See your hands. You notice a black spider on the knuckle of the left-hand middle finger. They’re your hands and now a spider. These wrinkles and those grains under the nails from the garden. Your hands. They appear to you suddenly with the somatic lucidity of a sting. Thick hands. You’d trapped one in a […]
And they gave each other bits. Ted pointed a hot dog and said, “You will be annihilated.” Juan answered, “You, you will be destroyed.” “No, no,” said Ted. “You, you will be annihilated. You are not of the body.” Juan raised a french fry and said, “You will be obliterated. You are not of the […]
Jimmy had Ferengi teeth. The neighbor complained to his parents that Jimmy had bitten his shepherd on the leg. “He climbed the fence and took old Charger’s leg into his mouth and bit the poor fellow. I couldn’t believe it. And with those deadly Ferengi teeth he has.” “It’s unnatural,” Jimmy’s mother told Jimmy. “No […]
The biologist open a shark’s stomach and the first thing out was a small, longhaired man, who said, “Where’s my hat?” He had a hard time finding his footing because of the digestive solution that covered him. Next out came a writhing consistency of bats that soon encrusted the tops of the lab cabinets with […]
The boy announced, “I’m going to run away.” Dinner at the Franks, chicken, salad, and white beans on the black table, a round of white plates. “You’re going to run away?” Father asked. The boy tapped at the edge of his plate with a knife. Mother took a sip of her drink. “Please don’t do […]
Computer Leon wrote a protest letter and when the officials took him for questioning, he knew what he would say, and he said it: “I’m not sorry I wrote it. I knew you’d come for me.” “And did you think we didn’t know you’d say that?” an Official said in the interrogation room. “You’re one […]
“The food’s running low,” Eddie said. “I keep thinking of things I thought I hated,” Ben said. “Onions, friend chicken, the smell of broccoli boiling, paper cuts.” “It’s running low,” Eddie said. “Maybe a few more days. We have more oxygen than food.” They watched the earth above the gray horizon, quiet and blue. Deep […]
Tinkerton hits a pocket of suspended space. On the street the cars have stopped moving. A plane overhead is a quieted image, pastel drawn, a stop-motion bullet, long in the sky. or Tinkerton hits a pocket of suspended time. On the street the cars have stopped. He remembers watching out the window of a plane […]
Summer begins for the reader, summer reserved for later nights and just another glass. Morning sun drifts in squares across the floor. A man rushes into a house and finds a werewolf hunched over a woman. The werewolf eats them both and gathers itself under moonlight and howls about the gratifications of flesh. The remainder […]
My scientist friend invented a time machine and we went back in time and did a number on some Neanderthals. I don’t know anything about the time machine except that it works with anti-time, my friend said. We went back to the time of the Neanderthals and they were real as you and me. Except […]
Imagine this as a sitcom. It’ll be a killer. We have Nancy and Bob Henderson, the parents of five children who live on an average street in an average town. The funny thing about them is that the five kids have no heads, which will make for a great laugh track when the Hendersons head […]
Did I tell you how I lost my tongue? It all started at the ice cream shop when a friend, Elan, suggested a drive to his sister’s wedding the next day. “She’s marrying some guy named Johnny, who she met just a few weeks ago in Toronto. I’m going for the drama, as all of […]
One day the earth cracked in two. There was a great rending noise at the separation point followed by tremors. A reporter reporting on a crime looked down and said, “What the hell? Get the camera on that.” But as people can only see a few miles in any direction, most considered the crack a […]
