All Stories

Hector and Barney sat overlooking a dusty Southeast country lane one lazy summer afternoon. Soon, one of them noticed a small object.

“Hey, Barney, see that?”

“See what?”

“On the road there. Looks like a tiny lizard.”

“Ain’t no lizard,” Barney said, “It’s an insect.”

“I tell you it’s a lizard,” Hector said. “You’re getting old.”

“No I ain’t,” he said. And with a flap of his wings Barney swooped down, scooped up the skittering object in his beak and landed gracefully back on the telephone wire.

“Well, was it a lizard?”

“No,” mumbled Barney the blackbird, swallowing. “A roach. Yum.”

The lost boy sleeps peacefully under a blanket of autumn leaves. The search party’s cries do not wake him, nor do the searchers see him, though they pass within four feet of where he sleeps. The maple tree, which covered the sleeping boy with leaves to protect him from the cold, has inadvertently hidden him from his would-be rescuers. The maple wishes it could call out to the searchers, or wake the boy, but, being a tree, it can do nothing to repair its mistake.
The boy awakens hours later, in darkness, to falling snow, and the distant howling of wolves.

It would not be long before he was caught. He’d have to work fast if he wanted to finish his work without leaving traces of his dealings here. He was in a small wooded area, at the base of a heavily rooted tree. Digging through the damp soil, he congratulated himself on this spot, easy to remember and camouflage. Once the hole seemed deep enough, he dropped the evidence in, pushed the dirt back into the hole, covered the hole with forest litter. His girl was calling in the yard. He ran to her, his tongue lolling. She would never know.

They were buying their way into the history books. At least that’s how the media was spinning the whole thing. Once life was detected beneath the icy surface of that mysterious faraway moon entrepreneurs across the planet sprang into action to provide the rich the opportunity of the millennium; to be the first to interact with an alien species. Thirty-two of the world’s richest men and their wives boarded that rocket aimed at the stars. Sure, the security outfit was sparse but so was time.

In just two weeks an unsurprised world would watch billionaires get eaten alive some 400,000,000 miles away.

Albert Einstein woke from a dream of dogs ripping at his flesh. With the moon’s ghostly photons streaming through the blinds, he sat in his bed and rubbed his legs. He looked at the faded picture of Roosevelt on the nightstand, his Nobel Peace Prize, and thought about the children of Hiroshima: in the late summer heat, with the sound of the aircraft droning overhead, did they look to their kimonoed mothers and ask why? He told himself Bohr would have signed the letter to Roosevelt anyway. But still, he wondered if it hurt, in that last moment before they burned.

Jack walked down the sidewalk on his way to work like he had done every weekday for twenty years. From his plain white house to his plain brown office; nothing really changed, except him getting slower. About to walk through the office door, a thought hit Jack, and he smiled. Today he would change his routine. So he did not walk into the office; he boarded the bus at the corner. He went to the airport. He tossed his brief case in the trash. He looked at a map of the world, bought a ticket to Belize, and never looked back.