish figure too horrible to imagine, covered in fresh, steaming entrails that had seconds ago been inside the now-hideously-mangled corpse of Chip’s oh my GOD IT’S JUST TOO HIDEOUS TO DESCRIBE IN WORDS A HEALTHY HUMAN MIND MIGHT HOPE TO COMPREHEND AND IF I TRIED YOUR BRAIN WOULD EXPLODE IN A HAIL OF CABBAGE-Y GELATIN!  RUN!!!  SAVE YOURSELF!!!

At work Ian saw it outside his window staring at him, ignoring passersby even when they offered food.

At lunchtime the cat appeared at Ian’s heels.

“Go away!” he shouted.

It only stared.  Then its eyes widened; it crouched, ready to pounce.

A sudden, icy fear seized Ian and he turned to flee.  Moments after the screeching vehicle crushed Ian’s body the cat leaped high into the air, snagging in its claws the invisible prey for which it had so patiently waited.

“This planet’s a mystery,” he said.  “Something left a footprint so huge an ocean formed inside it.  From orbit the print looks bipedal in origin but there’s only one of them.  And we know almost nothing about the creature that made it.”

“We know it had a leg span of about four-hundred thousand kilometers,” said Greg, staring upward.

“What?  Nothing could be that—”  Kyle followed Greg’s gaze then stopped mid-sentence.  “Oh.”

He got on his transmitter.

“Command, this is Johannessen.  We found the other footprint.  It’s on the moon.”

Mary stared at him, horror-stricken.

“Ok… this is a big mistake.  I did not want you to find out like this.  I’ll just… I’ll just get back in, then?”

Hesitantly, the gnome climbed back into Mary’s husband’s stomach and flicked a switch on the control panel.  The hatch slid shut and the man-body whirred to life.  Blinking, it looked at Mary.

“I hope this doesn’t change things,” it said.

“Have you killed it yet?” said a voice.  Diarmuid spun around to see a delicate—beautiful, in fact—young man crouching by a ray of light.  He was carving stone arrow heads; a pile of finished pieces lay beside him.

“N—no,” stuttered Diarmuid; he hadn’t expected to find anyone else here.  “I haven’t.”

“I have,” said the youth.  He smiled a lovely smile.

“But it’s still alive,” Diarmuid said, pointing absently the way he’d come.

“I know.  It comes back.  It always comes back.”

Diarmuid cocked his head, puzzled, but the young man said nothing else.

“I thought this would be heaven,” Diarmuid said.  “I remember dying.  A boar—like that one, only—it was a hunting accident—and now it’s still here—still… still coming after me…”  He trailed off.

“And what did you expect to find after death?” the young man asked.

“Not this,” Diarmuid said.  “Women, maybe.  Well, not women,” he corrected.  “Peace, maybe.  Everlasting silence.  Or bliss.  Or even boredom.  But not the boar.”

The youth finished carving the arrowhead and placed it in the pile beside him.

“I thought the same thing,” he said, “when I first got here.  “Why have I died only to face this animal again?  Yes, it killed me, too.  I thought I would awake by the hateful river or perhaps the Elysian Fields.  But this is much better.”

“How is this better?” Diarmuid asked.  “You said we can’t kill the boar.”

“No,” said the young man, “I said we can kill it, over… and over… and over again.  We have eternity to learn how.  And that, my fellow, makes us a thousand times more fortunate than the living.”

Inspiration here and here.

I wasn’t always a hitman.

One morning a sinister-looking pen appeared on my cubicle desk.  Somebody called for my boss; I wrote down their name; the line went dead.  Turns out they disappeared.  Turns out anybody’d disappear after I wrote their name with that pen.

Red ink.  Blood-like.

I made millions.  The ultimate hitman.  No mess.  Even I didn’t know where they went.

Until I got careless.

Helplessly I stare up from the paper; two-dimensional; nothing but a name written in red ink.  And I wonder, what happens to checks after they’re cashed?

Topic (a sinister-looking pen appears on an office-worker’s desk) chosen by Gregg Daniels, who also wrote his own drabble.

“Why the flashlight?” Alan asked.  “The lights are on.  You’re being overcautious.”

“For Pete’s sake,” replied Pete.

“Man, that stopped being funny last year.”

“I remember,” said Pete, poking a tortoise with a stick. “September fourteenth.”

