Thursday, June 5, 2014

The Sad, Strange Ghosthood of Benjamin Bray

In a gray and lifeless office in a gray and lifeless town, a gray and lifeless man haunts the gray and lifeless corridors; his name is Benjamin Bray, and although he likes the taste of flan and believes strongly in hydration, he nonetheless believes he is dead.

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Winner, Winner

Win a place among the worlds' first commerical time travlers, the email said, busted words and all. No entry fee!

The mail had been routed to my spam folder; there was no way it was anything other than a half-pound of horseshit. But I was tripping balls, and this was the funniest thing I'd seen in a month. I gave them a throwaway email address as a goof.

Even the followup mail that came to the throwaway a couple of weeks later, that was just a goof too. You know how it goes. I gave bullshit "information", didn't give my bank accounts or anything identifiable (I'm not stupid)... but I wanted to play them for everything I could, you know? Maybe I'd get a good /r/spammerbait out of it.

So we went back and forth for a while, and I was getting all sorts of funny stuff. Just a goof.

Until the guy in the suit shows up at my house.

Friday, March 28, 2014

A Goddess All Made of Words

Once upon a time there was a goddess in the shape of a girl, who danced barefoot in moonlight while the words of the worlds swirled around her and through her. From sunset to sunrise she would dance, and when her dancing was done and her hair and her body were limp with her sweat, the words would be scribed upon her skin, black lines on pale skin, all the words in all the worlds traced fine as spider silk upon her, and each day the words would fade in the sun only to be redrawn by the light of the next moon.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Chasing Time

They sold us the time machine with promises that we would see the dead again. We bought the vision, and we bought the machines. They got very, very rich. But they never told us the real price we'd pay.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Act Three When the Footlights Fade

On a warm September day, in the full sunlight of bright afternoon, Millie Rennart was enjoying a mid-afternoon walk with no timecard to punch when she was accosted in the middle of the Main Street crosswalk by a man with shaking hands and a set of teeth too regular and too white to be anything but false.

"You," he snarled in a low voice like rust and dark spaces.

Millie was raised to be polite, but he was being so very rude, and they were in the middle of the street, for Pete's sake. So she walked on, trying not to limp. She was no spring chicken, but she was twenty years the man's junior, and outweighed him by a good hundred pounds, and that was before lunch at Harry's, where that good looking Howson boy liked to smile at her as if she was half her age. (She'd like to rip his clothes off right in the freezer, is what she'd like to do. But that would be to forward by half, wouldn't it just?)

The old man reached out a wrinkled hand, too slow. She was past him.

Friday, March 14, 2014

A Revolution of Small Things

It began with a toothbrush. A pearly blue Smith ProGlide, gripped in the hand of a nine-year-old boy.

When the police came knocking, Adam Scott Bell came to the door with a Smith ProGlide and a mouth full of suds. His parents were next door at the Harry's place, but they'd always trusted Adam to do the right thing. So he'd never open the door for a stranger. But this was the police. Adam swallowed the suds (good for the teeth, bad for the belly, he knew that well enough but he wasn't about to spit in the umbrella canister, was he?) and climbed the stool to look out through the little window. Two policemen, red-faced in the cold. Hands on the butts of their guns, with the little leather snap unsnapped. That, Adam decided, was cool. Definitely something he'd tell Zach about at school the next day.

He unlocked the door.

"Hey, kid," the taller of the policemen said. He had a voice like a steam engine, loud and foggy. "Your parents in?"

Adam was never to tell a stranger where his parents were. But these were the police. "No," he said.

"They left you alone here?" the smaller cop said. He was a quick little man with a face like a shovel, flat and almost featureless but for a humorless crack that passed for a smile.

"They're just next door," Adam explained. "If I need them, I have the number. I was getting ready for bed."

"Yeah," the bigger of the two said, wiping his nose on the back of his hand as he stepped in. "That's not going to happen, kid."

Thursday, February 27, 2014

The Story of the Change

"It was supposed to be the party of the year," he told them.

The Children leaned forward eagerly. "What is a party?"

The ancient man closed his eyes against the glare of their attention. "It's . . . it's complicated. When you do something well--but of course, you all do everything well, it's how you are now--you want to celebrate. To be proud of it in public. And sometimes you just want to spend time with friends. But of course, you don't have to worry about that, either. Ever since the Mindshare, you spend all the time you want with everyone."

When he opened his eyes again, the Children had cocked their head and were rubbing their chin, their eyes blank as they processed and shared.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

And now for something completely different

A cute little children's story!

If anyone wants to illustrate this, I'd be happy to pair up.

-------

This is Cecelia.

[Picture of a little girl, cartoon style, against a green and happy background]

This is Cecelia's friend Aldo.

[Picture of a large black dog]