josh gastin

 1 January 2021 - A Beginning and a Dead End

“And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!”

The announcement rang out hollow and unwelcoming into the damp morning air. I weaved my way through the broken-down carnival machinery. The rides and attractions were stacked back away from the train tracks. Grass grew up around the rusting metal pipes, poles and draping canvas tents.

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Rides for everyone, games for all!

I was close enough that I could tell where the speaker was. I knew the route that would get me there quickest, but I slipped behind a looming, blue-tarped heap of abandoned metal. I heard low voices. The two men I’d been following. I knew it. I rounded the corner in a flash, pistol at the ready.

“Don’t be shy, give—CRACK!—it a try! Everyone’s a—CRACK!—winner at the Fun Fair!”

Both of them had been crouching behind the speaker platform, one with a shotgun and the other with a pistol, aimed down the approach I’d just avoided. Now they lay sprawled in the long grass. Their ill-fitting painter’s overalls were a poor disguise for their hardened fighter’s bodies.

“And now, the moment…”

I flipped the switch powering the speaker. Bad disguises and bad bait. I dug into each of their pockets, and sure enough, a black coin in each. Pure black. The kind of black you can’t see, but you know it’s there because you’re holding it in your hand.

I clenched them in my fist, listening to the quiet of the morning. Somewhere nearby, grass moved. Without wind. Someone else was coming.

2 January 2021 - Dancers

The wind battered the two young men, slipping in and out through the concrete of the parking garage and finding every possible channel to attack them with gusts, blasts and rushes. Their jackets whipped about them, and their long hair danced Medusa-like in the night.

There was no game, just a sense of adventure. No rules, but a definite goal: try it. Anything. Something. Escape the restless, nerve-grinding monotony of work eat sleep work eat sleep. Walls became ladders, railings had became balance beams.

The tall one hopped easily from a wall to a post, then stood surveying the endless city lights. Buildings stretched upwards around them and off into the distance: endless Tokyo. Lights and the smell of food and sounds of traffic jumped to attention in lulls of the wind.

He looked down past his feet to the street below. The next building over was only 5 feet away. An easy leap. In slow motion, he stepped forward, thrusting upward with his right leg as his left provided forward momentum.

There was no rain in the sky that night, but there often was. The wind would pool it at the corners of the rooftop, and there it sat, slowly dripping away at the concrete, wearing it down, exposing iron girders and rusting them away over time as well. All it would take was a good push for something to give.

His foot foundered in a mire of crumbling masonry. The corner of the wall gave away, and his weight bore down on his left foot. It was too far behind him to offer any support; instead it acted as a lever, thrusting him downwards even more quickly.

He reached back, grasping at fencing and guard wires. They too gave way. Everything he touched seemed to dissolve, and then he was gone, flailing down through the air towards the distant milling streets below. The last thing he heard was the wind rushing as he dropped.

3 January 2021 - Bait

Legends tell of an enormous fish that swallowed a whole fishing boat in one gulp about ten years back. Legends also say that there were almost fifty people on the boat (according to everyone who says they knew someone on it when the fish took it), so there’s a good chance that not all the facts are straight. One thing is for sure; everybody knows the story.

The water was like glass today. Our boat had been sitting for about an hour, I could see down into the swaying weeds. There were plenty of sunnies darting in and out of the strands, and the occasional hunting pike lurking in the shadows. Watching from above felt like seeing a forest from the sky. This must be what eagles feel like.

The fish move slower in the middle of the day, and even though I could see way down to the bottom of the lake, there hadn’t been much activity. Not until now, that is. Something had got into them and they were scattering in every direction. Sometimes the boat’s shadow could do that, but we had been still for long enough that they shouldn’t have minded.

There it was. Racing towards, teeth glittering in the midday sun. It just kept coming up. It had exploded out of the sand in a whirl of silt and dead leaves, the whole lakebed below us seeming to erupt. The boat moved with the rising pressure of the water being driven upwards.

We should have paddled, jumped out, screamed for help—anything—but I was stuck in my set, leaning over the edge of the boat as this yawning mouth pummeled through the water underneath us. The boat raised up and tipped as the beast’s mouth tore through the surface. I fell forward into a mess of enameled knives, water rushing everywhere. We were completely gone by the time the ripples reached the shore.

4 January 2021 - Chosen

I can run, but it’s not fast enough. I can walk, but I won’t blend in enough. I can stand still, but then they’ll only get to me sooner. The crowd around me swirls by in a blur. My heart is racing. I can tell that I’m walking in circles at this point, because even though the old stone buildings all look the same, I remember seeing the church with the open door.

The streets are narrow, but they open up into wide squares and quadrangles. Everyone is speaking different languages. My hands are sweaty. My pace quickens, then slacks, then I turn sharply and try to go in a new direction. They all lead back to the same square, somehow. Or maybe every square is alike. Someone bumps into me and my stomach flips into knots. Adrenaline. I’m hot in the winter air. I want to take off all my winter layers.

There they are. A circle of dots, closing in. I am the nucleus, the sun. I walk to the side, and they adjust, changing their pace. Each man is dressed in a blue suit, red tie, one hand in his pocket, the other swinging quickly by his side. They close the gap, now becoming a loose amorphous shape. Nobody will know what has happened.

Someone bumps into me from behind. I turn to see who it is, but he looks the same as all the others. I can feel the heat of the blood pouring down my back. It’s like I’ve wet myself. I’m back in bed now, a child, embarrassed, but then I’m back in that square, the blue suits drifting away from me but still focused. Somebody else notices the blood, and I hear a scream, then yelling, further and further away.

5 January 2021 - Deception

The slide is supposedly the biggest in the world, but I’m somewhat apathetic and I tend to ignore grandiose claims from underfunded marketing departments. I do have to admit that the stairs to the top are longer than anything I’ve ever had to climb in my life.

By the time I’m half way up, the metal supports are clearly moving in the wind. I can feel the whole tower swaying. Even my steps seem to make it move. I’m beginning to wonder if it could actually be the tallest in the world. I have a number of questions: how much money do slides make? What expenses are merited to create a slide? How long is it until another slide comes along and becomes the tallest?

After many more flights of stairs and considerable consideration, I allow myself to be convinced that this may well be the tallest slide in the world, simply because I am skeptical that anyone else would bother to build a taller one.

The view from the top is majestic. I feel like a bird, careless as it surfs across the myriad gusts of wind. There is a young man who instructs me in the safety precautions—don’t do anything stupid, don’t try to get hurt, keeps your arms by your side—and then I am in the water. It’s ice cold, and I can smell the chlorine.

Just as I am about to go, he asks me if I passed the weight limit check, but he’s too bored to actually phone down and confirm it. Plus there are other people waiting in line. I sit back into the tube, and I can feel it flatten.

The rush of the first drop takes my breath away. I fall what feels like straight down, my nerves screaming, hair whipping everywhere, hands suddenly gripping tighter into my legs than would ever be considered necessary.

After the straight drop comes the spiral. It starts gradually at first, just a hint of rotation, but then it spreads wider and I am starting to rotate against the outer wall. The whole thing shudders. The spiral tightens, and I am sure that the plastic is starting to flex.

There is a peculiar popping sound and suddenly everything goes from translucent-plastic-yellow to bright white. I am flung out into the air, plastic sections spinning away above me as I plummet. The world rushes up at me, hard, unforgiving. My hands are still tight against my side as I pay for my lie.

6 January 2021 - The Wrong Amount of Light

The fever dreams get you sooner or later. It took a while for them to kick in, but now they’re in full swing. The sand stretches in every direction, the sun floats maddeningly above, and your feet dissolve into a dull stinging roar.

I blinked and there was water everywhere. I was in a pool, back home. Inflatable camels and palm trees all around me. I had a huge drink in my hand with a ridiculous, tiny umbrella. I could smell the sugar and the alcohol as I lifted it to my mouth, tilted my head back.

Sand poured out of my hand and into my throat. I doubled over, coughing violently. I didn’t have enough spit in my mouth to get all the sand out. I struggled forward, grimacing and playing with the grit on my tongue.

I was in the middle of the ocean and it was storming. The waves were mountainous and I could barely keep my footing on my raft. The wood was slippery. I was in the trough between two looming walls of water, then one of them rushed towards me. I fell, arms flailing, into the chaotic swirl.

Sand again. I couldn’t breathe this time. The coughing wouldn’t stop.

A stream. Water gently rippling by me. Trees overhead. Sunlight glanced through the swaying leaves. The rocks underneath me were warm, maybe from the sunlight. They seemed to be moving, slowly giving way. I was already underwater by the time I realized I was sinking into the riverbed. The rocks closed around me, boxing me in. Everything went dark.

7 January 2021 - Flora and Fauna

I love flowers. Hollyhocks, primrose, lavender, arum lily, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, you name it and I like to grow it. I spent hours a day out in the sun, weeding, raking, feeding, fertilizing, trimming, lining things up. The result was that I had the best flower garden for hundreds of miles around. People would drive hours to come take stock of my neat rows of plants. It was my delight to be able to share not only the plants, but the secrets of how to grow them.

I held dinners and galas and other events where I displayed the differences between various methods of cultivation, purely for the benefit of the public. I labored tirelessly in the education of the youth. I have to admit, I got a little bit too wrapped up in it all. For a while I was called the king of flowers. Looking back, I am certain that I let it go to my head.

So I took a break, and here I am in a seaside town on the Mediterranean, fiddling with some flower pots outside my bedroom window. It had been three months since I had left home for this vacation—my first in 11 years. It took a while to hit me, but I realized how much I needed a break. As I was rearranging the soil to provide for better drainage, a bee flew in. The timing was unfortunate: the industrious little drone was aiming for the flower in the pot right as I was moving it. Incensed, the little fellow rushed at me in the attack.

I had never been stung by a bee before. The tiny prick in my arm was followed by the much more painful feeling of venom working its way under my skin. My arm immediately started to turn red. I tried to brush the bee away, but I only succeeded in crushing the poor thing. It was so terribly sad. I sat down, at first from the grief, but then I realized. This wasn’t grief! This was shock. Anaphylactic shock. I tried to stand up, but the room spun, and no matter how much I blinked my head wouldn’t clear.

The chair wasn’t there when I sat down, and I crashed to the floor. I must have knocked it. My eyes were swelling now, and I couldn’t see much. My heart was racing, beating too fast. I started to feel incredibly warm. My fingers were swollen now too. I staggered up out of the chair, lurching half-blind to the windowsill. The flowerpots fell and shattered everywhere, and then I went limp, dropping backwards out of the window into the sunny room. I lay on the floor, surrounded by bits of terra cotta pot and ragged flowers.

8 January 2021 - Descent

Dear diary, today I am planning on going on a very long bike ride. I haven’t had time to prep for the trip, because I’ve been working so much, but I don’t think it will factor negatively because the weather is always nice this time of year.

Dear diary, the weather has not been nice. In fact, this is the worst weather I have ever ridden in. The rain was coming down so hard that the roads had sheets of water running across them. I should be in the hills by the end of the day today, and then it’s time for some mountain passes.

Dear diary, even with the weather being as bad as it was, the views are worth it. The passes are up above the clouds. I didn’t cover much distance today, but I did climb a lot of elevation and it seems like I’m above the storms for the most part now.

Dear diary, I have successfully broken my leg. It was a stupid fall, and all because I was looking out across the valley. I think I am going to be alright, but there haven’t been any cars on this road yet so I am not sure how to get back. I can coast some of the way, but the road doesn’t slope down the whole time and I can’t pedal with only one leg.

Dear diary, I have significantly worsened my situation by trying to take a short cut. I am sitting at the bottom of a slippery gully and my bike is ruined.

I think I hear something coming.

9 January 2021 - Twisted Envoy

The two black coins were all I could think about. I couldn’t keep them on me, otherwise I would start to get sweaty and nervous anytime somebody walked up to me. Keeping them stowed away was just as stressful, but at least I didn’t have to worry about being attacked.

The coins themselves were nondescript. Pitch black, like you were looking into glass, but they were definitely metal. They were always ice cold. It felt like they absorbed heat somehow. I tried to take care of them as well as I could, but they didn’t seem to scratch easily.

I kept to myself for weeks, only going out for food. Then, one day, as I walked through a busy market street in the middle of some foreign village, someone came up to me out of the crowd. They walked slowly, with a large walking stick, and had a lot of layers on so that I couldn’t make out much about them.

It was a woman. Her face seemed to be middle aged, but it was rough, like she’d spent most of her life outside.

She stood, staring at me, then gestured towards an alleyway. I shook my head, and she came closer, hobbling now.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” she said, and handed me a third coin.

Immediately after that she collapsed in the middle of the street. She fell flat on her face, and I could tell by the way her limbs splayed that she was dead.

10 January 2021 - Enthalpy

The ground was slippery beyond belief. I understand that jungles can present lots of difficulties to the unwary traveler but, while I was weary, my wariness had not been reduced since my arrival into this dark, leafy nightmare. We had been marching along in silence for three hours now, and the sunlight was just beginning to fade.

Jungles are dangerous at night. At all times, really. Everything in a jungle is vying for resources in order to stay alive, and it takes incredible focus and ruthlessness to pull it off. As I like to put it, everything in the jungle wants to eat you.

A snake dropped out of the trees above and onto the path right in front of me. At the same moment, a scorpion (unseen by me, but it must have been a scorpion) was whipping its tail towards my foot. The scorpion, as you are likely aware, holds enough poison in its stinger to put any large mammal into a painful catatonic state. This unbearable suffering typically ends in death.

The stinger raced towards my foot, but was blocked by the snake’s sudden fall. Snakes have fairly strong scales that protect them from malicious endeavors such as that perpetrated by my eight-legged attacker, and the stinger did not sting.

I, however, jumped backwards at the sight of the snake. As I did so, a large jungle cat leapt across the trail, claws and fangs at the ready, speeding through the very void in the damp jungle air where I had been standing.

This was altogether too much to handle within the space of a single second. My body began to make mistakes in its subconscious processing of space and time. A severe lapse in my proprioceptive abilities ensued, and I fell backwards thanks to the unstable ground. My head hit a sharp rock. It went dark, but not before I saw the setting sun gleaming beautifully in the leaves far far above me in the vaulted canopies of the trees.

11 January 2021 - The Mole

Stuttgart, 1985. From where I stood, the whole world looked grey. Outside the window, the sky was dreary overhead, fading into a distant smudge of buildings, each sending their own miasma up from innumerable chimneys. Inside the window was even worse. Cement walls peeling to reveal even older cement; the layers perfectly alike except for their unique, cigarette-induced discoloration. Like teeth, rotting away only to be replaced by another row, shark like.

The temperature was grey too. I was just cold enough to be uncomfortable, yet not cold enough to merit wearing thick stockings or a heavier dress. I held the attaché case close. Bright blue, it alone represented an escape to another world where sun and light reigned supreme.

