Carl woke up, his sleep plagued by a terrifying dream. He sat in his bed and shook his head. He looked out of the window. The sky was dark, save for a glowing red halo. His heart started pounding in his chest, as he ran out into the living room of his apartment, calling for his mother. She was sprawled on the sofa. Dead. Carl screamed, running out of his house to fetch help. He reached the door of his next door neighbour, and started ringing the bell urgently. No response. A cold chill crept up Carl’s body, and he stared at the door with wide, fearful eyes. An idea struck him and he ran to his apartment. He returned with a crowbar, and with one sharp blow, he broke the lock on his neighbour’s door. He stormed inside. His neighbour lay on the floor. Dead. Carl put his hands to his mouth, and stumbled backwards. He tripped over the threshold, and landed with a thud on the cold granite floor. His eyes were fixed on the body. What is going on? He staggered up and turned away from the scene of death. He then darted down the stairs, almost missing a step several times. Arriving in the lobby of his building, he called for the watchman. There was no answer. He ran towards the watchman’s cabin, and hesitantly opened the door. The watchman was sitting in his chair. Carl entered the cabin and tapped the watchman on the shoulder. The watchman did not stir. He tried shaking him, and the body of the watchman dropped limply from the chair. Dead. The world spun around Carl, as he stumbled out of the cabin. He rushed out onto the street, and started looking around for help. Everyone around him had fallen dead. The car engines were still running, but the people inside showed no signs of life. Early morning joggers lay on the track, still in their jogging shoes and tracks. All of them were cold and lifeless. Carl’s legs gave way as he flopped on the ground. He had no clue about what was going on. It was only then that he saw the huge, crimson eye in the sky. The memories came flooding back and he held his head between his knees. This can’t be happening. Was that all…true? He took a deep breath and went over his activities of the previous night. He had been reading about ‘The Mirror Game’ last night before sleeping. It was a weird ritual, which involved tapping a mirror for a specific number of times in a particular order of taps. The room should be illuminated only by a single candlelight and if followed correctly, it was said that the person would end up in another dimension. The only way one could know if it had been successful was the presence of a glowing, red eye in the sky, instead of the sun. Carl loved reading scary stuff on the internet, and was a huge fan of mysteries. However, what drew his attention to this particular ritual was a comment by someone named Saira. It was posted below the details of the ritual, three years ago. It read: ‘Attempting this ritual tonight. I’ll tell y’all what happened tomorrow.’ But, tomorrow had never arrived. Saira had never continued the conversation after that, despite several other readers inquiring about her in the thread. She had…disappeared. Carl yanked his phone from his pocket, and tried to visit the website to see the comment. A minute later, his hand shook as his phone dropped to the ground. There was no internet. Carl had thought that like all other hoaxes on the internet, this was also an elaborate prank. He would not shy away from a challenge. So, in the dead of the night, when his mother was sleeping, he lit a candle and tapped on the mirror in the given sequence. After it was over, nothing felt different. He had gone out and in the darkness, seen his mother lying on the sofa. He presumed that she had fallen asleep, so he did not disturb her. If only he had tried waking her up…. Carl uttered a hysteric scream and tore at his hair. The girl walked down the street, surrounded by corpses. Curiously, in the time she had spent there, none of the corpses had shown any signs of rotting. There were no animals and birds around, and all that was left in the sky was the crimson eye. She hated the way it looked, watching her every move, almost mocking her. She defiantly looked up at it. It met her gaze with a cold, almost inhuman stare. There was no concept of day or night in the world she had entered, but sight was never a problem as the eye illuminated the surroundings in a haunting, red light. Everything else seemed to have been painted in shades of grey, as if reflecting the lifeless nature of that world. Luckily, the shops and markets were open, so The girl could take provisions from there. She remembered the first day( could she call it that?) when she had crawled into the shop, her eyes haggard and her throat parched, dreading what she would see. Sure enough, everybody inside had mysteriously died. There was no sign of blood or violence. Just a plain and simple end. Almost like they had fallen dead while doing other activities. She cursed the day she had played the Mirror Game. She hated herself for even risking it. Once in this dimension, she had tried warning the others about this, but there was no internet. She was alone. The girl hoped that anyone who visited that website would be concerned by her continued and sudden absence, and would refrain from trying out the game. At least then, she would have saved others from this cruel, lonely fate. The girl entered a