“You’re a really weird guy.  Alright, enough chitchat.  We’ve got to find this escaped Egyptian cobra.  And I’m guessing it’s not in that tortoise’s shell.”

“Never can be too careful,” said Pete.  “By the way, Alan, I love your snake hat.”

“What?” Alan asked, alarmed.

Don’t look up, thought the cobra.

Thank you, news.

She opened the message.

Dear Elizabeth,

You really are so much like her.  She died in a plane crash, after all. Bon voyage again, my love.  Enjoy your flight.

Then Elizabeth felt the cabin shake and the screaming began.

Thank you, Erin, for the inspiration.

Last summer my friend Elliot and I tried to climb into my bedroom window from the big oak outside.  I can still see Elliot trying to lift the pane when the branch snapped and he fell and broke his neck on the patio table.

The nights grew warm again and oak branches started scratching at my window, so Dad trimmed them.  I wish he hadn’t.  Because now I’m awake, still hearing something scratching at my window and knowing it’s not branches.  But like I said, no redos.

This story was written for the 100 Word Stories podcast’s Weekly Challenge #258.

Ed was sold.  He barely heard the verbal fine print; something about “responsibility” and “paradoxes.”

***

“Who are you?” Jimmy asked the decrepit old man behind the wheel as he climbed into his father’s sedan.

“I’m your father,” he said. “Get used to me looking like this at most family events.  I’m sorry, Jim, I procrastinated some important work.”

“How—?”  He began.

“Do as I ask and I’ll tell you,” she smiled.  “You’d undoubtedly appreciate it.  Now, I lead Quality Control for the Louvre Museum in Paris where, in 400 years, your painting will draw millions of visitors annually.  After studying 250 alternate realities I’ve determined we’ll enjoy maximum traffic if you repaint your subject with a delicate smile—just enough to peak the curiosity of the viewer.”

This story was written for the 100 Word Stories podcast’s Weekly Challenge #253.

Tie-Bow’s clowning routine, leading fake bow-tying workouts, had foundered with Billy Blanks’ popularity.  Now, though, his ingenious basement invention offered him an inexhaustible supply of fresh material.

One of the hobos chained to the conveyor amused Tie-Bow so he slapped the Hilarity Button.  The conveyor reversed, carrying the temporarily relieved man farther from the buzz-saw on his end.  The other hobo renewed his clowning with desperation, one laugh away from earning a few more moments of life.

“O:-)” she purred demurely but I didn’t buy the act.  I knew a >:-) when I saw one.  I’d have to play it B-).

“:-/” I inquired skeptically.

“:-P” she teased, coming closer.  She sat on my lap and came in for :-* but I saw her slipping the gun out of her garter belt.  I was faster.  With a look of :-O and then :'( she collapsed on the desk with a smoking hole in her back.

The tattoo on her now cold shoulder confirmed my suspicions: she had come for the Maltese :(|).  Well, she’d never get it.

Two decaying, zombified pigeons, one white, one black, landed on the flagpole from which she hung and began to peck at her fingers.  She looked straight ahead and saw herself reflected in the tower’s glass exterior.  Behind her, a golden sunrise peeked over the city’s silhouetted skyline.

That sunrise is very beautiful, she thought.

“Hellllloooo,” the man anounced, “YOU look like you could use a laugh!”

“I suppose,” replied Garrick.  “It’s terrible: I own a traveling zoo and this morning I found all my hyenas dead and dried up like prunes!”

“Oh,” said the man, grin fading.  “Uh, nevermind, then.”  Garrick didn’t see him slip a corked bottle labeled laughter back into his pocket.

“You treacherous, incompetent coward!” he exclaimed.

A sergeant near the corner reached for his blaster but the unimposing man raised a hand, ordering the motion to a halt.

“I’m sorry, Commander Rylen,” said the man, who wore a pilot’s uniform.  “What seems to be the problem?”

“You should be executed,” Rylen spat.  “You left my men out there to die!”

“I never leave men to die,” replied the man.  “I leave men to live.”

This seemed so nonsensical to Rylen that he opened his mouth then closed it again, unable to think of any reply.  The man continued, calmly:

“If we had pressed on, the Imperials would have picked us off with long-range cannons.  Once they mounted an energy shield my fighters couldn’t penetrate—”

“—You didn’t even try—” Rylen cut in.

