I was thinking...

She lifted her hand to her mouth as the news shone onto her face. It wasn’t the first she’d heard of what was happening, but it was the first time she had gotten a confirmation of it. The time to act was now, and she couldn’t wait to share the news with her community. She found a nook in the library, and projected herself into the audio and video feeds of her city to share what she had learned. “Everyone,” she began, her shining voice hinting at something urgent, “it’s been confirmed to me through my feed that it’s more than a rumor--it’s going to happen! We are, for certain, being taken up to the mainland!” She paused for a second, anticipating there would be some chatter. “Just to remind you, the first step is safety. So, please let the smallest of our citizens onto the vessels, first, then the next biggest, and so forth. Okay? We all know the drill, it’s nothing new, let’s get everything ready, check your personal checklists. Okay? Let’s do this, and I’ll see you all u...

When the sun came up, the light opened the eyes of a being lying on the fresh grass of a great hilltop. “Oh,” it began, “Oh, no. It’s happened again.”    It crawled over to another being that looked nearly identical as itself, minus a few features. With a violent shake, the other being opened its eyes. “Oh,” the other being immediately said, before even taking the first breath of the day, “Oh, no. It’s happened again…”    They both panicked and stood. The one being shouted, “What are we supposed to do? This keeps happening! We keep being alive! Every day! How long is this going to happen? Why do we keep being alive?!”    “I don’t have any idea! I don’t even know why we’re making these noises from our faces, and why we can even understand what any of the noises mean!”    “Why do we know what we’re saying?!”   “I don’t know. I don’t know!” the other being started to run and sob. “I don’t know…” Its voice grew distant, “I DON’T KNOW...

There was a dull hum blanketing the valley floor. Near its center was a teetering swarm of women and men, from very old to very young. “......tired…...lonely……” they whispered, as if with one voice, dark with silt. They looked as if with two eyes, moved as if with two legs, spoke as if with one mouth. None were ahead, nor behind. They moved like beads of water, rolling on a wet saucer, joining and rejoining the pool in the middle like a fluttering nucleus. “......tired…...lonely……” The words fell in line between command and complaint. The voice they ubiquitously assumed carried the heaviest of emotions within it--when the words were spoken, the weight of their intention brought the kind of psychic stress on the listener that it physically came over them as deluge of simmering lead. Behind the swarm, the valley floor looked like a mere sketch of its reality: no longer swaying, soft bristles of green and sunshine, but, instead, scribbled ink, smudged by a sweating palm. Aft...

Riddles. I'm okay with them (not that you asked,) a lot of people love them, but they're a plea for attention, for sure. Winston Churchill's phrase 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery' is thrown around like sweaty change in a tip jar. It's become a replacement for the truth, which is 'an answer you didn't ask for, wrapped in semantics.' It's like the first person who came up with a riddle realized, "Wow, I don't actually know anything that's interesting. But, I still desperately want to impress people," then it hit them, "Aha! I'll talk about the boring stuff I know without talking about it." Store clerk: What's that sweaty thing in your hand? Father Riddle: Let me answer that by asking you this: what has a face that people say can talk, but has no voice or head? Store clerk: I don't know what you're talking about, but I don't have change for a twenty in the register. Someone in ...

It was a cold, late morning in September, about as welcoming as a hangover is to a drippy faucet. Matthias gathered all the wood that he could find from behind the shed to warm the house. It was getting too late to prepare any more wood. Matthias was the sort of person who would wait until the devil said it was time to go before he considered heaven. Now, that weakness of will and ambition was catching up to him, because he was short on firewood for the winter, and it was already too cold in the back of the mountains to spend much time outside chopping more. Not to mention the trees he had on the property weren’t his, because it wasn’t his property. Matthias was living in another man’s house and living off another man’s wages, because he never set out to make a living. Farm-work was too hard, carpentry was too complicated, being a store clerk meant you had to work with people and he hated people, and, most of all, he was too proud to admit he couldn’t read enough to get past ...