I was waiting for someone to come and take it from me. Take it deeper into this web of treacherous, tenuous connections. The weight of regime and conspiracy hung in the air. Typewriters clicked in the background as someone lit up, kicked back in their leather chair, and puffed pensively into the air.

A pair walked up to me, a plain man with a tall, thin, severe older woman. They could have been mother and son, and would have been unhappy about it. There was a pause as they got near, then they closed in. I left the case on a chair by the window, turned and walked to a nearby couch. I sat. A gunshot rang out. It seemed dull in the office air, not sharp like the ones I remembered from training. I instinctively reached for the pistol concealed in my purse, but my arm wouldn’t move.

I looked down and there was blood darkening my blouse, streaming along my arm and dripping onto the orange fabric of the couch. I keeled forward. From the floor I saw the couple running, gun still drawn in the man’s hand, towards the door. The color slowly drained from my vision, and I had the strangest sensation of moving backwards in time, flying back to the era of black and white film noir.

12 January 2021 - Southern Weather

The wooded planks creaked eerily as I inched my way down the long boardwalk. Gloom was everywhere: the Spanish moss became entrails, the trees were reaching hands, the bog far below was a deadly soup, and the boards beneath me were teeth and bloody gums, gnawing and chattering. This mist must be haunted.

All night long I had been walking through the densest fog I’d ever seen. It billowed and wrapped itself around everything, padding the world, deadening sound, and rendering eyesight almost useless. My lantern shone bright, but the fog revealed nothing.

Any number of passersby would give yells or jump, startled, when I encountered them. Nobody could see anyone else until they were right up on them. I thought I had gotten used to it, until a pair of ragged little boys came barreling out of the fog just as the trailing moss looked its most gruesome. My mind was filled with distasteful images and so my heart could not take the strain of these sudden appearances.

I shouted, dropping the lantern as I threw my hands up in front of myself. It shattered, glass and kerosene everywhere. The oil spilled out onto the wood, and quickly caught fire. I tried to stamp it out, but the wood cracked and I fell through into the waiting bog below.

It was thick and goopy, and I struggled to tread water. The fog closed in, thicker and thicker. I flailed, my hands desperate to grab something. The poles from the boardwalk were too slippery to help me as I struggled. I looked up, just as someone else came tumbling down, and everything went black as they crashed into me from above.

13 January 2021 - Spill

A single drop of blood sat the cuff of my sleeve, yelling at the top of its lungs, “She’s a murderer! She’s the one you’re looking for!”

The police were going table to table, inquiring politely if anyone had seen a muscular, bearded man in the last ten minutes. Of course, they had not, as I ditched the beard and the muscle suit in an alley several minutes before walking out and taking this table. Now, a slender woman of 54, I was invisible, but for the drop of blood I had somehow missed.

The waiter returned to my table, croissant and espresso at the ready. I took a bite of the croissant. I could feel the chocolate melt on my tongue. The espresso would be too hot for a sip, but I brought it close to my face, breathed in deeply, and savored the warm acidity of the aroma.

An officer walked over to my table. I dripped the coffee expertly onto my sleeve.

“Shit. I’m so sorry. I’ve just spilt my coffee.”

The spot was gone, but he knew. He had seen it happen, his eyes darting towards my sleeve as the coffee began to tip over the edge of the glass.

His pistol was out and the shot was off before I could react. Straight to the heart.

Adrenaline blasted my senses into high gear. His badge was wrong. The gun was wrong. Wrong make, wrong caliber, and he held it like a connoisseur. He was no officer of the law. He was one of them.

I smiled grimly. I had lost the game.

14 January 2021 - Dead Meadow

Deep in the woods, a single tree falls and leave a space. That space grows and widens, as other trees succumb to the increased exposure to wind and rain and rot. The space fills with grass and small plants, deer wander through, and it hosts a new environment. Meadows are born through death, and they bring death with them.

This meadow was a grave. Many of my dancers lay fallen in their places. Their poses, ungainly, spoke only of defeat. Arms draped crazily across chests, crossing the central line. Unthinkable. Our craft, the manner of our warfare, was graceful strength. No limb crossed, no joint left unsupported. Move from a position of fullness to a new position of fullness. In this way, we had conquered many cities. No more.

I lay on my back, sky clear and far away above me. Where does the sky begin? I would lift my hand to touch it but my strength has left me.

Blades. Arrows. These I withstood, but the hooves were too much for me. Thunder that kills. I lifted my head. At the end of the meadow, through the deep grass, I could see shadows moving beneath the trees. They were amassing for another assault.

I saw the arrow coming. It streaked out of the shaded woods, like a needle passes through a garment, then drifted through air in an elegant arc. I watched it materialize from bright blur into dark line, glimmering-tipped. The head found me and pressed me harder into the earth.

15 January 2021 - Signal’s Bane

My gaming setup was a shrine to low-latency connections. I was a firm believer in reinvesting profits back into the business—for me, the business was reducing the time it took for a string of events to be transmitted across vast distances.

I sat in my chair, looking at 120Hz 8k screens. My eyes would perceive, then send a signal to my brain, which sent a signal to my hands, which tapped and clicked away at the keyboard and mouse, which sent a signal to the computer, which sent a signal to the software, which sent a signal to the game engine, which sent a signal to the game servers (probably in Pennsylvania, of all places), which sent a signal back to everyone’s computers. With so many places that a signal had to travel, it was important to minimize any interference and lag: the fast the signal, the better my game went.

I took a swig of Mountain Dew, wiped my hand on my sweats, and leaned a little bit forward. Someone was coming into range. I clicked; signals raced and a virtual bullet flew into a virtual chest. Strangely, I felt it in my chest.

A sharp pain raced down my left arm, and someone seemed to squeezing my ribs from inside. I started to sweat, and my hands became clammy. I stumbled out of my chair and the cheers from my teammates died out suddenly as my headphones were yanked off of my head. I crashed backwards, breathing heavily. It was hard to breath, and then I couldn’t breath at all.

16 January 2021 - Eclipsed

The moon is a peaceful place. There’s almost no wind, for one thing, and, personally, I have always found the off-white/grey of the rock to be soothing. I imagine it to be an exfoliating and moisturizing cream for the mind. After months at war, a brief cleanse is well-appreciated.

Currently, I was sitting by a viewing port at the top of one of the most important buildings in the base: the solar decryption tower. I was surrounded by plush leather from earth. They really built these original buildings with superior sensibilities than anyone would bother with these days.

The base sat in an enormous crater, and I could see across most of it from here. There were domes and greenhouses, bunkers, spaceports, barracks, engineering warehouses, hangers, munitions stockyards, and even a library. We called it a library, but it was mostly just servers. The building closest to me was the laser radio station. Paired with the solar encryption tower, we could reach almost anyone in the galaxy from here.

It had been quiet all morning, but it seemed like there was a lot of commotion the last few minutes. I wasn’t on duty, but I stood up to go check it out. You always got bonus points for helping out, and I wasn’t one to miss out on an opportunity. As I stood up, the whole window turned red, and I stared out.

Outside, the base melted before my eyes. Millions of lasers pressed buildings into the ground. The whole crater filled with red light too bright to look at. Unbearable heat radiated towards me. 5 seconds ago, I was looking out on a military complex, but the bombardment of energy had reduced it to slag. The full heatwave hit me, blasting the glass, shredding me, then vaporizing everything in the tower. What was left of me floated through the micro-atmosphere and settled on the surface, a darker grey stain on the grey surface.

17 January 2021 - Horizon

An old man was walking slowly down towards the sea. The path was fairly long, cut through grassy back yards, skirted fences, and crossed several roads, but eventually it opened out directly onto the beach. He was about halfway down from his home up on the wind-blasted hillside. When he had bought the house, it had a clear view of the water, but several new developments had since cut off the good sight lines.

Back then, when everything smelled like fish and gasoline, it took him less than ten minutes to lope down to the water’s edge. It was a morning routine. When he had married, his wife joined him, and when she had passed, he continued walking to remember their walks together. This walk would take him an hour or more now.

The cane felt like a crutch, but it kept him upright. He passed a dog, and it barked a friendly, sharp hello. He tapped his response back with the cane, rattling the fence gently. The little animal was delighted by all this noise and ran giddy circles, still barking, as the man continued.

He was close now, close enough that the sea smell overpowered all else: wood, fertilizer, metal, rust, cut grass; everything faded to the background. Salt water danced and crashed before him as he made it down the last flight of aging concrete steps. The sand was damp from last night’s rain, and he tide was low, exposing rocks and seaweed.

The man settled into his favorite bench. The bench didn’t belong there, and it made little sense to place metal so close to the corrosive sea air, but when it had rusted and fallen over once, the man and his wife had saved up and paid for it to be replaced. The sun had been up for almost an hour now, and as the man stared through thick glasses, he could see dark ships rushing slowly into the blue horizon. His head slumped forward, and his chest was still.

18 January 2021 - All Spun Out

It was nice being inside the orbiter because everything was soft and padded. With so much turbulence in Jupiter’s atmosphere, shock waves could send you reeling at any time, and thus every part of the cabin was protected with enough foam that you could smack into it without so much as getting a bruise.

The outside, however, glistened with cold metal. I always thought of it as icy, with memories of ice back home on Mars, but obviously there wasn’t any moisture in the gaseous mix above Jupiter.

I was outside right now. Fixing an antennae that had shaken loose over time. My tether snaked and floated around me, then back to the latch by the compression chamber. It too glistened in the pale light from the far-away sun. It was strange to think about, but my craft created more localized heat than the sun could shine on anything at this distance.

There was a hideous jolt, and then I was spinning backwards. It must have been an especially dense pocket of atmosphere. Air (though it wasn’t oxygen) rushing from somewhere to somewhere else. I waited for the tether to stop my motion before I tried to orient myself. It didn’t.

I kept spinning, rotating like a plate on a juggler’s stick, facing down towards the endless storms. Just off towards the horizon was the eye, massive and red, swirling endlessly in all its majestic fury.

This was it. It would be days before I died of dehydration, but at least I would have something to watch below. If I looked closely, I could see the enormous belts and zones met, and see the swirling interchange of rising and falling gases.

19 January 2021 - Lasers Lasing

Lasers everywhere. You could smell the sintering of rock and steel as the machine went haywire. Why mine for diamonds when you could erratically endanger everyone around you? Classic robots move. No understanding. No restraint. Just pure destructive power: connect a trillion volts of giga-vaporizer to a huge metal arm and hope for the best. Naturally, the best never happens. That’s what we had here, the best no happening.

This might be the worst, actually. Sand and rocks melting all over the place, OSHA crews helicoptering in to film the whole thing, a trapped crew-member live-streaming the ordeal. I had to get in there and shut it off and it was going to be the objectively most-insane shutoff of my life. I was sitting lacing up my kevlar boots and reminiscing and the more I thought about it the less happy I was.

Normally when you run a shutoff op you drop in hot and strike fast, but with this monster of a digger moving so randomly it was going to take a careful strategy to get inside. We had spent the last 20 minutes plotting trajectories and figuring out the safest way to get inside the perimeter.

We didn’t have a chance. The reactor shorted without warning, bursting and spewing vaporized fuel across the whole scorched pit. Somehow the laser kept lasing away and ignited the millions of droplets of high-octane nitro-gasoline floating through the air. Needless to say, everything around ignited too, including us. Not my best day.20 January 2021 - Reach Out and Touch Them

Grassy hills stretched out in front of me, rising eventually into sharp cliff edges. Beyond those loomed treacherous mountains of jagged stone. I had been walking for a week, and the bulk of my journey still lay before me. I had to get through the mountains.

There were two safe passes through this area, and I was gambling that the shorter, steeper way would be navigable by the time I got to it. So far, there had been rain every day for the past month. I would inevitably slip and fall to my death if the rain didn’t abate before I was through the foothills.

On the other hand, if I waited, I would run out of food. There were very few edible plants in this area, and hardly any animals to speak of. The extremes of the weather kept everything small and wiry—plants were woody and animals were wary. You could spend a day hunting down enough food to eat for an hour’s worth of energy. I had carried a lot in with me, but it would only last for a single attempt.

I was walking alongside a riverbed right now, and the water was churning with mud. Rain and mountain soil coursed like an angry vein. Before I knew what was happening, the ground in front of me fell away and dissolved into the rushing water. Grass and stones vanished into the swirl, and then I was under. My feet were trapped by rocks or branches that were crashing and rolling along the bottom of the channel.

Underwater, everything felt gritty, and my lungs were giving out. I yanked, but it was no use. I was stuck. The mountains had beaten me before I ever got near them.21 January 2021 - Perfect Synchronicity

The clock struck midnight. Twelve booming peals rolled across the city. The sound bounced between houses, reverberated through walls, rattled windows, and woke a fitfully-sleeping heart surgeon exactly six hours early, well before he was set to perform his very first surgery of the heart. He flicked on the light in his room so he could read the clock to see what time it was.

Nearby, a solitary cyclist was bumping her way across the cobblestones, concerned that her frail machine would break down and leave her to walk through the city at night. She glanced up as a light went on, surprised that anyone was rising at this hour. He front wheel hit a large rock. It sent her sprawling onto the ground. She let out a yell as it happened, which was suddenly cut short as she collided with the street.

In an apartment that sat at street level (one of the few street-level doors that didn’t open onto a small shop or restaurant) a teacher jumped up from the abysmal test she was grading. Had someone screamed? Was everyone alright? She ran to the door and peered through the window. She saw the mess of cyclist and cycle lying in a heap. She unbolted the door and rushed out to help.

I had been standing there, lock picks at the ready, preparing to work my way inside the shop next door once the cyclist was out of sight, when I heard the sound of a door unbolting. I fled, ducking around the corner into an alleyway. As I ducked I decked myself with a low-hanging sign. It must have been quite the sign for quite the shop, because the painted metal was hefty enough to lay me out flat. I floated motionless in the air for several minutes, then rushed at the ground with such speed as I have never felt before. I could hear my skull crack for just the briefest moment, and then I could hear nothing at all.22 January 2021 - Waves Goodbye

The ocean has always kept me close. Ships drew me near, the shore called, waves sang to me, until I would return, always, then despair and withdraw. It was a long dance. I swore to myself that I would do it, that I would finally achieve it, conquer it, succeed in that one endeavor, and yet I never had, and the water would laugh as I retreated.

I stood on a beach now, waves, boats, everything just so. The sand was arranged perfectly and the tide was auspicious. Even the land and the air were supportive: I had never received such clear signs that the deed was meant to occur than I had on this day.

My preparations were brief: remove my shoes, set them aside. Remove my shirt, fold it, set it aside. Bend to the ground and touch my hands to my feet. My grandfather’s diver’s watch could stay on. If not for this, than for what? My physical preparations complete, I moved on to the mental clarification necessary. I purged my mind of wavering, unsure, unsteady, undermining thoughts. Success was the only thing before me. I just had to embrace it.