“—and you lost your armored transport—”

“—because you failed to cover us—”

“—all we would have achieved would have been death.”

“Then we’d have died!” Rylen shouted.  The silence that followed the outburst was too quiet, telling Rylen that even people outside the office had stopped to listen.  The air was tense.

The pilot across the desk studied him levelly.  Rylen took a breath.

“General… my men would all rather die than bow to the Remnant,” he said.  “We would die for our queen and we would die gladly for Naboo.”

The pilot-general seemed to acknowledge Rylen’s remission and nodded almost imperceptibly.  Then he said to the Rebel in the corner:

“Sergeant, on second thought… give me your blaster.”

Rylen tensed.

The sergeant removed his firearm and handed it to his superior, who, in turn, handed it to Rylen.  Rylen took it with trepidation, his anger visibly faltering.

“In 80 hours I give you permission to shoot me in the head with this blaster,” the general said to him.

Rylen was stunned.

“What?”

“Consider it… a peace offering.”  The general sat down.  Rylen, not knowing quite what to do with the weapon, held it awkwardly.

“Let me tell you a story,” the man continued.  “It happened not very long ago but it feels like an entire lifetime has passed since then.  Before I founded Rogue Squadron I flew with the Rebel fleet at the Battle of Yavin.  It was Hell in the sky.  A lot of men died… good ones and bad ones.  I was almost one of them.  A pursuing TIE fighter shot up my stabilizer and I had to pull out.  I actually had to leave the battle.”  He paused.  “Do you know what it’s like to have to make the decision to flee?”

Rylen shook his head.  “I may have, today… but you took that away from me.  You made the decision for me when you ordered the retreat.”

“Consider it a favor,” the general said with an empty smile.  “It makes you feel like a failure.  An incompetent.  A… ‘treacherous coward,’ it’s true.  I thought I had let the Rebellion down that day, and I probably should have died.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.  I lived.  And do you know what I did later?”

“Yes.”

The general smiled; genuine this time.  “Yes, I thought you might.  I destroyed the Second Death Star.”

Rylen lowered his eyes to stare at the pistol.  He was now thoroughly embarrassed that he had publicly insulted this man credited with the destruction of the Empire’s second-greatest weapon.

Wedge Antilles leaned forward and traced his finger on the map.

“At random increments exceeding no more than two hours, starting immediately, a pair of my X-wings will make attack runs on the energy shield.  The intermittent attacks will be ineffectual, of course, except to serve one purpose: they will force the Imperials to keep their energy shield live.”

The light of understanding began to cross Rylen’s face.

“Between two and three days from now the Imperials will run out of energy and be forced to abandon their position for open ground.  The same open ground from which you just came.”

“That’s a bad position,” Rylen said.

“Yes, it is.  So you see, less than 80 hours from now you’ll be free of the Imperial Remnant on Naboo for good.  They’ll be easily overwhelmed.  And if they decide to stay where they are, one of my bones will nuke them from the stratosphere.”

Rylen blinked.

“One of my Y-wings,” Wedge clarified.

“Sir, I…”

“So,” Wedge said, standing.  “You can shoot me, if you want, when the time comes.  But you want to know why I ordered the retreat?  The reason is because I’ve learned the difference between cause and effect.  People revere both martyrs and heroes… but martyrs die for a cause and heroes live for an effect.”  He met Rylen’s eyes once again.  This time, though, his face was soft.  Almost kind, as Rylen imagined it was naturally when the man wasn’t fighting wars.  “Which one would you rather be, Commander Rylen?  A martyr… or a hero?”

After a long moment Rylen placed the gun on the desk.

“I won’t be needing this, sir,” he said.

“Good,” Wedge said, leaning back in his chair.  “Because I know a few bucket heads with itchy trigger fingers that love shooting at moving targets, and I don’t think they’d take too kindly to you if you took me up on my offer.”  He added, “You’re dismissed, Commander.”

Rylen saluted and left the room.  Wedge let out a sigh.

“With boys like that in the Rebel army, it’s no wonder the Empire lost,” he said.

Less than a year later Wedge retired for the first time.  Having achieved peace through battle and victory through survival, he would be known as a hero throughout the galaxy for generations to come.  The warrior who lived.  The Rebel who made the most difficult choice of all.

You can’t do any good back there, the voice in his memory said.

Oh yes I can, he replied.

Wedge Antilles’ biography.

