Vexedly, I tapped the glass whose sloping walls warped and elongated the bookcases and fireplace of my study. It was dishearteningly thick, the Lessening having worked exactly to my specifications. Previously, when placing the bottle horizontally in it's …

It had been fourteen days. The painting was gone and with it my heart. Authored by an amateur it had meant more to me than any museum in the world. Each day that passed felt like a relentless excavation into my chest, letting in the outside ice and snow t…

Devin hungered for conversation. That didn't happen much when he was around people. He tended to be the quiet sort and when he did say something it was usually the wrong thing. Two days out with nothing but a couple of dozen head of cattle as company and …

October 14

Day five that Brent has woken up ravenous and exhausted. Officially it's day five. It's been at least five days since I noticed a pattern and decided to track it's course. I'm not surprised that he's exhausted. He told me about his dreams and …

It's been raining for two days straight. No matter what I do I can't see how to stop what I started. Honestly, it's hard to see anything through the wall of water beyond my window. The house across the street was little more than a looming blur and the st…

Empress Melinda the IV ignored the cries of the man being dragged away by two guards. So few people accepted their notice of execution with any sense of dignity these days. She should know, she had sent hundreds of men, women, and the occasional child, to…

“This is what you don't see.” Janine unpaused the recording and upped the contrast and tint until everything on the screen became spiky darkness.

Before I could say anything to contradict her, she pushed a button and bright colors appeared next to my he…

I pushed the beaded curtain aside and stepped through the front door. A little naked boy, perhaps six or seven frowned at me as I entered his home and ran through the darkened doorway behind him without saying a word. The floor was made up of interlocking…

He was here now.

Fear wrapped cold hands around my arms and slid them up to caress the back of my neck with light fingers. Not quite coinciding with his arrival, almost as an after thought, a bolt of lightning silently struck the ground where he stood, i…

Story is marked as mature

Story is marked as mature

I was teaching English in Malaysia when the black spot first appeared overhead. It seemed small, barely larger than a fifty sen coin but without any real context it was hard to tell how much higher over the trees it was. Was it small and close or huge and…

Laying inside a field of wildflowers, Lana stretched out luxuriously, feeling every blade of grass slide along her skin. She felt so intimately connected with her surroundings, not just the flowers but the tree in the distance, and the vast pink of a dawn…

They had taken the light. All lights everywhere were gone. First the stars winked out one by one. Then the Sun grew dark before vanishing. Without the Sun there was no moon. It was probably still out there in that deep darkness but we couldn't see it.

We…

When the cliffs came into sight, I found that I wasn't ready to see them. Their vast dominance of the sky, those dizzying heights, even from this far away, toyed with my body's perception of which way was up. The sensation that I was about to fall sideway…

“Why are you here.”

Wasn't it obvious? There were lines around the block to sign up for the E.D.C. and had been ever since the attack that melted southern California. “To fight aliens, same as you.” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice but knew…

I saw the fat man with a beard again today. He had been a stranger kind enough to lend me half of his table at Starbucks. People are never that nice and honestly I thought it was a ploy to talk to me. Nope. He didn't interrupt me once while I was studying…

Max stood at the edge of the curtained window and stared out into the dark of the garden, searching for any sign of the creature. His eyes darted here and there looking for more substantial motion than the shivering of hedges, or the swirling interplay of…

Sloughing off the tide of years, Ixcar came to his senses very slowly. There had been darkness and now there was light. Such light it was, appearing first as a horizontal line that separated one darkness into two. The line widened and grew in intensity un…

It was his need that broke me. I knew what it was like to be in a position where there was no other options than to ask for help even if I didn't take it. For him to be here now, asking me for help, it spoke of powerful desperation. In it, I could see a…

Story is marked as mature

Story is marked as mature

“Today is Thursday? Are you certain?” The blue of her eyes that I had always associated with the clear warmth of the long gone sun-filled skies of my youth turned cold and penetrating. Having gone through similar confusion moments ago, I couldn't fault he…

Yellow flakes spiraled down from above to settle on the city like the ash of some great holocaust. The yellowness that filled the air wasn't the pure color of a sunflower but rather a corrupted yellow like rancid butter. Near the ground, the dancing motes…

The city seemed endless when it was empty. Half of it, maybe more, was filled with unused treasures that lay moldering in growing mounds of dust. Long streets stayed dark, no longer powered now that no one was left to keep the electrical grids up and runn…