I began. My feet provided the necessary locomotion, and before I knew it I was knee deep. The water was a perfect temperature; I pressed onward. As the waves rolled over me and I forayed further, the sand beneath my feet began to be difficult to find. I would push my toes downwards hoping to brush the bottom, but it was elusive. I flailed. The lessons I had memorized had found their way out of my ahead along with the negative thoughts. I was bobbing now, dropping to the bottom and then racing back up to the surface in hopes of snatching some air before sinking again.

I was not doing it. I was not succeeding. Nobody, had they been there to perceive my essay, would have described it as swimming. I was not a swimmer. I was not swimming. I could not swim. My breath left me, and I coughed violently and then went still. The watch kept ticking as I floated gently to the surface; too late.23 January 2021 - Visitors

Rodents. I hate them. I do everything in my power to eliminate them whenever I come across one. And yet, now I was subservient to them. I relied on them. They were my source of life… and of food.

We’d been trapped in this tunnel since the cave in a week ago, and rats are the only thing left to eat now. I had never expected that I would come to hate rats even more than I did before, but eating them did the trick. They were always hideous in my mind, but consuming them bit by bit drove home every unlikable feature.

We knew there would be a rescue dig to get us out, but it wasn’t clear when that would be. None of us were worried, strangely, but sitting in the dark with nothing to do had worn us out. We sat listening to the stillness, hoping for the sound of a drill, hammer, or the distant thud of explosives. And, naturally, for the scrabbling sound of rodent feet nearby.

I heard one just now, maybe ten feet away. It was working its way across the rough stone tunnel floor, slowly smelling for the food that we didn’t have. It could tell something was nearby, and as it got closer it slowed its approach. Or did it?

It sounded more distant than I thought. With a crack, light blasted into our world. I jumped from the suddenness of it, smashing my head against a protrusion in the rock. I listened as I lay dazed, my life slipping away from me. The rats were gone, and there were voices nearby. It went dark.25 January 2021 - Wind and Water

You only really die when you give up. I don’t care if it’s true, but that’s what I live by. Thousands of feet up in the air, sitting behind a motor full of carefully-regulated explosions, surrounded by fabric and wood built to keep me aloft, it’s all I need to focus on when something goes wrong. If you let yourself give in, you won’t make it back to the ground in one piece.

Right now, I was nursing my plane in from over the sea. Fuel had been leaking for the past 30 minutes. I could smell it everywhere. The engine was still tapping away with a steady roar, but it was only a matter of time before it went silent. I could just barely see land on the horizon.

The engine sputtered and died. I ran a quick calculation as I floated along in silence, and the math assured me that I would end up many miles short of land.

The water loomed closer and closer. It had never looked less welcoming than it did right now. Grey-blue, cold, white caps whipping into foam in the stiff wind that kept me away from the shore. Everything was picture perfect for a nautical painting from 100 years ago. I felt like a sailor as the canvas-wrapped wooden wings bit into the water. Salt spray dashed against my face. Everything went cold and dark as we quickly descended below the surface, but I stayed in my seat, hands clasped tightly around the controls.26 January 2021 - To The End

I had found the most fascinating story in the paper today. I was a little bit late for my bus, so I was hurrying, but I couldn’t help but keep reading. The words tugged me in, and I found myself dashing through exotic bazars, hoping on rickety planes, and firing off muskets to scare away the hungry wolves at night, all as I hastily navigated the humdrum bustle of the three blocks from my apartment building to the bus stop.

My feet were wet from the puddles I hadn’t dodged, and I had sadly torn and lost half of the front cover when someone’s umbrella raked across the paper. It would have been easily avoided if I had been looking, but as it happened I was in the middle of a car chase through a deserted village high in the mountains.

There was also an old lady I had nearly toppled in my forward march. I stopped to help her regain her balance, but my mind was elsewhere: in the back room of a musty hostel, playing poker to win enough money to fill my motorcycle with gasoline for the trek back over the mountain pass.

I was back on my way, over the mountains and towards my bus stop, when I realized the curb had shown up much more suddenly than I expected. I slowed, caught myself stumbling slightly, and was unceremoniously dashed across the road by a fast-moving taxi. As I twisted through the air, my body drenched in layers of pain, my eyes darted to the end of the story, and a picture stuck in my mind: a hand, bloodied, gripping a fistful of glossy black coins.

27 January 2021 - Forest Fighter

A bullet thudded into the ground a few yards away from me. I nestled closer against the butt of my rifle. The oiled weapon smelled sharp and mechanical, in contrast to the loamy soil and musty heaviness of the dead leaves all around. It was a beautiful day, with sunlight flitting in and out through the branches and foliage of the trees.

The forest was seemingly endless. We had been fighting our way in for months on end. Arriving in the middle of spring, turning the soft muddy ground into a dark gash of footprints for mile after mile. Now we’d met true resistance, but the recent summery growth provided ample cover for prolonged engagements. Another bullet plinked off of a tree, further away. Either they were no marksman, or they hadn’t actually seen us.

I hadn’t seen them yet either, but every shot they fired told me more about where they were. The dappled light made it hard to see anything in these woods; it was to both of our advantage. Night would come eventually, then the silence and darkness would keep us both alive until morning.

We’d been probing enemy positions for three days now. Their perimeter must be immense, because no matter how far in we pushed or crept, there was no sign of any building, just hundreds of stealthy scouts roaming the woods. My mind was drifting. I focused on the leaves far ahead, looking for patches of shadow where someone might be hiding the shape and glint of a rifle.

I found a spot, nestled close to a stately oak. There was a huge dead branch that had fallen half way down but still leaned against the trunk. Just in the middle I thought I could see some movement. There was a flash of light, and a moment later a round crashed into my shoulder. I slumped forward, face down into the leaves.28 January 2021 - Strobe

Club lights beat to the entrancing thump of the towering speakers. Hundreds of people dancing, faces flashing in and out of sight as they twisted and pulsed. In the middle of them all, unaffected by her surroundings, a short woman with silky bleached white hair was standing perfectly still. She was staring at me. Both her hands were under her dark jacket. I blinked, and she was gone.

I turned and fled, pushing out of the crowd. People shouted at me as I jammed past them. The song was so loud that I could see their mouths move but couldn’t hear even the slightest hint of a voice. I watched their eyes turn from me to someone behind me, and I knew she was catching up. The DJ pushed the beat up, holding it on the edge of rhythm and steady sound, then launched into the breakdown. The club went dark, then erupted in a new wave of color as the beat dropped.

I made it to an exit door. The light changed from raucous, flashing purple to a steady white as I crossed underneath the lintel. I was out on the street in no time, the bass thudding behind me as I tried to find a cab. It was too late at night, too early in the morning. Nobody was out.

I was panting by the time I reached the subway. There was a train just about to leave. I dashed across the station just in time to board. As I did, the girl brushed past me, white hair glinting. She was getting off, somehow already on the train I could barely catch. She smiled a goodbye as she slipped away.

I watched her hand dive back into her pocket as she strode off. I sat in the plastic bucket seat, heart pounding. Then my side started to go numb. I tried to stand, but my leg wouldn’t budge. By the time I had decided to call for help, my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth.

29 January 2021 - Dripping

The temperature had risen a lot in the past day. Somehow the sun was hitting harder than usual and the ice was starting to soften and melt. The creaking was growing louder, and it sounded like the plane was starting to move from its jagged perch on the ridge of the glacier.

We were supposed to wait for a rescue team and hang tight in the plane, but it seemed like that was becoming a worse and worse idea as conditions changed. There had been a long argument last night that it would be safer to leave the plane and build a shelter in the snow, but the pilot kept repeating that none of us had enough experience to navigate a glacier.

Now, twelve hours later, the mood had changed. The plane was going to slide at any time, and we were of the same mind: get out before it slid and dashed us to pieces on the plateau below us.

We were trailing out in a long line when I started to hear a dripping sound. I was one of the last ones out, and I stepped to the side and paused, my head cocked up to one side. What was dripping?

The sound was at eye level, not ten feet away from me. It couldn’t be snow or ice; the plane was well above that, and there hadn’t been any time for buildup. The only thing above me in that direction was the wing of the plane, canted up into the air. Then I smelled it, realizing too late what was dripping from the wings: jet fuel.

It only takes a single spark to ignite something volatile. Jet fuel is very volatile, and the static built up by 200 people filing slowly along a carpeted floor provided a surplus of electrical charge. As I turned, that static jumped to life, as did thousands of gallons of energy-rich fuel mix. The explosion sent what was left of me sailing out over the ice, and the heat from the blast and ensuing fire melted the nearby ice into a huge crater. It sat there, dark, scarred, and dripping, this time with water.30 January 2021 The Rush

The best surfing is always the most dangerous. It’s a truism: risk is equal to reward. Big waves translate directly into a bigger rush, a longer run, and more air. Rough water wasn’t a positive, in fact the ride quality was much worse when it was choppy, but you get more adrenaline from it, so it nets out to be a positive when you’re a thrill seeker.

These waves were the biggest. The water was choppy. Add on to that the storm coming in and you had a recipe for the most delicious riding in the world. I had been out here every day. As the storm got closer, I started waking up earlier in the morning. I was out before the sun rose, watching the tides change, smelling the air, breathing in the chaos that fed my appetite for forward motion.

Today felt different. Nobody knew how long it would take for the storm to reach the mainland. It could be weeks, or days, or hours. It felt like it was already here when I made it to the beach. The sand was dancing and floating in convoluted gusts of wind. The water was grey-green; bright but somehow menacing. My board hit the swells and I was away.

I paddled farther out than usual and floated, sitting on the board with my legs dangling on either side, for a few minutes. It was peaceful. The sound of the waves hitting the shore seemed far-off. I was suspended in a separate reality, waiting patiently for I didn’t know what.

Then it hit. The storm blasted up out of nowhere. Waves grew out of nothing, beaten and whipped forward by the pressure of the wind. Water was crashing everywhere around me, blasted into the air. I paddled back towards the beach, hoping I could catch a decent wave that would save me the effort and trouble of getting safely back.

I did. This one was a monster. I could feel myself moving higher as the wave built in size even as I surfed along the front of it. My heart was pumping at full strength and I couldn’t stop smiling. The monster wave rushed into the rocks and trees that sat behind the beach, and I tumbled from my board headfirst into a swirling cacophony.31 January 2021 Stillness

You could see the firebombs in their slow, terrible descent, watch them as they floated with precision towards the hills. Their tails of flaming magnesium glittered and shone into the night, illuminating everything for miles around with ice-cold white light. I’d seen long-exposure pictures of stars that looked like this, white stripes painted across the sky, but to watch it happen in real time was an experience like no other.

The mountains were coming apart so that everything looked like an ocean of slow-moving stone and dust. The bombs struck the ground so hard that the shoulders and angles of the peaks were melting beneath their weight and fury.

I steeled myself. There was no surviving this final assault. Not now, with my armies spent and my position revealed. We had fought for so long and been so close to victory that I had never given up hope of success, not until tonight, when the sky opened and the stars began to fall.

I was standing outside now. The night air was hot with summer, in contrast to the chilling tone of the metallic fires all around. I had stopped hearing it all, after several hours of bombardment. The crashing gave way to a peaceful silence. I had found that my ears were bleeding; perhaps I was deaf?

I turned, and the silence had deceived me with its peace. The whole mountain behind me was aflame. White sheets of light shot and danced their way towards me, bringing with them innumerable landslides. The force of it shook me to my knees, and I put a hand down to steady myself. I closed my eyes for a single second, then marshaled myself and stood. I met the dimly roaring tide with my head held high.1 February 2021 Water Lily

The flowers of the water lily give off a delightful fragrance. Their appearance, too, is pleasant. Even the leaves have an attractive form. Their rounded shield shape has a strong and waxy surface that makes it suitable for small animals, such as frogs, to sit on them. They are very distinct from the small, slimy algae and various plants such as watercress, that grow riotously and choke streams and ponds with their incessant reproduction and propagation.

I was beneath the surface, looking towards the edge of the pond and admiring the fact that even the stems of the water lilies were sturdy and well-formed without being overly thick or ungainly. I let out a stream of air from my mouthpiece, and the bubbles jostled upwards, scattering on the surface and disappearing into the air above the water. From below, it seemed like the bubbles were merely bouncing out and would return soon enough.

I swam forward, towards the shallows where the lilies grew by the edge of the water. I clicked the safety off of my pistol, holding it close to my chest, barrel pointed down and away from my body. There was a dark shape up above the lilies that cast a shadow into the water. I was about 20 feet away now, and I could clearly see the outline of a man shimmering in the underside of the water.

I got my feet under me, peering through my goggles towards the man. I couldn’t tell which way he was facing. I was sure he was there, but all I could make out was his silhouette. I had to take the risk. Gun forward, I pressed into the soggy mud of the pond floor and stood up out of the water. He was facing away. I watched the water pour out from the revolver, then pulled the trigger. Headshot. I was under the surface before his falling body rolled into the water. I watched as the lilies closed back over the spot where he had fallen.2 February 2021 - Enlightenment

I had been told, after a great deal of searching and mystical transfer of energies, that enlightenment could be found in a hidden stairway deep in the mountains. It had taken me the better part of a decade to locate that stone stairway. My hands and feet were tattered and calloused. My clothes were similarly ragged. What had started out as purified white cotton had acquired a deep red-grey hue after months of dust and hundreds of miles of forgotten pathways. The stones carried me forward, but I left more and more of my physical self behind.

The cliffs rising on either side of me hedged me in and protected me from the wind. Its calls and cries echoed around the whole mountain region. It needed more attention than I could give it. My legs were burning, my back was bending and pushing me forward, my arms ached and protested with every thrust of my twin walking sticks.

The steps reached out ahead of me into billowing clouds. Roiling fog poured out of the sky and down towards me. As always, when you walk into the clouds you are never in the midst. They are always thickest off in the distance. I couldn’t see the top, but I knew I must be near it. My body was screaming with the effort fo moving towards the vaporous thicket.

The stories described the summit as the most peaceful place in the kingdom. The hills opened out before you into a long valley of flourishing trees and plants. The vista was surrounded by an open-air temple, constructed by those wisest monks of old to shield you not only from the wind, but from all sound of the world below.

I could just see the pillars and carved stones of the entrance as felt enlightenment reaching towards me. My heart stabbed sharply. My handles faltered on the poles, and I drifted quickly to places higher and more quiet still than what lay before me at the end of the steps.3 February 2021 - Beans

There is something special about beans. To my, anyway. Others have not seemed to grasp or appreciate the true excellence of beans. Many are perfectly happy to consume canned beans. Canned! Beans submerged in some oil-based, salt-infused glop, surrounded by aluminum or tin. Can you imagine anything more dreadful than a a bean that has spent its life in such poor conditions?