“Look, it even takes old-timey metal coins!”  Kell slurred.

“Win me a cute one!”  Ayla said, sipping her margarita.

Kell fed the machine and the claw whirred to life.  Behind the glass, a dozen canisters lit up, waking the babies inside.

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Lou could see so much.  Concentrating, he rummaged through the gigantic haystack of living souls that pulsed in his mind.  Some of them called out to him sweetly.  Some of them shrank away from his clairvoyant eye like frightened animals.  Those ones would be saved.  Lou wished he could see his own fate so clearly.  The knowledge of whether his path led to salvation or damnation—or, somehow, both (he still heard the words of Ari and Uzi when Lou had told them he wished to serve Father again: “You are, still… in your own way”)—escaped him completely.  He could not win the game outright, he knew.  He could only weight the dice.

At once a pattern emerged from the haystack and Lou turned his mind’s eye upon it: a pure soul in distress.  For what reason it suffered, Lou could not tell—that which Father deemed “pure” was opaque to him by definition.  But the pattern fit what he was looking for.  It was, unmistakably, the oh-so-common archetype found in the thousands of human stories he had heard, read, and finally watched: the figure of the damsel in distress.

“Bingo,” said Lou to the afternoon air.

“Excuse me, you got a dollar I can borrow?” said a man next to him.  Instinctively, Lou’s hand shot out toward the man’s neck.  Three-and-a-half millimeters away from contact, his hand stopped.  The man jumped back and uttered a cry of indignation.  He was dressed in dirty, tattered clothes; too many layers to suit the weather.

New leaf, Lou reminded himself.  “New bills,” Lou said, and with sleight of hand that, if televised, would have forced Criss Angel into retirement, three crisp, one-hundred-dollar bills appeared in his hand.

The man stared.

“Seriously, take it,” Lou suggested.

“I don’t want no trouble, man.”

“I realize that.  Take the fucking money, please.”

The man eyed the money greedily but did not budge.

“Fine,” said Lou.  He turned to the nearest passerby.  She looked like a college student.  “Want three hundred bucks?  This guy won’t take it.”

“Alright!” the man cried.

“Ooh, already offered it to someone else,” Lou apologized with decadent sarcasm.  The college girl had stopped but seemed too interested to move on.  “Now I’ll lose a gold star if I deny either of you the money.  Hmm.  Tell you what: I’m in a hurry, so each of you grab an end of this stack; we’ll do this Solomon-style.”

***

It was approaching dusk when Lou found his soul-in-distress and the scene was almost too sweet to believe.  A cat up a tree, Lou mused.  I couldn’t have asked for a more obvious opportunity. Lou needed obvious; doing good did not come naturally to him.

The kid was already up in the tree.  One short arm grasped a large branch jutting from the trunk; the other reached coaxingly toward a shaggy, red cat hanging perilously from a limb that bent with its weight.

“Come on, Jim,” Lou could hear the kid pleading with the cat.  Ah, the fur-balls still control the humans, Lou thought. Hilarious.  Why do humans love pretending animals are human?  Well, I’ll never understand and it doesn’t matter.

“Hey, kid!” Lou’s voice rang clear, winning the attention of both boy and cat even from 50 yards away.  “Better get outta that tree!”

From his branch, the kid could see the yelling man give an enthusiastic thumbs up.  Then the man began to run.  He moved impossibly fast and directly at the tree.  At first the kid just froze, trying to understand what was happening.  Then instinct kicked in and he swung down, stumbling about ten feet and turning just in time to see the man running headlong into the trunk, arms raised in front of him like a linebacker.  But instead of hearing the crack of the man’s skull, as the kid thought he would, the crack came instead from the tree.  Splinters seemed to fill the air like a mist.  Dirt erupted as roots tore out of the ground.  As the tree fell, Jim the cat howled and leaped from his limb, landing as a tangle of wood and leaf-matter crashed around him.  The kid didn’t realize until it was all over that he was screaming.

Lou teetered above the jagged stump, nearly losing his balance.  Finally he shifted back onto his heels and, before he could stop himself, gave a triumphant whoop.  It was undignified but the adrenaline in his human body nearly demanded it… so he gave in to temptation.  That was something that came naturally to him.  Turning toward the kid, he smiled.  The kid was screaming.  Well, no wonder.  Mortals didn’t often knock over trees with their bare hands.