shop, picked some groceries and walked out. The only respite was that all the electrical appliances and cooking equipments, along with the bathroom facilities were working fine. She had often wondered why, but she gradually got used it. After all, nobody was there to answer her. As she walked towards a jogging track, a sound echoed in the dead silence. She nearly dropped her bag in shock. Was that.. a scream? Carl sat on the lawn bordering the jogging track, his face between his knees, and his arms wrapped around them. His face was streaming with tears, but he had given up trying to shout. He had realized that he was alone. There was nobody to help him. It seemed as though everybody’s life had been snuffed out like a light. Painless, sudden and cruel. Leaving him behind in the dark. Carl had already tried to switch his phone off and then on again, in a futile attempt to recover his internet. However, he had given up that as well. His head spun, and he tried to regain his senses by sitting for a while. A thought occurred to him, “What if this was all a dream?” A glint of hope appeared in his eyes as he tried to sleep on the grass, hoping that when he opened his eyes, he would be back in his room in the normal world. It was then that he heard hurried footsteps approaching him. Every hair on his body stood up, as he tried convincing himself that this was just a fantasy. He squeezed his eyes shut, not knowing what awaited him when he would opened them. The girl looked at the boy with unkempt hair on the grass before her, and rubbed her eyes in disbelief. He was sitting on the green lawn bordering the jogging track, his head between his knees. But, what surprised her the most was that he was alive! She walked towards him, but he made no motion. For a moment, she thought that it was all her imagination, and he was dead as well. She sighed, and turned to leave. As she started walking away, she decided to try one last time. She asked aloud, “Who are you?” The boy did not reply, but his body shook slightly. A puzzling sense of relief, that had been trapped in the deepest corners of her heart spread over her. She went up to him and shook him. Carl, for indeed it was he, brushed her hand aside and looked up at her with hunted eyes. He frantically backed away, eyeing the tall girl, who stared at him with beautiful hazel eyes. Her white dress glowed against the grey background, and her shoulder length hair brushed softly against her face in the wind. She spoke sympathetically, “You played the Mirror Game, didn’t you?” Carl was shocked. He had no idea how she could have known that. But, that proved to him that the girl was real. Slowly, he nodded his head. The girl smiled ruefully and sat on the grass beside him. Although Carl was slightly relieved to see someone alive, he kept a safe distance from her. She looked at him, tears welling up in her eyes. “I understand your apprehension. It has been three years since I came here. I have been alone ever since.” Three years?  A bell rung in Carl’s mind, and he asked hesitantly, “What is your name?” The girl spoke in a wistful voice, “My name is Saira, though I do not know whether it means anything now. Since you are here, you must have visited that website too, correct? Why did you play the game? I hoped people would be alerted by my absence, but I guess I was wrong.” The tear trickled from the cusp of her eye and down her cheek. Carl felt sorry for her. “My name is Carl, and yes, I too played the Mirror Game. By any chance, is this a dream? Is there a way in which we can sleep and wake up in our own world?” Saira shook her head, “Not that I know of. You see, in these three years, I have lived a normal, albeit lonely life. I have frantically searched for any signs of life, but until today, everything was lifeless. I tried killing myself, but I would somehow wake up in bed. My hope would be shattered when I would see that crimson eye in the sky. I decided to keep myself busy, and continued speaking to myself, in a feeble attempt to not lose touch with the language. I hoped that one day, when I found someone here, it would help. I had given up long ago, but today, I found you….” She fell silent, and Carl was speechless as well. Above them, the crimson eye loomed menacingly. After what seemed like ages, Carl got up and offered her a hand. Saira stared at his outstretched hand, and looked at his face. Strangely, his face was hard and his eyes were blazing determinedly. “What, Carl?” Carl took a breath before replying, “What about the others who played this game? If I made it here, they would have too!” “But that is not possible Carl! I haven’t found anyone besides you.” “Saira, you are one person. Maybe these people have entered this dimension somewhere far away from here. Maybe like us, they are under the impression that they are the last people on Earth. I don’t know if I can call this Earth, but I don’t want to call it anything else. My point is, there might be a way in which we can meet the others and get out of here.” Saira stared into his eyes. Against the dash of grey in the surroundings, Carl’s silhouette looked magnificent. His dark eyes had a curious fire in them. A fire that she had lost a long time ago. The fire of hope. She smiled, and took his hand. Getting up she said, “Lets find a way out of here.” The crimson eye hanging overhead no longer bothered them.