The true marvel of beans is that such a powerful source of flavor and nutrients can remain dried for so long without losing hardly any of its particular and excellent qualities. Try drying a tomato and report back with what you get; it won’t be pretty. Beans are a perfect balance of water and fruit (in the technical sense). Their chief offering for me is their protein density.

As a man who works out incessantly, protein is the most important part of my diet, bar none. Without protein, I would wither away into a shriveled excuse for a human. Protruding bones would become a problem with such immediacy that I dare not even consider such ramifications. Instead, I eat beans.

I also lift beans. They provide such a consistent and convenient source of dead weight that I have moved entirely from metal weights and replaced them with bags of beans. My current deadlifting bench is simply a long bar with two bags, one on either end of the bar. As I warm up and desire to lift more, I simply scoop more beans from my (extensive) stockpile into the bags and then I am in business.

Today, I am working on breaking my personal record. I can feel the power of the beans coursing through my muscles. No protein is as effective as bean protein, I can assure you of that. The bar feels good in my grip. I lift it up, and my strength unexpectedly fails me. I can’t get the bar back up. It starts to press on my chest. I call out to the beans for help, but they are silent. I can feel pain in my ribs now. It’s hard to breathe. I realize too late that I am not worthy of the beans. They are punishing me. I let go of the bar, and surrender to the will of the beans.4 February 2021 - Ignition Problems

Fear made my breathing heavy. The mower was a beast to be conquered. Dark, shiny tires, still slick with anti-drying agent from the factory. Seamless paint, proudly showing off its lack of dirt, grass or scratches. Everything about it was intimidating. It took me a week to muster up the courage to get it out and take on the lawn after I had bought it. By then the grass was so long that I feared the blades would seize up and the whole thing would explode.

Now that I was sitting astride this monster machine I realized that it wouldn’t be an issue to get it to mow the lawn. Getting it to stop would be the problem. I could tell that the inertia and rage of the thing would carry forwards far longer than I might need it to go.

I turned the key and it spat out a choking, coughing sputter. I tried again and it still sounded unhappy. I sat for a moment, perplexed. How could a creature so hideous be so coy? I got off of the seat and checked the gas tank. It seemed to be full, but I opened it and topped it off with some fresh gas from the can on the other side of my reliably untidy garage.

The oil was fine as well. I went around the back of thing and lifted the seat to take a look at the battery. The wires were loose. It didn’t make sense, but wires are loose sometimes, occasionally without reason. I jiggled them to establish a better connection, and a single spark flew from the clumsy metal wires.

The glint of energy traced a tiny arc towards the floor of the garage. Its descent placed it right in the middle of a puff of vapor from the gasoline I had just poured. The spark turned into a jet of flame, which erupted into a fireball. I was thrown backwards and crumpled in a heap at the base of the wall. I breathed out deeply, one last time.5 February 2021 - Toast

The apartment was quiet in comparison to the rush-hour streets outside. I stepped in over the balcony wall with my other leg, inched inside, then gently closed the door. The sheer curtains drifted softly. It smelled like toast, and I froze. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone inside. I heard a knife scraping butter onto bread. As long as they stayed occupied in the other room, I would be fine.

I slowly tip-toed over to the computer, thumb drive in hand. There were potted plants everywhere, and while they were frustrating to get around, they did help to deaden the noise of my footsteps. The sound of toast crunching in other room was almost comical, if only my errand had not been so dire.

I plugged in the drive, then waited for the process to complete. The fan on the computer started up and I choked back a scream of my eternal frustration with out-dated machines. The toast munching in the other room stopped. The curtains tossed fitfully in a hint of a breeze. More munching. I let out a slow, silent breath.

The LED on the thumb drive lit up: finished. I slide it out and dropped it into a pocket. Back to the window, slowly open the door, one foot over the edge of the balcony, then I heard a sound right behind me: someone chewing toast. I froze astride the wall, turning my head slowly to find a man in a nightgown standing right by the door.

“Pardon me,” he said, one hand politely covering his mouth as he finished a bite. He swallowed, then stepped forward and gave me a crisp shove.

I floated in slow motion, hearing all the sounds of the street, far, far below, then plummeted to it.6 February 2021 Lights and Lights

The wet cobblestones flashed with light from the clubs that lined the street. Cigarette smoke overpowered the quieter smells of alcohol and sweat that drifted out from the knots of people loitering around the entrances. Someone pulled up in a red convertible and people pressed against the side of the car to beckon them in. He got out, grabbed a couple, and walked into the biggest club with the man and the woman on either side, chatting and laughing. He tossed the keys to me.

I stepped in behind the wheel. The seat was always warm, and I hated the feeling. It ruined the experience of a car to have it feel so recently used. My uniform held me back as well. On the farm, before the drought, I used to race shirtless in a pair of ragged jeans. That was the only way to really drive a car.

I revved the engine, feeling out the limits of the clutch. It was snappy and I lurched forward the slightest bit before transitioning smoothly into second gear. The tires bobbled on the rough stones. I sometimes thought about how long these roads had been here; horses, carriages and hansom cabs had all traced the same route I did. Tonight it didn’t feel like anything, but there were nights that I felt as though I carried on a timeless and proud tradition.

I smelt gasoline. It got stronger as I turned the corner and drove away from the sounds and scents of the main street. The car hit a particularly large stone and I saw everything in slow motion.

The hood of the car bent and curved upwards. Bright red light shone out from underneath, followed by tongues of flame that grew as the hood split down the middle. The car lifted up and I felt myself tilting backwards. The fire in the front had grown from individual flames to single mass. The heat hit me, and then the fire reached me. I could already smell the smoke.7 February 2021 - Liquid Fire

Fire floats in outer space. The heat can’t go up, so it it just stays in a ghostly bright bubble. When space systems catch on fire (despite everything’s flame-retardant coating) the plasma races along their surface and looks more like the work of a spiritualist than a gravitic phenomenon. The fire racing up the outside of my safety suit acted like a possession. It stuck on no matter how I twisted and thrashed. My only thought was to get out of the jumpsuit before the gnawing combustion ate through the shielding layer.

I tore off the helmet. It spun off and collided with the wall of the airlock chamber, bouncing back and forth between the window that looked out into the black emptiness and the window with a view into the cool white light of the crew quarters. The suit was still burning with a strange glow that wavered between blue and orange. I unstrapped it, feeling the heat on my fingers through the heavy gloves, then pulled it away from my body.

The fire had started from a buildup of static and liquid oxygen, and I had to assume that there was some stray grease on a hinge or mechanical couple. I wasn’t sure how the final contact had happened. the whole airlock had erupted in tiny blue balls of light as soon as I had pressurized the chamber with oxygen for my re-entry.

It seemed like everything was under control. I was out of my suit and I could get back inside and depressurize the airlock. That would immediately kill any remaining fire. I clipped the suit to a bracket and turned to the airlock door. The helmet beat me to it, landing square on the the big red emergency depressurization button. The door behind me opened, and I felt my body freeze in a matter of a second or two.8 February 2021 - Tree Story

Pine trees whipped by on either side. It was all I could do to keep the canoe steady as we dodged a constant barrage of huge rocks and stumps. The near-misses kept adding up, and I knew it couldn’t go on like this.

“Timothy! We have to get to the riverbank! If we don’t get out of the water we’re going to die in here!”

He wouldn’t listen. He sat up front, slouched and grinning.

“Don’t chicken out now, Mud Sucker!” he jeered back at me.

He turned forwards again just as the prow glanced off of a submerged obstacle. The boat spun sideways in the rapids. The water rushed against the boat, pressing and tilting it. I angled upward to try to keep myself level, but it was no use. We flipped over.

I fell headfirst. The water hit me, not the other way around. I felt the shock of the temperature course through my limbs. The stream started from far up in the mountains; melting snow was making its journey back down to the lakes and ponds. It was near freezing.

I started to swim, hopelessly kicking with my heavy boots on. I realized I was still holding the paddle. I let go of it, and saw it float downwards. I was still underwater. I was swimming the wrong way.

I spun awkwardly, then tried to follow the paddle. I felt so heavy, and my lungs were starting to give out. A huge dark shape loomed ahead of me, and I found myself jammed under a fallen pine. It was enormous. I struggled and yanked, but the water was pressing me with a weight that I had never felt before.9 February 2021 - Dystopia Codes

What will the future be like? We are always in the future when we ask that, and also in the past. You can’t reach hacker zen without understanding all the big paradoxes. My favorite was Armstrong’s Perpetual Present. If everything is experienced from the present, then how can history exist? History is simply the present that was, viewed from the present that is. Similarly, the future is the present to come, viewed from the present that is. Nothing can exist without existing now.

My room smelled like stim packs and spent hydrogen cells. The laser bike was in one corner, and my node was in the other. The bed took up the rest of the room. Wires and cables snaked from the node to the window, attaching to some slim and discrete antennae arrays that lined the inside of the window frame. From the outside, I looked like a junkie slob. From the inside, I still looked like a junkie slob, but a much more connected one.

I sat back from the node’s screenset and grinned. Armstrong’s work had been deemed illegal thinking for decades. Finding it on the node-net was a rare joy. Nothing riled the mods as much as sharing contraband philosophy. I happily keyed in several commands and sent copies racing across the numerous fora that would be open to such overtly counter-logical ideas. I strolled over to my bed, pulled off my shirt, and flopped. I lay there, eyes closed, feeling the cool air of my poorly-sealed window drift over my skin.

I woke up to flashing lights and breaking glass. The window was a sucking, gaping hole of wind, and I was covered in tiny cuts. Blood was all over the bed. I saw the bladecraft hovering around the city outside. I dashed over to the node, slapping at the keyboard, then ran to the window. I leapt out without pausing.

///Suspect not apprehended. Suicide.

///Immediate surveillance of room. One message pending from node.

///Read; “Defenestration of Progress.” Message deletion unsuccessful.10 February 2021 - Table Manners

Back and forth and back and forth, kitchen to tables, kitchen to tables. I was sure I was going to wear a rut into this rustic wooden floor. My apron had probably seen a hundred nondescript black pens come and go, a handful of different bottle openers, and many a dirty piece of silverware spirited away at the last moment before a guest took their seat. I’d only been here a few months, but it felt like decades had passed since I had wandered into this valley in the back of a stranger’s pickup truck. My shoes were wearing out, but not much else had changed.

I rushed a plate of ham and cheese out to table seven. Seven was the coziest spot, tucked into the corner furthest from the door and out of sight from most of the other tables. The couple sitting there looked like they too were from out of town. I had tried to make conversation, but they only grunted and smiled and pointed at specific lines on the menu. I couldn’t help but think that they didn’t know how to read it. You had to admit that Ham and cheese was a funny option this time of year.

A few minutes later, after many more trips to the other tables, I checked back in on table seven. They smiled and pointed at more menu items, then said “wine” several times in a variety of dialects and languages. I found them a bottle and was on my way to their table when I saw a knife with a crusted edge that needed a good long soak in the sink before it could ever hope to return to the dining room. I swiped it from the table, dropped it into my apron and kept walking in a smooth and sly movement I’d picked up last year in a diner. I arrived with the wine. The couple seemed on edge. They kept looking at each other, talking hurriedly in a low voice.

I realized I’d seen them before. On television? I tried to remember when exactly but all that came to mind were jumbled images of cartoon evildoers from my childhood. Then it hit me. They must have seen the change in my facial expression because they lunged at me. Food and wine went everywhere. I turned and stumbled away, but fell on my face. I felt something sharp gouging between my ribs. I struggled to my knees, and felt something hanging out of my chest in a place where nothing should hang out. It was the knife in my apron. The floor was red with smeared blood, and there was a deep scratch where the back of the knife had been pressed into the wood. A rut after all. I laughed, then keeled forward. The strangers were long gone by then.11 February 2021 - Dromiceiomimus

Something had been eating the apples. My orchard was the joy of my life. Every waking hour was another hour I got to spend tending those beautiful trees. It made my heart sing. My husband had never come back from the war, and my two sons worked in the city now. They came back on the weekends to visit, but lately I wished they were around more often. Whatever was eating the apples didn’t seem natural.

I have seen enough chipmunk and squirrel gnawings to know when a small animal gets ahold of some fruit. They eat greedily, but they’re not large enough to finish the whole thing, so they leave clear signs of their work. Birds peck holes into the fruit. It’s a waste, but it makes sense. Larger animals eat the entire apple in one go, so all you usually see is a few broken stems. Whatever was at the trees now was cracking branches down and picking them bare. It was big, and it was hungry.

I thought I had seen it early one morning, but I couldn’t make out the shape of it. It seemed to be big and grey and somehow fast. What prompted such a creature to move so quickly? I couldn’t imagine it was afraid of me. Frail old women are low on the food chain, at least when it came to what could hurt what.

I rolled over in bed, still thinking back to that misty, wispy glimpse of a wary beast. It should have frightened me more than it seemed to. I was more curious than anything. Perhaps its fear of me had made me bold. I heard a noise downstairs. The courage I thought I had vanished in an instant. I lay still, ears straining. I heard a soft crackling, then nothing. My door creaked open, and a head poked in at about chest level. It was reptilian looking, but it was covered in downy grey feathers. The yellow eye was staring right at me.

I rolled away and fell out of the bed, scrambling for the shotgun hanging over the dresser. I realized a moment later that I was screaming at the top of my lungs. The creature had stepped into the room now, but my theatrics must have intimidated it. It stood at least seven feet tall with a long thin neck descending into a muscular body. It looked like a cross between bird and a lizard. It was clawing the air with its feet. I tried to back away, but the claw at the end of its toe caught me across the shoulder.

I fell down. My arm was useless and I couldn’t prop myself up. Now that it had bested me, the creature paused. It watched me. I could feel my strength leaving me. The strange beast turned and gobbled up the basket of apples by my window. They were damn good apples, after all.12 February 2021 - Rock Slide

They key with a rock slide is position. Your position, that is. Relative the rock slide, you will want (and need) to be above it. If you are below it, it is very unlikely that it will go well with you. It has never gone well for me to be below a rock slide.

I speak with the full experience of such things, as I am currently speaking from the middle of such a thing. The rocks are sliding and I am in their midst. For now, I ride on top of a large slab, as a member of the pack, you could say. It would be a stretch, but, even upon close examination, it would be a difficult task to differentiate me from the various inanimate objects that were swirling every which way around me.

For one, we were all the same dusty hue. The hue itself was not particularly unique to dust, but it was the dust that had imparted the hue to me; hence, dusty hue. I would have described it as light brown in situations of less importance.

For another thing, we were all headed in the same direction. There was a steep cliff and, without a doubt, soon we would topple from the top to the bottom. As I said, position is key.

These similarities with rocks ended when it came to consciousness. I feel more conscious than I ever have before. I am thinking more quickly and more clearly than I would have ever dared to believe was possible.