“Kid, shut up,” Lou ventured.  To his surprise, the kid did.

The cat. Lou scanned the arboreal wreckage.  The cat, Jim, was scrambling out from beneath the maze of cracked branches.  “Ah, ha,” Lou said, and he lunged at the animal, snatching it up.  It howled again, scratching at him.  Blood seeped out of Lou’s arms.  The thought of stigmata crossed his mind and he nearly chuckled.

“Alright, kid, here’s your—”

Where the child should have been stood a man.

Not a man.

“Oh,” said Lou.  “Hello, Raph.  What’s up?”

“What the fuck are you doing.”  Not so much a question as a statement.

Lou felt the energy drain out of him.  The fun was suddenly over and the reality of the situation—his situation—began to seep in.  When Lou replied his voice was dry and resentful.

“What’s it look like?  I helped this kid get his cat out of a tree.”

Raphael’s level gaze remained unchanged.  A long moment passed.

“And,” added Lou, “I’m helping out the Park Commission with its timber management.”

Without warning Raphael drew his firearm, a massive, gleaming semi-automatic, and leveled it at Jim the cat.

“Fuck!” Lou said and tossed the cat into the air.  Raphael fired a single shot—a blinding light issued from the barrel of the gun—and Jim exploded into a red soup.  Lou did not close his eyes as gore spattered one side of his face and clothes.

Raphael lowered the gun, slowly.  Lou glared at him.

“Fuck,” Lou said again.  He tried to sound upset, righteous, even, but the word came out sounding more like childish fascination.  What had just happened was something Lou had seen many trillions of times before, but each death has its own unique circumstances—its own flavor—and for whatever reason contemplation of each demise never ceased to give him pleasure.  He glanced down at the cat’s remains and became transfixed.  Blood still gushed from the separated halves of the animal, its organs still individually alive although the whole was dead.  The eyes of the cat bulged, as if the force of the bullet had pushed them nearly out of their sockets.  On the grass was a network of entrails, fur, and strange shapes Lou recognized but had no names for: the parts of life that made more sense to him separate than together.  God lived in the machine, he knew, and to disassemble the machine made it no longer God’s.  Pain was the currency of Hell and death the financier.  Lou thought of Death for a moment and smiled.  He could almost see, now, though Jim was not human, the Godliness leaking out of Jim’s entrails, seeping into the earth, the dirt becoming one with the blood, the life and the divinity fading like a sunset into darkness, which held, itself, more colors than the human eye could perceive…

Lucifer looked up.

“Ah,” said Raphael.  “And there’s the truth.”

“Shut up,” said Lou.

“You haven’t changed a bit.  All your gallivanting around like some newborn savior of mankind and you still lust after the sight of fresh, steaming entrails.”

“Fuck you.”  Then, without thinking, “You murdered it.”

Raphael laughed—a sardonic, penetrating laugh that fanned embers of hatred in Lou’s gut and made him clench his teeth.

“I murdered it, did I?  The cat?  Fucking Jim the cat?  Oh, Lou.  Heaven forgive me.  What have I done?”  He laughed again.  Lou’s fists squeezed so tightly that his knuckles turned white.  After a few moments, he could not contain himself.

“What the fuck do you want from me, you self-righteous asshole!”  he exploded.  Raphael’s laughter ceased.

“That’s just it, pal,” Raphael said.  “I don’t want anything from you.  I don’t want anything to do with you.  And moreover, I don’t want you here.”

“You’re here.”

“Indeed.  And I don’t want that, either.  I want to be in Heaven, where I belong.”

“Then go.”

“Not until you leave.”

“I’m not leaving.”

Raphael’s eyes narrowed.  He tipped his face forward in an angel’s best better-not-mess-with-my-righteous-fury-on-the-cover-of-Vogue look.

“You think there’s something you can do, here… something that will tip the scales of God’s will in your favor.  But you’re wrong.  Father may love you still, as he loves all things, but after several billion years of opposition there is nothing you can do in a day, a year, a millennium, nor an eon of time that will heal the gaping wound between your existence and his.  And certainly rescuing a cat from a fucking tree means so little that you might as well never have done it.  What a pathetic display, Lou.  Ask yourself: how badly do you really want to come home?  How long were you really planning on keeping this up?”

“I can’t win the game outright.  I can only weight the dice.”

