I don’t understand why this is still a problem,” the ACS Director says, point-blank from behind the line of tiny crystal goblets filled with discreet, elegant sips of sherry. The Director’s flight, and that of every sherry-flight at the table, glistens in the muted light of the cabin. He stares on through the front windows of the yacht’s dining room into the night. The city is partially hidden on the horizon, and, up above it all, almost insignificant pin pricks of light lie scattered like fallen sequins.
I am locked up in a cell. The captors are conducting medical experiments on us. They give us metal wires to stick in our necks, which I know instinctively will erase our memories.
They crawled from shallow darkness out of a crack in the sidewalk. They each stood as tall as a man and a half. Their bodies were covered in hazelnut fur and their nose tendrils writhed like skinned octopi. There were three of them, and one of me.
I fell backward onto my ass in the street, whimpering and whining, completely expecting to have my brain eaten out backward from my skull like a stew by these terrible, loathsome, horror-inspiring… Psychic Moles from Outer Space!
When I was in the seventh grade I found a scalpel after school. I think it belonged to my mom. There was nowhere else it could have come from. And this scalpel almost glowed. The black, black, veiny marble counter it was sitting on reflected a kind of halo around the silver knife, anything but subtle.
He bolts upright from the classroom floor to find there is hardwood now instead of emerald carpet. His legs are shorter than they’d used to be, clad in long khaki shorts that show shriveled monkey limbs from the knees down. No. No, no, no!
His hands are shriveled like the prunes he’d so often associated with old age, thick white hairs curling off the backs of them, follicular steam. Where had she gone?
When I first met Paul, I thought she was a Jesus freak because of her shirt. The shirt was screaming neon yellow, the kind of shirt they give you at camp because you need to be able to find your campers again after letting them loose in a roadside history museum or food court, and it was too big because they only ever make camp shirts in one size. It said “TAG — YOU’RE IT!” on the front, with a big screen-printed cross. It was kind of threatening.
Phaedra lulls at sea, draped in satin that melts when touched by water, perched on the rocky coast. Temptress by night and day, Phaedra represents desire, impulse, and risk. Her voice and beauty make any man surrender to her grasp… Infatuation as a psychological phenomenon entails a constant state of arousal and demonstrates a variant of ‘love at first sight’.
“Get up! Wake up, there’s a bear!” the voice cries, reaching and opening a shadowy lump in front of them that sounds like a bag.
“There are no bears in New Jersey,” the other body turns over and sighs.
The voice whispers, rushing in anger, “Then it’s a serial killer. Get up, I am not dying on a Wednesday.”