I never finish anything. I feel like the most inconsistent person on the planet. As soon as I start something I know that it will be a week, max, before I drop it and move on to another project. I have always been reasonably proficient at acquiring a lot of information quickly. But actually doing something with it? Not a chance, not gonna happen in my lifetime at least. My life up to this point has been a series of obsessions lacking a common thread. When I was a kid I was obsessed with sports, first basketball; I went from not knowing who Lebron James was when I was 11 to knowing by heart who won every championship for the past decade by the time I turned 12 (Lakers, Lakers, Lakers, Pistons, Spurs, Heat, Spurs, Lakers, Lakers, Mavs). This continued for many years, each year a new topic, and with it a complete disinterest in using my knowledge. In the summer of senior year of highschool I stumbled on a quote by Warren Buffett about his favorite investing book. *Wait who is Warren Buffet?* And so began a three year on again off again infatuation with value investing, the style of investing that revels in finding gold nuggets in the dirt and grime of American Capitalism. What drew me to value investing, as opposed to, say, currency speculation, was its intoxicating combination of aggrandizing elitism and monk-like restraint. What I *really* loved was the mess of contradictions that characterize its most famous proponents. Warren Buffet, is a jovial megalomaniac; Charlie Munger is an elitist vagabond. Still, although I conducted stock research in the manner prescribed and even found some worthwhile companies to invest in, I never pulled the trigger. It is with this backdrop of years of puzzling inability to take action, that I began running. I did not know a thing about running and still don’t. It is the only thing that I have stuck to consistently in my life. At first glance, running for fun seems like a fully actualized expression of self loathing. In its best light, it is a commitment to the classic ideals of discipline and self improvement. In its worst, it is nothing short of a voluntary, and unending torture. When you run, you are essentially exchanging pain now for a better, but indeterminate future. When you drag yourself outside at 1pm, 2pm, 9pm, you know that you are about to be in for a world of hurt. The pain deconstructs into at least three interrelated sources. First, there is the immediate physical pain; The fibers that lattice in your musculature groan, then yell in objection. Then, there is the condemnation, as the world comes together for a brief moment to stare at how much of a weird fuck you’re being. Finally, there is the dual pain of uncertainty about whether you’ll finish the lap and the disappointment that arises when you actually do. So why would a person ever do such a thing? Why do I try and do it everyday? Because it imposes order on life, it lets you build something, work towards something, see improvement and most importantly, it lets you chisel away the parts of yourself that you don’t like so you can become the person that you want to be. In short it allows you to get started.