We flew together. In unison we ejected ourselves from the slope that we had traversed with such camaraderie. The moments of floating were sublime; a final fleeting brotherhood of varying levels of awareness and intelligence. The same dusty hue. The same dusty destination. What more could a man ask for his final moments than to be a grey-brown lump headed directly for a mountainside several thousand feet below, tumbling through the air together with a large number of othe13 February 2021 - For The Game

I couldn’t tell why my head felt so fuzzy. I had only had a handful of pulls on my own flask. You better believe I didn’t trust these clowns to pour me a drink. Not when so much money was at stake.

We had been playing cards for well over an hour now in a dingy little basement room underneath a bar. You could hear the crowd upstairs watching the game. It would grow suddenly silent if a goal was likely, everyone intent on the action. The silence would break out into yelling and cavorting, regardless of whether someone scored or not. Their lives were wrapped up in their game.

My life wasn’t wrapped up in this game, but most of my money seemed to be. No matter what happened, I always ended up back down here wit ha mix of strange and familiar faces. The deck was always fresh. Someone bought it, brought the receipt, then someone else unsealed it in front of the rest of us, and finally a third person counted the cards and discarded the jokers.

We were getting close to the end now. The reactions to the game upstairs was growing louder, but I was so focused that somehow it all seemed further and further away. I knew that if I let my attention slip I could be in the hole for months to come.

I was safely in the zone, so there was no worry of that actually happening. Numbers and probabilities were flying through my head so quickly that all the thinking and playing was based on subconscious instinct.

Jarring me back into reality, the fans upstairs erupted into a drawn out hooting that put all their previous cheers to shame. Not only was it loud, but the noise wouldn’t stop, and it sounded like they were jumping for minutes on end.

Without warning, the floor collapsed. I was crushed almost immediately, my cards still in my hand. I couldn’t see anything, but I could smell a lot of cheap beer.14 February 2021 - Under Waves

My boat was smaller than the others. It was so quick in the water that I smiled as it caught a strong wind and clipped along the surface of the water. The salty air rushed over my face. The spray wet my bare feet with warm seawater. The sounds of birds overhead meant that I was in the right place. I pulled the sail in and slowed down.

I readied my diving line, triple checking that it was fastened to the boat. I looked over the coil as well. It was still neat, but I re-wound it for safety. Perfect. The rocks I had for weights were piled up in the corner. Enough for a day’s diving, plus a few extra just in case. I already had my rope basket in my hand, tied to my wrist. Everything was ready. I lifted up one of the heavy rocks and slipped over the side into the clear blue ocean.

I loved feeling the water get cooler as I neared the bottom. The rock sent me down quickly. A little too quickly. My chest felt tighter than usual, and I hadn’t finished my count before my feet hit the sand. I waited before I moved so that my body could adjust to the depth. After I had rested for a few moments, I started searching.

I found a section that had plenty of large oysters. I worked quickly with my knife to pry them loose. My bag was only half full when I found a dark corner. There were oysters all around the edge of it, and I could just make out what looked like a clump of large oysters growing inside the mouth of the crevice. I poked my knife in to make sure it wasn’t some kind of trap. Nothing.

It was a trap. As soon as I reached inside a sharp mouth closed over my wrist, clamping down into the bones in my arm. Pain shot through my shoulder and back. I had nothing to fight with. The knife was in my trapped hand. I tried to knock at whatever held me with the oysters in my bag, but they did nothing.

I was running out of air. I yanked on my hand to try to get it loose, but the bones were too strong. I let out my final stream of bubbles. The mouth closed down harder on my arm. My lungs started to burn. I looked up. There, one hundred feet above me, my boat cast a small shadow on the surface of the water. It felt so close. I could almost reach it. The shadow grew and grew until everything was dark.15 February 2021 - Grass And Stone

These hills have bones. The rotted stumps of stonework still stand against the wind. Grass, seas of grass, long and waving, bright and muted, endless grass. It washes around the base of dead towers, towers that rise coldly into the warm daylight. The sun and the rain feeds the grass, and the grass keeps growing, but nothing feeds the stones. Not anymore.

They used to grow. I would walk the hills and where there had been no stones, stones would be. I have not traveled as far. I walk less now. But when I get to these hills I remember them before the stones arose. They were bare and clean, clothed with only the swaying, dancing grass.

I have come here now, at the end, to pass on. There is a hill that never saw a stone. A single tree stood at the top of this hill, guarding against the growth of the stones. Towers and walls and houses grew, lichen like, across this hilly country, but never here.

I am almost at the top. I am tired. The walking has worn me out. The grass brushes against my legs and my fingertips. It smells like a mountain spring. There will be rain tonight. For now, the sun is out, far away but somehow warming still. I am halfway. I am more than halfway. The grass ushers me forward with a gentleness I had forgotten.

I rest my hand on the trunk of the tree; it’s warm from the daylight now. Even the light looks warm. The sun is dipping close to the mountains far away, and it starts to look almost red. I sit down against the trunk. The grass dances softly, beside me, on the next hill, and the next, all the way to the mountains’ bright edge.16 February 2021 - Cloakless

Only a Northern girl like me would end up so disheveled on a Sunday. My hair was flying, my dress was all in shambles, and the mud on my feet made my black shoes look brown. This wind was a nuisance but I had nobody but myself to blame for not wearing a proper cloak. The clouds looked like rain too. It was going to be a long walk home.

The path bent up away from the village and into the forest before it reached my house. I hadn’t made it to the edge of the woods yet when I felt the first drop of rain. It splashed right on my hand, bigger than usual and cold as ice. It was too far to run all the way home, but I dashed ahead to at least get under the cover of the trees.

It was dark in the forest even though some of the leaves had started to fall. I never liked it. Over the years I had grown from feeling afraid the whole two miles through the woods to eventually getting to be quite familiar with the different twists and turns, even to the point of recognizing rocks and roots along the way.

The rain had picked up a lot by the end of the forest trail. I couldn’t see my house yet, but it was only another few miles around the side of the hill. We had built it next to a stream that ran down the far side of the hill so that we would always have fresh water, even in the dry season and the middle of winter. It was more walking to get back from the town, but it was worth it.

Strangely, the rain felt even colder now. I was shivering after only a few minutes of walking. My dress was soaked through. I debated running, but it was still a long way off. Nothing was worse than getting cold after breaking a sweat.

The rain suddenly turned to hail. I panicked. I was out in the open. My teeth chattered as I tried to shield my head from the pelting ice. I was walking along, arms up and head down, when I realized I had fallen. My knees were numb, and the hail was getting bigger. My whole body began to feel warm as the freezing, knocking, cracking kept up incessantly. It felt like someone had just tucked me into the biggest, warmest bed. My eyes were already closed, and they stayed that way.17 February 2021 Temperature Change

Last night was rough. The desert dropped in temperature as soon as the sun was down and it must have been well below freezing. I woke up this morning feeling stiff and achy. Not just from yesterday’s long ride, but from the cold. I lay on my back, looking up at the black sky. There was a warm, purple glow on the horizon where the sun was coming up. I rolled over, got to my knees, and stretched.

I stumbled around my tiny camp for a few minutes before I realized I was no closer to making coffee. I slapped my face a little bit to get the blood flowing. My stove started easily, and water was boiling in no time. The smell of coffee blended with the desert sand brought back memories of past adventures. I rolled my sleeping bag up and sat on it, leaning back against my motorcycle. The sun climbed slowly while I sipped my coffee.

Hours later, I was hot, sweaty, pumping with adrenaline, and flying through the never-ending dunes. Sand blasted all around me as I crested yet another enormous rise. I gunned the engine just before the top, sending me sailing. In the long seconds while I floated above the earth, I saw that the dunes tapered off fairly soon. The sea glittered off to my right, and rocky plains stretched out ahead.

Exhaustion hit me well before I reached the hard ground. By the time I was riding on the flatlands I was drifting mentally. It was dangerous, but I couldn’t think of returning home defeated. The light was dim and the shadows were long. A ravine opened up right in front of me. I floated again, this time uncontrollably. It felt like I fell for hours, hearing the wind around me, seeing every stone, every scraggly bush, smelling the dust of the dried waterway below me. I hit the ground seconds later. Everything erupted into flames.18 February 2021 - Good Game

This game just got un-fixed. They couldn’t control me. I wasn’t going to let some lousy thugs and gangsters blackmail me into losing. I never lost. Their money be damned. They might control the betting, but they sure as hell wouldn’t push me around and undercut my game. It made me heart pound.

The game started. I tapped the ball to Luca and he took it right down the middle, dashing past a midfielder. He met heavy resistance after that, pulled up short, and swung a pass outside, splitting the defense. I saw an opportunity for a run. I worked my way towards the far goal post, making sure to seem unhurried. Then, in a sudden dodge, I sprinted full-speed past a defender. I looked up, and Carlos had sent me a beautiful pass sailing through the air over everyone’s heads. I lined up and struck the ball before it even hit the ground. It whipped through the air, right past the goalkeeper’s hands and into the back of the net.

At the end of the game, we were up by two points. I had scored two of our four total, and had an assist with the final goal. Thoroughly un-fixed. Nobody could make me lose if I didn’t want to. I could carry this whole team on my back just from sheer force of will. Those mafia boys had another thing coming if they wanted me to just roll over.

I was the last one out of the locker room. I heard a noise in the back. The hair on my neck stood up. I lugged m duffle bag up onto my right-hand shoulder and went to leave. I should have gotten out sooner. A goon came out of nowhere with a pistol, and another one with an American baseball bat. I pulled my own pistol up out of the bag and shot them both before they could start talking. Nobody was going to make me lose at my own game.19 February 2021 - Seal or No Seal

I couldn’t see much from where I lay. My cheek was pressed against the thin wooden planks of the bow deck and I had closed one eye, so the ocean was the only thing in my line of sight. It came in and out of view as the boat dipped and rose in the swell of the waves. Afternoon sunshine poured generously across the bay. The water glittered, but something dark seemed to be bobbing slowly in an out of the water a few hundred feet away.

It looked like a seal, but I knew seals didn’t move that way. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore it. I was too warm to be on high alert right now. Nobody knew we were here, and we had nothing to worry about.

I must have dozed off. The sun was lower now and not so warm. I sat up and looked around. The boat was quieter than it had been. The water still lapped at the hull, but the babble of voices was gone. There was another boat in the bay now too. I heard a loud crash from the rear. I jumped to my feet and sprinted aft.

The crash I’d heard was the motor. Everything smelled like gasoline fumes and sea spray. I stood, su-dazed, groggy from my afternoon nap, and confused about where everyone was and what could have happened. My phone rang, and I jogged back toward the front of the boat. I picked it up.

“We have the coins now. This is your punishment.”

The line went dead. I saw the bobbing head again in the water, but this time it was closer and moving away. It wasn’t a head, but a periscope. Then came the explosions. They started at the rear of the boat, and tipped everything forward. I fell onto the deck, just before the second explosion hit, tearing the wood planks apart. I felt my body crumble just before my consciousness disappeared.20 February 2021 - Ancient Hunter

The river was oily. The water smelled of animals and machinery. It had always been that way for me, but my grandfather told me stories about how he had played on its banks when it was clean and fresh. It was more dangerous then too; his best friend had been taken by a crocodile as a small boy and had never been seen since. I couldn’t imagine anything living in the water now. It looked like rust.

But there was something in the water. The other girls and boys wouldn’t go near it at night. Every now and then, people from the town went missing after going to get water. I wanted to know if the crocodile was still there. The teacher last week said they can live for up to 100 years, so it could just still be around if it was an old one.

I sat thinking, wondering where crocodiles go after they get chased away from a village. Is it hard for them to swim upstream, or do they always move downstream? They had to be able to do both, or else they would all end up in the sea eventually, wouldn’t they?

I stood up and started to walk along the bank. I peered into the dark water. The shiny trails of oil on the surface made it hard to see down in, but I thought I saw something moving. For a moment, I was paralyzed. Should I lean in closer to see what it was, or stay a safe distance away?

While I was deciding, the water rose up and split in half. A mouth with deep rows of teeth on either side burst from the middle, grabbed my ankle, and before I knew it I was being dragged in. The water was lukewarm and tasted like death. It got in my nose, and the pain in my legs gave way to panic in my chest as I struggled to break free. The surface got further and further away, and the water got colder. It was fully dark by the time my lungs gave out.21 February 2021 - Potatoes

Potatoes are the most dangerous thing in the world. I am addicted. My life changed dramatically the day I first tasted a potato chip. I was a child, and I was not prepared for what my body was about to experience. A classmate offered a bag of thin crisps to me. The shiny foil of the bag’s interior reflected light onto every side of the delicious carbohydrates within. It was like looking into a diamond. I reached in, picked a single chip from the bag, and placed it on my tongue. The salt immediately registered, followed by a satisfying echo of flavor in the fat. I bit. The crunch sealed the deal and I was hooked for life.

Why do I count an innocent tuber as the most dangerous thing in the world if I am so enamored? They have ruined me even as they have made me. I live alone. I spend all my time thinking about, growing, and cooking potatoes. Imagine my story at parties: I dropped out of school to grow and cook potatoes and potato chips, respectively. While there was no physical danger, I found that it was socially repulsive to share this secret. I must admit there was a certain manic look in my eyes when I discussed my fondness for the humble potato chip. I started describing myself as someone who worked in agriculture, but the effect was largely the same.

I maintained my warehouse with utmost care. It was important that the lights not be so bright they lead to premature ripening in these photo-sensitive fruit of the earth. I had been experimenting with leaving the lights all the way off, and the results were promising. The potatoes kept a superior level of freshness, and that allowed for a significantly crisper end product. I smiled as I drove the forklift, thinking about the marked improvement. The lights on the forklift may need to be dimmed as well, now that I thought about it. And it could be worthwhile to lower the temperature.

Would increasing the air pressure provide an environment even more like underground? I mused over the difficulties as I moved crates of potatoes from the loading dock to the inner sanctum of the pitch-black potato warehouse. My absentmindedness left me and the lift somewhat stuck, and I had to reverse down a long corridor to get back out. I rounded a corner in reverse and crashed into a towering stack of freshly-picked potatoes from the farm. They fell, knocking into other stacks of crates, and I was pummeled with a deadly barrage of potatoes from on high.

The impact drove me from the forklift and pressed me against the floor. Thousands of pounds of potatoes rained down. I was being squashed into jelly. One thought kept repeating in my head: how could I have forgotten about last night’s harvest? 4,236 potatoes, stacked neatly in Isle 5. I should have remembered the potatoes.22 February 2021 - Smooth Jazz

There were two people standing at the front of the crowd. One of them had an inflatable guitar and the other had an inflatable saxophone. They didn’t show up together, but as the music writhed and slithered they had found each other and started a mute jam session. My guitar was getting weird and calling out to them, and somehow they heard it. The music was the same as always, but it felt different experiencing it so vicariously. They clearly knew the songs, the way they jumped and cavorted on the beat, but having each other and those plastic, air-filled tools in their hands made the song live larger.