“That’s great.  Did you hear that in an Eastwood film?  I’m highly amused.  But I’m afraid I can’t let this arrogant little crisis of yours continue.”  He smiled acridly.  “It wasn’t going to last, anyway,” he added.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Turn around.”

Lou did.  The sky was a dark blue, and the city skyline rose above the dark silhouette of trees that lined the park’s entrance.  At first Lou saw nothing out of the ordinary.  But then he saw something—three things, in fact—that made his heart stop beating and then, shamefully, caused a stirring in his loins.

Looming above the horizon were the shadows of three crosses, each supporting, in their center, a mass that Lou recognized as a crucified human form.

“Jesus,” Lou said.

“No,” came Raph’s voice, sounding distant, “Just your handiwork.  Goodbye, Lou.”

Lucifer would have turned around but he knew Raphael was already gone.  He strode a few paces toward the crosses and then stared upward.  In the darkness his supernatural vision could discern three corpses: a homeless man, a female college student, and a young boy.  Everybody he had encountered today—everyone he had attempted to help, albeit badly—destroyed by the wrath of Father’s little crew of self-righteous thugs.

For the first time in billions of years of life, Lucifer felt a tear coalesce beneath his eye.

It was well within Raphael’s right, he knew, to destroy humans at will.  It was not their lives that mattered, but their immortal souls, and those were judged by Father above.  Besides, if asked, Raphael would probably spout some nonsense about these people being tainted by evil upon interacting with Lou.

The taste of failure, familiar to him, filled his mouth, making him want to vomit.

He turned away.  So, Raphael was going to try his hardest to thwart Lou’s efforts planet-side, eh?  Lou could respond with anger.  He could respond with wrath.  He could get hit by a truck and return home, where he would sit on a throne and rule over the fiery pits of souls, passing judgment on an infinitely long waiting list of the damned.

Or.

Yes, or.

He didn’t know what came on the other side of that conjunction.  Or. Or what?  He could work in more subtle ways.  Of course he could—he was the devil, for Christ’s sake.  He could find new ways to usher mankind into the arms of Father—ways that might go unnoticed by Raphael and his posse of winged deuchebags.

Why not? he thought.  I have until Armageddon to experiment. He thought of Death.  Maybe I should pay her another visit.  Yes, that would be nice.  And maybe Gabriel, too.  I think he’s got a soft spot for me.

In the darkness, a man who was not a man stuffed his hands in his pockets and whistled a merry tune as he walked away from the scene of several terrible crimes, all of which would be announced in the city newspaper the following morning.  Men and women would weep, lawyers would flock to victims’ families, and journalists would scramble for interviews come daybreak.  And beneath the surface of human society, an underworld would prepare for battle with an overworld as it had for billions of years.  But between both worlds one immortal would surf the tumultuous waves of holy war, repulsed by one side and repelled by the other, fighting for the salvation of a soul that had long ago cast its fate in opposition to the home it truly loved, if it could love at all.

I want to go back, he thought.  I will go back.  They’ll see.

This story is a fan sequel to a screenplay written by Kyle Johannessen.

“I need your help,” the man said.

From deep inside, two eyes shone with a green light.  “The offering is made,” the eyes whispered.  “Plead with us.”

“The boy in the front row… he looks sick.”

“Slow and weak.  Ours soon,” then, Purr.

“Please, spare him.”

The eyes closed slowly.

“Very well.  We shall not hunt him.  But the hour draws nearer when our jaws close around your neck.”

“Thank you,” the man said.  He pulled his head out of the lion’s mouth.  The audience cheered.

“You’ve left a gift bag at someone’s door,” his companion observed levelly.

“It’s Hallmark, Amy.  Hall.  Mark.”

“Exactly,” said Amy.  “Would you say that qualifies as ‘perfect?'”

“Humbug.  It’s not my fault Hallmark insists on continuing to send retail shipments through the Bermuda Triangle.  Every few years I end up with a boatload of kitsch and gift-wrap.  Inconveniently, the downstairs toilet shares a dimensional rift with the Bermuda Triangle.  Imagine my surprise when Amelia showed up down there. The other Amelia. Earhart.  ‘No smoking in the lavatory,’ I said.  We had a laugh.  She ended up in a quiet cabin on Europa.  Back to the point.  This bag does contain the perfect gift—perfect for the person who lives inside this house.”

“And that is…?”