I made the obvious decision to invite them up on stage for the next song. Things died down as the current track wrapped up and the drum solo carried us into a welcome, sweaty, water-craving break. I called them up and the crowd thronged in. Seeing two of their number elevated to godhood was good sport. Security team members milled about, checking for knives or guns or whatever else they spent their time worrying about, and then the duo were hoisted up onto the stage.

That ended up being a change in precedent. By the time we were half way through our set, more and more people had emerged and worked their way on stage. The rest of the band was digging it—I’m sure the drugs and drinks helped with that—but something felt off. I couldn’t be sure what it was, but through all the noise my body was telling me to get out, get away, run. I looked around. I was surrounded by smiling, singing faces, but my stomach was in knots. In answer to the knots, the floor cracked suddenly and we fell with splintering wood, the electric clicking silence of instruments disconnecting, and confused yells. I hit the concrete basement floor beneath the stage with a heavy thud. The saxophone player fell even harder on top of me. I could taste blood on my teeth. I coughed and joined a different melody.23 February - Gone Fishing

Perfect mornings always started with a pole in one hand and a tackle box in the other, walking in the cool air before sunrise, hearing the birds warming up their wings and starting to call to each other. You’d wade through the wet, dewy grass to get to the water’s edge, find somewhere in the mud you could stand without sinking. I like to be still and watch the water before I started setting up my rod. A lot could change day-to-day and it didn’t make sense to just start casting and hoping for the best.

The right tackle would always make the difference between landing fish all morning and going home empty-handed. Line thickness, weights, lures, rod, reel; everything played its part. Today hadn’t changed much from yesterday, but I had a feeling that the fish would be closer to the bank, so I changed the weight out accordingly. My hands were a little stiff and cold, but the sun was on its way up. I would be warm soon enough.

I cast a little too far on my first throw, overcompensating for the stiffness in my muscles. The line sailed through the air and the lure plopped half way into the river. Strangely, I had a bite almost immediately. I played the line a little bit, keeping tension, but with a sudden jerk the fish left me unbalanced and I tumbled headfirst into the reedy water by the riverbank.

I struggled to get my face up out of the water. The mud was sucking and deep and I couldn’t get my hands down onto anything. I found a bunch of reeds and pulled hard. My body was too heavy and too stuck in the mud. I sunk deeper with every effort to shake myself loose.24 February 2021 - Thermal Principles

My head hurt. I kept my eyes closed as I regained consciousness in hopes that the headache would abate. It didn’t. I opened my eyes and realized that we were spinning crazily. Stars whirled in a blur outside the viewports. Then it hit me. I couldn’t hear anything. Even moving my own mouth didn’t make noise. I snapped my fingers next to my ears, then tried rubbing them. No sound, but they both felt wet. It was blood. I couldn’t remember what had happened.

I reached out and grabbed ahold of the frame. The metal was hot to the touch. It was unusual for such a small pod to be so warm. I got closer to a viewport and realized why: I was entering atmosphere. I looked back towards the rest of the space station should have been. There was nothing there; where there should have been half a mile of scientific test pods, solar arrays, storage units and backup support systems, all I could see was dark space with a rotating blur of stars. I couldn’t see what was ahead of me, or what atmosphere I was falling into, but it kept getting warmer.

All the systems were down. Life support was non-electrical, so the chemical processes would keep converting CO2 into oxygen, but it wouldn’t matter. As the walls of the craft slowly climbed in temperature I would eventually boil in here. That would happen long before I hit the surface of whatever planet we had been over when I detached. I looked out the view port again and realized that I hadn’t detached. The whole station was raining down around me. I hadn’t seen them at first against the dark of space, but I caught glimpses of the wreckage now as friction increased and components started to burn up.

I wasn’t going to go out like this. I still had blood on my hands from my eardrums. My fingers left sticky red marks all over the machined aluminum as I unlocked an emergency landing suit from the locker. It was folded up impossibly small, and it took me a full two minutes to get it out and on. The trainers back home would have been appalled. I felt calm with the suit on. With no electricity I didn’t have to override anything to get the door open, but it was so hot that it burnt my hands. The door opened with a rush of fire and I was violently pulled up and out. I think it broke my leg, but it didn’t matter. I fell for a moment, slowed by the vacuum effect of my rapid exit, and then the burning began. I looked down through the friction flames and saw a vast blue planet below me. Somewhere down there it was ice cold.25 February 2021 - Fresh Air

Coniferous trees release a chemical compound into the air that helps you breathe more freely. Whether you’re walking through a pine forest, a stand of firs, a sequoia glade, or even some citrus orchards, your lungs will open up in response to these terpene chemicals. I could feel it happening right now. Not only were the enormous sequoias peaceful and majestic, but they were physically connecting me with my surroundings by bringing more air into my lungs with every breath. I had never felt so at one with nature. I pulled out a can of Coke to commemorate the moment.

The cold, bubbly, sharp and yet somehow smooth-tasting liquid splashed into my mouth. Images of parties  and polar bears sprang to mind. What a beautiful way to experience this park. I cracked open a second can. My thirst thoroughly quenched, it was time to find a good spot for a picture.

I may not be the best iPhone photographer, but I do know that trees are notoriously hard to take photos of. Unless you can get far enough away from them to establish a silhouette, you are better off using them as a backdrop for something else. These trees were as tall as any building I’d seen. There was no chance I could get a clear shot of them. I walked over to the cliff, hoping that there would be a good vista.

After a few minutes of walking I realized I might have a shot after all. The cliff hadn’t opened out onto much, just the tops of lots more trees, but when I looked back it seemed that one tree stood out apart from the others. It was just separate enough that it could frame up nicely in a picture. I squinted at the screen, trying to balance the composition. The top of the tree was too close to the top of the picture, then trunk of the tree was getting cut off.

I wrestled with these adjustments for a while, moving slightly, taking a step here, zooming in there. Without warning my foot didn’t land on anything when I stepped backwards. I tumbled into space, flailing my arms for some semblance of balance, but it was too late. I was free falling hundreds of feet towards the tree tops at the base of the cliff. I realized I was yelling—my lungs still weren’t empty when I hit the ground.26 February 2021 - Gunman

Gunshots echoed through the dusty streets, harsh sound waves bouncing off of adobe houses. Weathered wooden plates and bowls rattled on baked clay countertops. Then silence. A burro flicked its tail and twitched its ears, trying to rid itself of the annoying ringing that sounded flies. Nearby, furtive steps in the dust.

The sweat was dripping from my nose but I couldn’t move for fear of giving away my position. I had managed to scale a ladder (rickety as hell) during the last exchange. Moses and his boys were spreading out across the whole town, and I could see it all play out from the roof I lay on. They inched through alleyways. It looked the way water from a faraway rain looks when it starts to fill up a dry riverbed. Slow at first, but there was nothing you could do to stop them.

Then another round of gunfire. They must have found Sánchez. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. The gunfire stopped for a moment, then picked up again. I inched forward, trying to stay invisible. Then I saw Moses. He had three gunman with him. I sunk back down. There was no way. My mind raced back to my horse, that girl in El Paso, and that bottle of mezcal I’d shared with Jeremiah last year. I smiled, then stopped myself. I smelled the crisp smoke of gunpowder and another memory filled my mind: lying in the dust shooting prairie dogs with my father.

“A gunman always takes his shot,” he’d say as we picked off varmints for hours.

I peeked over the roof. Moses was still standing there. He had a big black hat on and a pair of revolvers on his hips. He was gesturing for one of his boys to give him a rifle. In one smooth motion I leapt to my feet, steadied myself, and leveled my Winchester. Moses was looking away, across the town. I breathed out and squeezed my finger. He collapsed backwards.

The water that had spread through the town turned to hornets, and before I could jump down they had riddled me clean through. Every sting hurt more than the last, but I dropped to my knees and smiled, then keeled face first onto the dry wooden boards of the roof. Down inside the house, blood dripped slowly down onto the floor, each drop sending up a little puff of dust.27 February 2021 - Wing to Wing

I am a bird. I feel at home in the sky. It had taken a few tries, but now that my glider was the right size I was looping from thermal to thermal and riding the rising hot air across the valley. The land beneath me, pastoral and serene, rolled slowly by. My hands gripped the cool metal steering rods and I turned smoothly into a long banked turn. The gentle curve in my trajectory brought me back over a large dark field that had been producing a column of hot air all morning, and I felt the wings of the glider heave and lift as they caught the updraft.

I wasn’t alone though. This time I was sharing the thermal with a hawk. I couldn’t tell what kind it was from this distance, but it noticed me and flapped upwards, annoyed to be sharing. I floated along, looking down at the grass and cows below. A strange tearing sound to my left shook me from my aimless daydreaming. I looked at the wing and saw there was a tear in it. The hawk had dive-bombed right through the fabric!

It was below me now, flapping back up to gain altitude. I tried my best to manage the draft of the thermal, but I was no match for a creature with real wings. Then I realized—I was losing altitude because of the rip.

The hawk, above me now, dove again, this time tearing a bigger hole in the other wing. My chest tightened up and my hands started sweating. I pulled down into a dive. I needed to get on the ground before this bird tore my wings to ribbons. I had plenty of time. At this rate I would be safe well before it could dive through enough times to knock me out of the sky.

The hawk had realized this as well. I felt it hit the wing a third time, but it wasn’t diving right through. It hooked its talons into the fabric and pulled, tearing a gaping void into the wing. I had no control now; the glider dipped sharply to the side and entered a steep spiral. I struggled against the metal of the steering, but it was immovable at this speed. The fields raced up to meet me. The hawk made a final attack, striking the only fabric left intact. I was in free fall. I am not a bird.28 February 2021 - Interloper

I had hunted him down and cornered him in a curiosities shop. The street outside was busy and noisy, but as I closed the door behind me it grew quiet. I paused. It was like stepping into a completely different city. Dust hung in the air, barely moving. My eyes adjusted to the dim light and the shadowy shapes began to resolve into furniture, cameras, picture frames, dresses and coats. Nothing was moving. Distant echoes of the world outside faded as I stepped further in, knife at the ready.

The blade was an ancient relic, imbued with the strength of a distant, mountainous land. Kings had fought there in the dawn of the world and this blade belonged to the last to sit on their storied throne. Long searching had lead me to it, forgotten in its sheath in an attic above a coffeehouse by the harbor. It fit my hand perfectly.

My footsteps were kicking up too much dust. I slowed my pace and listened carefully. There was a rustle of paper in the far corner. A decoy? A mouse?

A pile of boxes to my left exploded and he emerged, scales, teeth, claws. Impressive but no match for the dark metal in my hand. Black steel met white scales, and we crashed through a stack of antique furniture, then rolled onto the floor. He was dead before we hit the ground. I lay for a moment, gathered my strength, then heaved his body off of me and stood.

Dust swirled in and out of the light that slipped in through gaps in the newspaper-covered windows. These reptilian off-world bounty hunters never did their research. The curses on this blade had been around longer than spaceflight itself.1 March 2021 - Hot Shoot

“I think we need more lights.” This photographer, some famous one I had never heard of, was having an affair with an excess of wave-particle duality matter. I was sure he was trying to use photographic lighting melt off what little clothing I had on. This, after I sat in front of the camera shivering in next season’s latest erotic loungewear for almost an hour until he showed up, fresh from the shops, with a whole moving cart full of new lights.

“It’s an untamed technique,” he promised myself and the rest of the crew. I didn’t care, but I was very happy to have so much infrared spectrum shining on me. I went from cold hands to an almost-headache in a matter of five minutes once he had all the lights set up. But then, naturally, “all” seemed to be an incredibly relative term. Naturally, as a famous shooter, he had other photographer friends with lights of their own.

“Can’t you just use a longer exposure?” I muttered to myself. Two of his friends showed up with more lighting and they talked excitedly about this new, preposterously low-ISO film stock that had come out. Apparently the grain was so fine that it was smaller than digital pixels could pick up on a scanning bed. What I understood that to mean was that the sweat dripping from every pore was going to show up on camera and ruin the whole “sharp elegance” campaign we were working on.

One of the lights shorted out, flickering and sparking. Then another, and another. Flames leapt up all around set. I couldn’t move because of all the ridiculous staging we had set up (which had kept me from taking breaks off set to cool down), and as the flames roared through the studio the exotically domestic scene we had so carefully pieced together turned into a furnace. The combustion of all that potential energy felt even worse than the lights had. As I succumbed to the inferno, I could have sworn I heard the camera shutter clicking.2 March 2021 - Midnight Mischief

Something woke me up in the dead of night. My hammock swayed back and forth as the ship rolled over waves. Everything seemed quiet here belowdecks. What had woken me up? A half memory of my dream lingered behind my eyes. I had been on a long walk, and had just ended up in a forest that wasn’t on my map. I had smelled someone baking bread in the woods and I was searching for it, but that’s when I had started from my sleep with a sudden sense of dread.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. I rolled from my hammock onto the cool wood of the deck. My eyes had adjusted to the dark so I made my way to the stairs without much trouble, even though it was pitch black in the crew quarters. What I saw above on deck was even stranger than I could have imagined.

The sails were all set at full strength but I couldn’t see anybody aloft. Nobody was on deck. I almost shouted, then thought better of it. There was mischief afoot. I jogged lightly over to the wheel. My bare feet made hardly any sound on the wood. The wheel was lashed in place with a short length of rope and a few clever knots. Where were we headed in the middle of the night?

I walked back up to the prow, my heart beating faster from the movement and from the fear that was growing in my chest. It was foggy. I couldn’t see very far ahead. Suddenly a ship loomed out of the grey mists. The deck was swarming with crew members, the ropes were a mess, the sails were ragged… and there was a black flag flying! I fell backwards from the railing in shock.

I leapt to my feet, breathed in deeply to sound the alarm as loud as I could yell, and then felt a hand on my mouth, felt a knife slide into my back.

“You shouldn’t be up here, Mr. Sykes.” I couldn’t tell whose voice it was. The knife tore across my neck, and the mutineer shoved me overboard. I hit the icy water with a slap, just in time to hear the iron hooks of grappling lines clank onto the deck above me. I choked and spluttered in the water, then sank beneath the surface.3 March 2021 - Fear

The field of battle is the birth of all gods. This grass we trod down was the only manger we would need. We rushed towards the waiting mass of the enemy, those city builders, those men of stone who knew not their place. What could they tell us of the hills and the forests? Nothing. They knew only what they made themselves. We were at a jogging pace, closing the distance with light hearts. Our archers set forth a spray of twinkling death into the morning sky. The arrows flashed red in the rising sun, then plunged into the enemy. I could see their faces and hear their anguish. We began to run.

I lifted my spear as our footsteps turned into a storm sound. Our voices rose to match it, mine springing out without thinking. Their lines were so orderly. It would be a joy to break them. Torvoss was out ahead, and carried only his mace. I saw him draw first blood, ripping a shield down, crushing a man in a single blow. And then we were upon them. I felt the favored pain in my arm when my spear drove home. My sword came next as I dodged their own clumsy spears. They didn’t know how to attack, only to defend. They belonged inside their walls. I slew another, then another. Every which way I saw them falling and us cutting them down. We were favored to be gods.

But then the thunder changed. Lower, heavier, like the voices of the heavens from far across the valley. My heart checked itself. What spell was this? Then I saw them. Men with four legs, twice as tall, each with a head of a man and a head of a beast. Like sheep, but with the strength of oxen. I felt the ground shake as they neared, saw their line break into us like water. I would kill one, if nothing else. I charged with a new yell, slew a foot soldier, rode him into the ground and leapt up, sword point right into the beast man. His eyes were wide with fear, and he split, the human from the beast. I felt his spear in my chest, but I cut him again as we fell. On the ground now, he was just a man. We would both die here, but his fear debased him. Only I would live again as a god. I laughed and pulled the spear from me. Warm blood; the end.4 March 2021 - On Your Toes

The ballet is a perfect place to kill someone. The refined elegance of a show distracts audience members, transports them to far-off palaces, deserts, winters, and they are completely unaware of their surroundings. I loved dressing up for it and fitting in. If you play your part you fade into the background… unless of course you find yourself in a lead role.

My knife, perhaps more than myself, would play the true lead role. I wouldn’t last as long as either the blade or the results of my heroic deed. I eyed my target. She was delicately featured—a deceptive biological fact. Her slight form cloaked her obsession with brutalizing her political adversaries until they were driven to hire women like me to do what words could not.

The show was nearing the end. Colorful dancers whirled across the stage. I made my move. I looked at my watch several times in quick succession over the next three minutes. I then stood, walked to the exit with my head down and a cell phone out by my side—an over-committed businesswoman making an early exit to attend to an important call. I played my part with the flavor of past experience.

I ducked into the hallway, silent and vacant, then snuck up to the box where my target was sitting with her security guards. It took all my craft to edge in during the rapturous applause. The knife suddenly went home as I struck from the shadows. Timed perfectly, the lights came up as I slipped back out, momentarily blinding the guards. They roared into action, but it was too late. I was already tucked behind a door. The crowd flowed out and I disappeared among them. Just another woman on the phone after the ballet. Just another dancer following the choreography.5 March 2021 - Space Drift

Air was down. The sublight drive was down. The supralight drive was at 10% functionality. We were drifting along at warp speed without the ability to safely return to gravitational speeds, and on top of that we were burning through our reserves of oxygen. There must have been a malfunction in the control unit. How else could so many systems bust themselves up at once? I had read stories of submariners trapped on the ocean floor when their ballast tanks stopped working. Our tin can was billions of dollars more expensive and yet the feeling of helplessness felt exactly the same.

I sent some of the crew to check the controller, and the rest fanned out and did a general spec. Within twenty minutes all the radios had gone silent. No calls for help, no screams, just more and more silence. The hair on my arms was standing on end. Then the lights went out. The dim red safety lights flicked on, turning the shiny chrome of the cabin into a bloody reflection of itself. I armed my taser and cursed the official regulations that forbade freighters from carrying real weapons.

I found the first dead crew member only 500 feet from the cabin. It was Trallexi, but her limbs were all missing. No blood or sign of violence, just a torso belonging to someone who I had seen alive just minutes ago. Then I realized why there wasn’t any blood: she was frozen stiff. Suction kicked in. There was a hole somewhere in the hull! Whatever had been freeze drying my crew had drilled into the ship somewhere and was leaving. I banged and careened off of the corridors, accumulating frozen bodies as the mess of the dead coalesced towards the vacuum point.

We crashed through the gaping hole torn in the hull, and my suit caught on a jagged edge of the metal. I tried to grab a pipeline or a frame strut, but the jostle of icy flesh around me was too chaotic to even orient myself correctly. We floated out into space, my suit losing air rapidly. As the cold began to set in I saw a bright red ship detach itself several thousand feet down the hull. Another vacuum puncture. More frozen bodied floated out, and we drifted into space, the frozen and the freezing, the dead and the dying. At least dead submariners washed up on shore somewhere. We could be drifting here for thousands of years.6 March 2021 - Ponied

The ponies got me. Their hooves were too much. The dog had run in, quick, nipping, yipping, but it was too small and too loud and they turned on the poor thing. They trampled it so fast I couldn’t even remember seeing it happen, or maybe didn’t want to. I ran in after him, calling his name out, but by the time the horses backed off there was hardly anything left of my dear little creature. I started yelling and shouting and crying all at once, kicking up a commotion. My ruckus must have made those ponies turn sour somehow. All of a sudden they start pawing and stamping at me, working up the courage, testing me and forcing me backwards. Before I knew it one was running headlong at me. I tried to calm it but that great big barrel of a body rushed at me and only dodged at the last second when I clapped loudly at it. I could smell the sweat on its mane in the air that followed its charge. Then the next one charged me, followed by its twin. There was a madness in them that I’d never seen before, and I was sitting confused in the mud without knowing how I got there after it toppled me with a brawny shoulder. I hadn’t changed their feed or anything. It was winter, so there shouldn’t be any mating disagreements to rile them up. I couldn’t figure it out. The group came at me all at once then, and it didn’t take long for them to start trampling and breaking bones. I didn’t have much fight in me then. You can’t fight what you don’t know. I sure didn’t know what all this was about. I guessed I may as well die a confused man as die an angry man.7 March 2021 - Vantage Point

I could see the beach from up here on the tiled rooftop. I had been lounging all morning, watching the surfer’s unending conquest of the waves. From this distance the water sounded like a gentle hum of static and the surfers looked like toys. I sipped on my Bloody Mary and looked at my watch. Ten minutes to go—never enough time.

Then the air raid siren started blaring. The boys on the beach scrambled ashore while I watched. There must have been head winds for the planes to be so early. The fighters and bombers roared overhead moments later, ripping into the anti-aircraft guns and the ammunition depot. A door opened softly behind me.

“I’m a little too late, Colonel, but it seems that you were perhaps a little bit too cavalier in your liaisons. Margaret told me everything.” He held his pistol out and smiled with disdain.

“Thomas, always the clever one, eh?” I had never liked Thomas Welzinger and his do-gooder attitudes about the war. “You should be more pragmatic. The war of morals you think we’re fighting is manufactured. It’s purely economic.”

The anti-aircraft batteries were operating now, thudding the sky with black pock marks. I saw a plane go down in a stream of oily grey smoke. It dashed through a building, bricks everywhere.

“If it were only about the economy then it should have been a diplomatic issue. The use of force always implies morals. But, I feel my time is not best spent lecturing traitors.” He fired.

I staggered back into my chair, blood coursing down the front of my shirt and onto my neatly pressed khaki shorts. My head lolled, and Thomas was gone when I regained my bearings. All I could see now was the waves. They were empty. There were a few surfboards scattered across the beach.8 March 2021 - Tourist Trap

This little dingy white moped was putting along just fine until I splashed through an oily puddle. Now it was misfiring like crazy, unspent fuel popping and snapping out of the muffler with distracting regularity. I couldn’t tell what was wrong with it—was there water in the air intake, or an electrical short? It didn’t matter too much as long as I got the pizzas delivered on time.

I wound my way through the crowded streets and narrow alleyways. A maze of piping and conduits wove across every wall. Premium sushi shops, quiet and dimly lit, sat next to American fast food chains. It all blended into a vague sense of familiarity despite only having landed the job an hour ago. Then I realized what it was: every street smelled the same. Clean, but with undertones of damp concrete, slightly burnt cooking oil, and gasoline.

My Japanese was terrible, but Pizza Hut’s recent expansion plan was to hire native English speakers and I fit the bill. It would have been better if I were American, but Canadian was close enough. Sadly my motorcycle license was still pending when I showed up today, so they plopped me on the owner’s son’s moped and here I was. Ruining the moped and probably letting the pies get cold.

I glanced down at my phone, and the GPS was spinning crazily. I had just missed my turn. Too busy reliving the awkward conversation about my license, probably. I slowed down and attempted a U-turn. Out of nowhere a truck backed up, leaving an alleyway at such speed that I couldn’t stop or turn to avoid it. The truck bed jutted out at head height. My only hope was that they would see me and stop before I collided with them. They didn’t.9 March 2021 - Orbital Chemistry

“Hey Hal, there’s something wrong with the generator again, can you go take a look?”

I stumbled out into the cold of the airlock. The heavy duty rubberized plastic shuddered and crackled in the winter wind outside. I stripped down to my base layer, then put on the heavy, clunky, winterized maintenance suit. The yellow rubber weighed more than it should have, but it was triple insulated against the roaring chemical winter of Europa.

Jupiter loomed somewhere overhead. I could tell from the shadow, even if I couldn’t see through all the flying ice chips. I fought to put one foot in front of the other. I turned the corner of the barracks and saw an enormous shape looming above the generator. The darkness, the wind, the icy hail… it could have been a hallucination, but I was sure. It was a carapace-covered worm. Scaly and unthinkably massive, feeding on the energy and warmth from the generator.

I couldn’t think. I stared for at least a minute before my wireless radio hummed and snapped with the static of Sugiyama’s voice again.

“Halpert, where are you? We’re starting to lose our life support in here!”

The set was broken and I couldn’t respond, but it snapped me out of my stupor. I trudged forward towards this horrible, bus-sized parasite. It noticed me. I dove back around the corner as it turned the dull sheen of its eyes towards me. My suit caught on a hardpoint that was meant to be used to tie down a warm-weather awning. The awning had sat in the back of the store room since we got here. Apparently this barracks was a reused Mars model, and nobody had thought to ditch the convertible top when they winterized the package.

The worm was on me before I could stand. I felt my feet dissolve in alien acid. The nerves disappeared too quickly to react or to feel pain. It bit down further, and I tried to roll over so I could hack at it with my knife. By the time I rotated my body, my waist had been dissolved as well. I melted away inside my suit, pooling in frozen red puddles inside the acid-scorched rubber of my suit.

“Hal, life support is down. It sounds like there’s something outside the barracks.”10 March 2021 - Sky Dove

I lifted the ear protector slightly to see how loud the plane was with the door open, then reflexively let it snap back onto my head when the wall of noise bashed me over the head. The air is thinner at 15,000 feet above the world, but it doesn’t sound any thinner. I checked my parachute bag one last time and readier myself by the door. The light turned green and I stepped out into pure gravity, spinning for fun.

The air cushioned me and that perfect feeling of weightlessness settled in. I grinned as I rolled and spun in the air. The horizon swung in and out of view, and the earth below somehow remained distant even as I raced towards it. I checked my altimeter. It was time to slow my descent. My hand felt cold and stiff from the wind I’d whipped through, but the parachute cord pulled easily away from the pack.

Too easily. It seemed to be broken. I tried it again but nothing happened. I gave it a final sharp pull, and the handle came off in my hands. I switched over to the backup parachute. That handle felt tight and wouldn’t even budge when I yanked on it with both hands. Everything I could see held very still. I looked out towards the horizon, and I could see trees silhouetted against the rising sun. Grassy fields stretched out below me in every direction.

I stopped the panic that was coursing through my body, unclipped the parachute bag, threw it as hard as I could, and watched it spin away from me. The ground was growing closer now. The horizon grew further and further away as I neared the green of the earth. I looked, but didn’t see any buildings. I swung back over and looked up towards the sky.11 March 2021 - Impossible Impropriety

Light streamed into the hotel lobby. My brown leather bags (accented with the most exquisite tiny checker patter—they made smile every time I looked at them) were glowing and lively. The flower vase refracted a beautiful rainbow that gently colored the white marble of the desk it sat on. The smell of coffee and toast wafted in from the other room, and I could hear the murmur of morning conversation and the tinkle of silver cutlery. Sadly, nobody was behind the desk. It was unusual for the lobby to be so empty, especially on a weekend.

I clutched at my stomach. In stark contrast to the perfect surroundings, I felt as though I was filled with everything that was most horrible in the world. I had been in agony ever since I ate the pâté on the plane. Nobody else had had an issue (I asked) so I began to wonder if it was the food or if I had simply come down with a bug.

There still wasn’t anyone at the desk. I wanted to shout, but it just felt so out of place. The pain was confusing me, but I wouldn’t let a slight physical discomfort erode my manners so easily. I had been through worse before and made it just fine without putting anyone out on my account. It would have been different if I was traveling with someone else and they weren’t feeling well, but for myself there could be no request for special treatment. I would wait my turn like any other guest. I was certain that whatever was keeping the receptionist was well-worth their trouble.

I experienced a shuddering wave of nausea and fever. I fell forward, and could barely get my hand out in front of me to fend off the corner of the desk as I collapsed. Sweat beaded across my whole body, and I passed into darkness. I fought to open my eyes. It was still bright out, but I felt a strong sensation of falling into a tunnel or mine shaft. I was still lying on the floor, but everything was shutting down. There was a final sharp pain that radiated from my stomach into my spine, and then I felt nothing at all.12 March 2021 - Leftovers

I used to skip pebbles across the lake when the water was calm. It was meditative to watch the ripples fade into the distance when the morning light was soft and there was still fog and mist. I remember how big the stones would feel in my small hands as a child. I also remembered getting sand and grit all over my fingers. That’s how I felt now. Sand and grit all over my fingers. But it wasn’t sand or grit, it was sugar crystals.

Instead of water stretching out away from me, it was dough. Mountains of pizza dough. I snapped back to my work and continued pounding the sticky mixture until the sugar crystals dissolved into the mass of flour and water. I formed the blobs into soft round balls, then transferred them to quarter pans to proof.

There was a tab of acid or something leftover from last night. I was so tired and bored rolling up hundreds of balls of dough that I didn’t even care what it was. I took it… it definitely wasn’t acid. I had never had anything like this before…

The dough started to run away, jumping into the oven. All I could think was that I needed to turn it up to scare the dough back out. With only half an hour left until my prep shift overlapped with someone else’s shift, I managed to crank the ovens high enough to ignite the pizza boxes sitting in stacks on top of and next to the ovens. Or was that the dough that did that?

The blaze spread rapidly. It was so hot in there. I needed a drink. I opened up the cooler in the front, opened up a glass bottle of root beer, and took a long, deep swig. It was so nice to feel the cold on the inside and the hot on the outside. The whole building was burning now, and  I think my clothes were too. At least I didn’t have anything gritty on my hands anymore. I drifted off, a ripple riding out into the mists…13 March 2021 - Pass

The sky was turning purple just after the sun had set. Beck was on the radio. I was running on empty, but the tank was full of gas. It had been week after week of late-night shifts and odd jobs during the day, but now I was finally getting out. My body was tired but my mind was racing with possibilities. I pulled up to a stoplight on the edge of town. A pair of headlights pulled up behind me with uncanny menace. There was something aggressive about the way they stopped; sudden and just a little too close behind me.