“I have no idea.  But I know people.  They like things.  And this bag definitely contains a thing.”

“You should do this more often.  You could take over for Saint Nick.”

“Who says I don’t?”

Amy’s eyes lit up.

“You’re not…”

“No, of course not.  Not all the time.  Every few decades I’ll pick a Christmas to leave at random about, give or take, seven-hundred-million and six presents.  It’s a hobby.”

“So you are Saint Nick.”

“Yeah, I’m Saint Nick.  But I don’t give people what they ask for.  What’s the point of giving people something they ask for?  You can’t change people that way.  You only satisfy them.  Not that there’s anything wrong with satisfaction.”

“Chocolate is satisfying,” Amy suggested.

“You’ve had enough, Pond.  No more trips to Belgium.  The point is, remember Eeyore.  He wanted an inflated red balloon but he got a deflated red balloon and a pot and those were even better.  Remember that.”

“Okay.  So do we have to do the other seven-hundred million and five houses tonight?”

“We are doing them.  Right now.  Well, parallel versions of us.  Multi-threading one moment of our lives through multiple points in space.  I call it shuttlecocking.”

“Sounds questionable.”

“Oh, it is.  In fact, we should go rather soon.  Implosions.  Space-time.  General badness.”  The Doctor started down the stairs.

“Wait a moment!”  Amy stopped the Doctor by his bow tie.  The Doctor teetered over the remaining steps and made a sound in his throat that sounded like “gwok.”  Upon recovery, he turned.

“Yes, Pond?  Mind the tie, please.  Attached to my neck, you know.”

“Sorry, but I was thinking: all the other Amys will probably do the same things I do, right?”

“So your plan was to strangle me seven-hundred million times.”

“No, but listen.  Am I right about the multiple mes?”

“Most likely.”

“Do you think half a billion people have ever said ‘Merry Christmas’ all at once?”

“I think they just have.”

“Good point.  So let’s double the number.”

The Doctor smiled.

“Alright,” he said, and adjusted his tie.

Amy ran to the nearest window and pushed it open.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to hear us shout it.”

“Pond…”

“Oh, it’s me!  And me!  And me!  We’re all doing it!”  Amy began to wave frantically out the window.

“For goodness’ sake, Pond!  Don’t wave to yourselves, you’ll end the universe!”  The Doctor froze at catching the tail end of the duplicate word “universe” uttered in his own voice from several places outside the window.

“Oh, hush, you,” the Doctor could hear Amy, and at least three more Amys across the street, retorting.  “You’re always worrying about ending the universe and it hasn’t happened, yet.”

“Not that you can recall.”

“Alright, ready, Doctor?  On three.  One, two…”

Amy stuck her head out the window.  The Doctor raised his face to the ceiling.  And they shouted it.  Merry Christmas. The sound rang from shingles and street lamps and mailboxes throughout the neighborhood.  Dogs barked.  A car alarm went off.  And in the very distance, like a gentle sigh, Amy and the Doctor could hear the reverberations of a million more voices, all their own, caroling the words into the December air.

“Well,” said the Doctor, after a moment.  “That was magical.”

Behind them, the door opened.  The Doctor turned to see a girl of about six standing in the doorway wearing footed pajamas that sported pictures of Winnie the Pooh engaged in various pastimes.

“Pooh!”  The Doctor exclaimed.  “We were just talking about him!”

“Are you Santa?”  The girl asked.  Behind the Doctor, Amy swooned.

“No,” said the Doctor.

“What.”  Amy’s tone was dangerous.

“I mean, yes.  Of course I am.”

“Why are you here so early?”

The Doctor looked at his watch.

“It’s not early, young lady.  It’s well past midnight and a certain someone should be in bed, I think.”  And then he added, “Ho, ho… ho.”

“But Santa,” said the girl.  “I mean, why are you here before Christmas?”

The Doctor blinked.

“Come again?”

“Christmas is two weeks away.”

Silence.  Broken by Amy.

“You.  Nitwit.”

The Doctor tapped his watch, then dropped his arms to his sides.

“Um,” he said, “I suppose there’s nothing to say except… oh, bother.”

“There’d better not be a man up there!” the witch called.

Silence.

She tugged fiercely on the golden braid and to her surprise, it began to fall into a loose coil beside her feet.  She glanced upward to see the other end of the hair tumble over the windowsill.  And what was that small object tied to it?  Dark, with a gridded texture.  It landed beside her.

It seems to be made of metal, she had time to think.

The atoms of the universe crowd tightly around a dark, dense center.  All is stillness.  Then, in an instant, all is chaos; matter separates and scatters to the farthest limits of space.  Colored spheres collide with one another, sometimes aligning, sometimes forming patterns that seem too perfect to be the products of random chance.  Indeed.

White is the color of My divine will.

Running the mechanics of the universe is great fun.  I live for it.  But a time comes when all things must end.  One by one, the white strikes each striped or solid mass from the fabric of reality.  Each disappears into the void, unreachable even by My hand, until all that remains is the dark matter; the black hole to which all matter clings in the beginning.

White is the color of everlasting miracles.  White is My avatar.

I call the pocket; I shoot.  Yang strikes yin and the number eight disappears from my view.  I hear it roll away beneath the surface.  Now the table is empty.  I check my right pocket for quarters.  Nothing.  The cue ball and I stare at each other blankly.  Is this God’s fate?  Eternal boredom?  My thigh vibrates.  Ah, yes.  Of course.  God will never be lonely so long as his mother calls him every Sunday.  I reach into my left pocket for the phone… and discover five quarters I’d forgotten I’d received from a faulty vending machine last night.  NO VEND, it had proclaimed.  Splunk, splunk, splunk, splunk, and splunk.

My mother has long since gone to voicemail.  My phone vibrates once, signifying that she has finally finished talking to nobody about church.  I lift from the table a holy shape: the plastic Trinity that has just shaped the form of a new, unborn cosmos waiting before Me.

The game begins again.  It always begins again.

Let there be white.

Hidden scales and microphones were installed beneath the chairs of mall Santas in demographically similar locations across the country.  By subtracting the weight of the chair and “Santa,” researchers could calculate the heaviness of each lap-faring child.  Recordings were made of the children’s wish lists.  If any correlations emerged between weight and requested toys, the company could more effectively market to children discretely weighed in their stores.  On the verge of identifying one such trend, an elated research team failed to notice that one mall Santa in Nebraska weighed nothing at all…

Thank you, Erin, for the inspiration.

The expedition left base camp at slack tide and continued up the northward ridge.  The change in atmospheric pressure had long become deadly for the climbers, who wore pressurized, solar-shielded suits only tested at elevations thousands of feet below their current position.  Finally, on a warm June afternoon, the party transcended the last layer of breathable atmosphere and emerged, triumphant, into the brave, new world above.

Hikaru screamed; just yards away what looked like large, robotic centipedes were crawling out of the ocean onto the Japanese shore.

Inspiration

“See how tenaciously it lives?”  Said the Fourth Doctor.  “How nothing—not the coming of war or famine—can divert it from its purpose?”

“My people revered such trees as great warriors,” said Leela, “for on many battlefields, they were the last to remain standing.”

The Doctor laughed.

“Looking for something?”  A voice purred.  Merlin turned to see a beautiful, naked woman at his bedchamber door.

“Sorry,” said Merlin.  “Long story short, my memory works in reverse.  Who are you?”

“Niviane.”

Merlin looked into his future and saw she would bring him darkness, betrayal, and eternal suffering.

“Ah,” he sighed.  “We’re married, huh?”

Sometimes I wonder how easy I am to click.  Am I distant and narrow or nearby with a wide-open mind?  I hope the latter.  I want to be a big, green button that says “Click Here.”  I want Fitts to be proud of me.

“If we don’t hide this thing, somebody’s going to eat it before we do,” Hillbuck said.

Swamper’s ears drooped.  “Can’t we just eat it now?”

“I think we need to boil it first.  Now hurry before somebody sees us with these shovels.”

Close by, the owner of Hank’s Produce peered out at the empty street corner where there was supposed to be a kid handing out samples.  Had the kid chased after those damned rabbits again?  Well, he’d better not ruin that promotional carrot costume he was wearing.  It had cost Hank a fortune.

“But Lost is on,” he protested.

“Television will rot your brain.  You need fresh air,” she said.

Years later, Zachary’s television lay in a heap next to the ceiling fan, on what used to be the ceiling but was now the floor.  Zachary gazed down at blue emptiness through the skylight at his feet.  A good thing he’d been inside when the Inversion happened.  In the end, rotting his brain had saved his life.