I didn’t wait for the light to change to green. My tires screeched and left pink smoke in the red stoplight glare. I slapped it through the gears, rushing up to 3rd as I hit the mountain turns just outside of town. The headlights were well behind me, but keeping up. We ascended. Pine trees whipped by in the dark, and the road snaked away in front of me, turning, dipping and rising. I knew all the turns, but my heart still pounded. The leather on my steering wheel grew slippery with the sweat from my hands.

We were nearing the pass. I thought of what was behind me—pain, pressure, loss, unwanted memories, fear, and most of all an endless list of obligations. My mind filled with adrenaline from a sudden sharp crack behind me. Gunfire? I heard it again, then glass shattered behind me. I felt the warm night air rush in. Pain blossomed from my shoulder with another cracking sound. This was it. I could see the pass ahead of us, a lighter gap in the darkness of the mountains silhouetted against the night sky. I whipped the car around the next corner, but my shoulder was gone and my arm with it. My turn went wide, and I sailed through the metal guardrail. I heard the twisting and shrieking of the steel. The engine revved up as the wheels left the ground. My foot held the pedal down on the floor. I looked up and saw the pass one last time before the car fell to the cliffs below.14 March 2021 - Two Tones

The station was busier than usual. I walked down the worn concrete steps into a surprising jostle of commuters. The city noises faded away as I descended, but they were replaced with cell-phone conversations and someone busking passionately in a hallway somewhere further along. The jangly guitar added a buzz to the crowd that made it feel like I was standing outside a nightclub at 3am.

I gently and politely elbowed my way through the crowd towards my platform. The mix of languages around me covered almost every continent in the space of fifty feet. I pulled my headphones from my briefcase and tuned out from the busyness around me. The gentle Korean pop music helped me focus as I thought about the presentation. Marketing had borne the brunt of the changes and I had a lot to reorganize. I grimaced. Product launches were always such a nightmare.

The engineering team hadn’t told anyone about the colors on the hardshell plastic not matching the anodized aluminum until last week. Half of the aluminum parts were already at the assembly plant, and the rest were being shipped there this month. Changing the plastic parts would be easier, but we had already been storing crates of plastic components on site for months. So now it was up to my team to spin it as a “unique two-tone colorway.”

We stepped onto the train. It whooshed softly as it picked up speed out of the station. Disappearing into the cavernous darkness of the underground tunnel network, I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, resting it against the handrail I stood next to. It jolted me as we came to a screeching stop. Everyone on the train was thrown to the floor. I lay on top of someone else, and two people were inadvertently pinning me down. Everyone was shouting. Then I heard a deeper rumble. The scrambling paused, I smelled gasoline and dust, and a wall of fire ripped into the cabin. It was like a furnace. All I could think about in the midst of the deadly chaos was the face of the chief engineer as he explained how hard it is to match the color of two different materials.16 March 2021 - Cattle Thieves

The dogs had just herded the last of the cattle into the barn when I saw a light on the far side of the farm. Damn poachers.

“Come on boys, up you get!” I said as I dropped the tailgate. The dogs hopped up in, excited by the change to their routine. I climbed into the cab and turned the engine on. I revved the engine out of habit, and I could have sworn the light blinked in response, but there’s no way anyone could have heard that sound all the way across the valley.

We bounced and jolted our way over the rough, pot-hole-riddled dirt roads, then splashed through the shallow spot in the river. The dogs were loving it, and kept knocking around in the back as they play-fought each other.

The light was higher up than made sense. There weren’t any trees around, so as we got closer I kept craning my neck, leaning in close to the windshield to see what it was sitting on. It was also strange that it didn’t go out. Maybe it wasn’t poachers after all. The light dipped out of sight as I rounded shoulder of the hill.

I came up and around the other side of the hill and hit the brakes immediately. The light was floating. There was no other way to explain it. I stepped out of the truck, grabbing my shotgun as I slide down to land with a heavy thump on the dirt.

There was a peculiar humming sound. It wasn’t the noise helicopter blades make, it was more like a large generator sitting far off in a basement. I smelled burnt plastic.

I couldn’t bring myself to say the word, but I knew the shape I was looking at. I realized the dogs were all hiding, whimpering in the back of the truck. The plastic smell grew stronger. I leveled my rifle up at the spinning disc, but a single ray of red light dashed out at me. I was dead so fast that I can’t even remember the feeling of it happening.16 March 2021 - Go To Town

The spring warmth filled these creeks and rivers to bursting. Snow drifting slowly onto the slopes of crisp white mountains, hundreds of miles away, then melting in the newly risen sun until it all rushed down again to the ocean. A single droplet of water must make the journey more times in its life than we could know or understand in ours. This was likely to be my last journey. I had come to the end of my years, and the river was taking me back down to the ever-growing town.

We (it used to be we) had built our cabin far up in the pine woods. I could breathe easy up there, and it was always quiet for her painting. Slowly the car stopped working, and then her painting stopped. That’s when I knew it was bad. I had bundled up last week to go get medicine, but the last snowstorm had blown in and kept us inside. So I read to her and that was it.

The sun came out the next day to taunt me. I couldn’t even remember what I was reading her, maybe couldn’t even remember how to read at all. I couldn’t bury her with the ground still so hard and cold, but I wrapped her up in blankets and climbed into the canoe. It was a fool-headed thing to do, and it was too late to stop it now. The water was crashing louder and louder up ahead. Then I remembered, the canoe was for the lake, not for the river. I’d never been down the river in the canoe before.

The rapids were waiting with crazy impatience. I saw them, tried to steer the boat to shore, but there was no shore left now, just looming rocks and sharp cliff faces. The mountains rose up on both sides, climbing into the bright cold sky. I could see the sunlight hitting the snow, feeding the frenzy that whipped me forward into the foaming white water. The canoe split, water hit my face, I was upside down, water was pressing me and spinning me. What had I been reading?17 March 2021 - The Snake

Have you ever seen a snake the size of a bus? It seemed that all the locals claimed they had, and I was deep into the rainforest to set eyes on it for myself. More than that, I was hunting it.

The sightings came few and far between, but the bodies turned up regularly. A farmer would go missing. The search party would set out. They would find the body, terribly mangled, deep in the jungle. The clock would reset and then they would bide their time until the next killing.

The mental picture that came to me was that I was clocking into a factory in 1967, with a big white sign by the door that said “7 days since our last horrific snake incident.” I hoisted the heavy hunting rifle across my shoulder. It was time to push that number a little further.

We took some kind of knockoff jeep into the jungle as far as the roads went, but eventually I had to go on foot. The locals would only lead me so far in. We got to a fork in the path at the trunk of an enormous tree and they said that they would wait for me there. I knew they were lying, but I pressed on ahead.

I estimated to be out here for at least a week before I expected I would find any sign of the beastly reptile. Snakes leave hardly any trace,  especially when they haven’t eaten for a while, and a snake as big as this one should be able to last a long time without a meal, provided it got a big meal when it did eat.

As I walked cautiously down the path I had to pause, because I could sear I heard footsteps up ahead. It was unmistakable.

“Hello?” I called out. A minute or two later, a man walked out from the shadows.

“I am the snake,” he said. He pulled out a revolver and shot me in the chest.18 March 2021 - Breakwater

The docks were silent this early in the morning. The edge of the ocean lapped against the worn concrete of the breakwater and splashed around the aging wooden posts holding the docks themselves aloft out of the water. I was looking East. The sun wasn’t up above the horizon, but the refracted gleam bouncing its way through the layers of the atmosphere were enough to softly illuminate the scene. The shimmering liquid below me looked as much like molten metal as it did water.

How strange would it be if, overnight, the ocean was filled with mercury. Would anything survive? I can’t imagine that liquid metal could be oxygenated the same way that water can. The smells associated with my imaginative leap deterred me from pursuing the ideas further. I pulled out a cigarette. The smell of parties, weekends on the road, waiting, talking, sunshine, and memories innumerable cleared my head immediately.

My hands were cold, and the heat I was drawing from the tiny ember wasn’t enough to warm me. I had been waiting for Martin for close on twenty minutes. I had been sure he would show up by the time I walked down from my apartment, but there had been no sign of him. I looked down at the stratified shellac of grime on the ancient cobblestones.

“Boo!”

“Shit!”

Martin was standing right in front of me, but I was stepping back, into empty space, then falling, my arms swimming through the air and finding no purchase, the smile on his face turning into horror, then the horizon as I flipped backwards end over end, the water, then the rocks as I plummeted down. I hit with a crack, lots of things breaking. The water was still gently lapping at me by the time Martin scrambled down and across; the silvery mercury tinted with red, water meeting water.19 March 2021 - Antiseptic

Lasers glanced off nearby rocks, sintering them immediately. Everything smelled like molten glass. Dust swirled through the air making an inescapable haze. The neon shops and patchwork streetlights blended into a rainbow tapestry of flickering distractions. In the distance, dark figures advanced slowly. I nuzzled my cheek into my rifle, peered, fired, reloaded. One of the shapes fell, but the others continued their inhuman movements.

I squinted through the scope again. They all seemed differently shaped. Arms and legs in a random assortment of configurations. Bodies of smooth black plastic. Weapons in place of their head. I fired and watched with satisfaction as yet another machine splintered into fragments. These things were cheap. But low cost meant high volume, and they just kept coming.

Their weapons finished charging and they fired another volley. I ducked just a little too slowly. My cheek erupted in searing hot pain. My ear was gone. I could feel burn marks on my face and neck. I staggered backwards into the alley, tripped, and fell to the side. My wounded face was pressed against the filthy city cement and it stung and stung.

I looked towards the beastly soldiers. Their weapons were nearing a charge. I lugged my gun over to my other shoulder. I didn’t even need the scope now. Their bodies loomed clear and shiny out of the chemical gloom. Their gate was stochastic, but their bodies floated forward, stabilized by machine learning and years of tyranny on foreign soil. I squeezed the trigger and felt the jet black shards cascade across my body as yet another frame erupted into dust.

No matter how many fell, they would just keep marching. I wished desperately for a grenade, but I had none. They fired again, aiming at me and everywhere else. I was fatally cauterized from head to toe.20 March 2021 - Stonework

Straggly grass found its way up through the loose rocks along the sandy path. The mountains loomed on all sides, and the wind blasted and whistled. Ruined stumps of trees marched to their sad end for a while, but up here there was nothing but the dull grasses and the orange lichen on the rocks. I marched forward, both hands struggling to hold the box.

The wooden chest was bound in leather and etched with mystical symbols. The lock was sharp black metal and did not match the ancient figure work on the wood and leather. While those lines were flowing and shapely, the lock was plain and even unbeautiful. It took both arms to hold it out in front of me. I had born my burden for several miles today, and for many days before.

I turned around a corner in a path and saw the shrine. The stone was colder, and there was no grass. An ancient woman wrapped in grey and blue sat facing the valley. The sunlight leapt from the rocks in bright darts of crystal as I walked—the stones were flecked with small gems. I staggered up the slope of the path and into the small landing that had been cut from the mountains ages ago.

“The final hand,” I said, as I laid the box down before the woman.

She stared, blind, at the valley. The lock undid itself and fell in pieces from the leather and wood, crumbling even as it dropped to the stony ground.

“It is not the final hand.” The woman stood and stared through me. My arm pulled loose and I collapsed in pain. I gasped for air as the blood pooled beside me.

When I opened my eyes night had come, but the glittering stones now shone red in the moonlight. From the blood beside me, grass grew. In place of the woman was a child, nearly lost in the ragged grey and blue garments. The pain took me again and I did not return.21 March 2021 - Mix Up

There was a strange noise coming from the washing machine. While it usually rumbled and sounded a little run down, now it was clattering like it was full of cutlery. I knew what I had in there—socks—wouldn’t make that much racket, but I was afraid to open it on account of all the things that had gone wrong when strange noises appeared in my life. I looked ruefully at the spot where my fridge used to be. I wasn’t eager to toss another appliance to the street.

My chair became uncomfortable. My clothes were itchy. I had to go to the restroom. I needed a drink of water. It was too hot in the house. There wasn’t enough of a breeze. Eventually, I ran out of excuses and distractions and walked into the laundry room, toolbox in hand. I looked at the dial on the washer. It hadn’t moved from when I put it on “Start Cycle” half an hour ago. This was it. I turned it to “Off” but it kept making noise. I yanked on handle of the lid, but it wouldn’t budge.

I kicked it out of frustration. Another appliance ruined by Russian hackers. I reset my wifi password and suddenly the clanking stopped. The lid eventually unlocked once the spinning slowed down. I opened it.

There was a bundle of wires and what looked like clay packed inside. My socks were nowhere to be seen. Taped to the top of the weird machinery was an envelope addressed to someone with my name but at a different address. I walked over to the sunlight pouring in through the window and opened the letter.

“Your subversion has gone unchecked for too long. The fridge was a warning and you ignored it at your peril.”

The bomb in the washer exploded, sending fireballs and jets of metal streaming out into the house. The whole interior of the house disintegrated, what was left of me drifting out of the window as ash.22 March 2021 - One More Climb

The water below was splashing softly on the rocky shore. I was dangling by one arm about 100 feet over it. It felt good to be so confident in what my body could do, even at 60. The seagulls were crying noisily about something I didn’t understand. I reached my other hand across a small gap in the rock and found a good hold. My feet hung below me for a moment, swinging with the momentum of my movement, then I tightened my core and heaved them up to the ledge to my right. I continued climbing, exhilarated by that foolhardy act of daring just moments ago.

The next stage of the climb was easier, with several flat spots that I could sit and stare out into the ocean. While the climbing was easier, it became more dangerous, as the route snaked away from the water and over the rocks. My hands started to sweat, and I reached back into my chalk bag with one hand at a time to fight off the slippery feeling of fear.

There seemed to be more gulls than I remembered. It had been over a decade since I had been up this route the last time. The birds weren’t so annoying back then, but maybe there were more because of an environmental policy change of some sort. The French had certainly made efforts to rein in the degradation of their beautiful country.

I liked birds, but they were getting to be a problem. I was about ten minutes’ climbing from the top, and they had started to dive bomb me. I didn’t have the strength to climb back down. I had picked this route I because I wanted it to be on the edge of my ability, and I had done my job too well. I could almost see the top as I reached my hand to the next hold. I held for a moment, my fingertips just barely gripping the stone, while I shoved my other hand into the chalk bag.

At that moment a gull made its first real attack, diving straight at my hand and stabbing into the tendons with its beak. It didn’t even feel as though I had a choice but to let go, and the next thing I knew I was sailing backwards into space. Another seagull had the nerve to swoop at me as I fell, and I swatted it with a satisfying thud. I hit the ground, also with a thud, and heard lots of things break. The water kept splashing nearby as I drifted off.