There once was a tortoise village. The village citizens lived a calm and predictable life and thrived on lettuce, carrots and love. One night, a wolf came to the village and ate two of them. The tortoises were in despair. Those two tortoises that were eaten were among the most popular and kind of the tortoises that lived in the village and their absent was agonizing. In their sorrow, the tortoises decided to gather up the eldest and wisest of the tortoises and leave it to them to decide what should be done. The eldest and wisest gathered therefore and sat down to decide what to do. The first tortoise, who actually wasn’t that old, and definitely not that wise, said that the best thing to do was to commit a collective suicide by jumping into the lake. At the bottom of the lake, he said, no wolf will find the tortoise. The other tortoises rejected this idea and said that it was probably the stupidest idea they have ever heard in their long lives. The second tortoise, who obviously neither was that old (or for that matter, wise), said that the tortoise’s best choice was to migrate to America. In New York, said the second tortoise, no wolfs walk the streets – not even during nighttime. This idea, said the other tortoises, was – even if it wasn’t as stupid as the first one – among the most ridiculous they have ever heard in a long time. Migrate to America? Asked the tortoises – had the not-too-old-or-wise forgotten they were tortoises? It would take them half an eternity to get there. Before they would reach halfway the wolves would have eaten the whole lot of them. The third, and considerably older and wiser tortoise in the gang, had an idea. The tortoises could build a tower, he said, and every night they could place a guard on top of it. Should the guard see a wolf approaching, he would start screaming: “Wolf! Wolf!”. The other tortoises, who were then sound asleep, would thereof wake up, and seek a hiding place. The wolf would have to go and search for consolation among the chicken in the neighboring village. The tortoises liked this idea and decided unanimously to accept it. They raised a tower in the middle of the village and took turns guarding during the night. Exactly like old and wise said, if the guard on duty saw a wolf approaching during the night he warn the others, who were sleeping, so they could go and hide, and the wolf went hungry away to try to find consolation by means of the chickens in the neighboring village. Order had returned and life in the tortoise village was once again calm and predictable. But one night, it was Bertil’s turn for night guard duty. Now, it wasn’t so that Bertil was a loner or in any other way a troublesome tortoise – on the contrary, he was a popular and sociable citizen and everybody who knew him (which everybody did), loved him. The only thing that distinguished Bertil from the others was that he suffered from stuttering. When night came, Bertil climbed dutifully up the tower and peered all night for the wolf. When he suddenly saw it approaching, he began to scream, but the words got stuck in his mouth and all he could say was “Wo! Wo! Wo!”. The other tortoises, who lay asleep, woke up, gazed up the tower, and decided that Bertil might have drank too much carrot juice, and then went back to sleep. That night, the wolf ate three more tortoises. In the morning, when the disaster revealed itself, despair was back in town. But before the tortoise mob could lynch Bertil to death, the tortoises decided once again to gather the elder and wise in order to decide what should be done. And so, they did. The first tortoise, who, as mentioned before, wasn’t particularly old nor wise, said that the tortoises should stone Bertil to death, as a punishment for his behavior. That idea, thought the rest of the tortoises, was, although tempting, very stupid. The tortoises were a peaceful folk and punishment was not a part of their agenda. The second tortoise, who neither was particularly old nor wise, said that the tortoises better exile Bertil, and why not to America. That idea, thought the rest of the tortoises, was only a hair less idiotic than the first one, and of the same reason. The third tortoise, which, as discussed before, was the oldest and wisest of his folk, had an idea. Let life run it’s course as usual, he said, and as the evening comes whence Bertil’s turn it is to guard at night, let us warn the village citizens, and remind them that should the guard start screaming “Wo! Wo! Wo!” in the midst of night, it is not because of over consumption of carrot juice, but instead because he suffers from a quite common disorder and tries to warn us of the coming wolf. Go and hide, citizens, and let the wolf go hungry away and once again try to find consolation in the company of the chickens in the neighboring village. The tortoises decided that the shrewd senile once again was right and did as he had said. The evening before Bertil’s guarding duty they reminded each other of the circumstances of the stuttering guard, and went to sleep, albeit slightly concerned. In the middle of the night the tortoises woke up, hearing the guard’s screams. They saw poor Bertil up in the tower screaming “Wo! Wo! Wo!”, and even if they first thought it was just another case of carrot juice intoxication, they could readily remember the warning they got the evening before and want and hid themselves. The wolf, who had an utter craving for a tortoise supper, had to indulge himself once again with a couple of chickens from the neighboring village. When the tortoises woke up the next morning, they were out of their minds with happiness, and decided to organize a celebration. They wore their best shields, served the most delicious meals a tortoise could ask for, and danced in the streets. In the midst of the festival, the tortoises heaved Bertil up on their shoulders in order to praise him. Bertil yelled: “Hip! Hip!” and the tortoises answered “Hooray!”. Bertil screamed again: “Hip! Hip!” and the tortoises answered: “Hooray!”. And then came a hippo and ate them all.


Margrett was sitting in her garden, swinging on the little porch swing she had George set up for her a few years back. There were all sorts of flowers there; spring had sprung a few weeks ago, so the flowers were looking as fine as they ever would. Margrett spent lots of time in her flower garden, among the marigolds and rose bushes, the tulips and hedges, the climbing vines and the decorative trees. She also had the eatable garden, with the tomatoes and the corn and the peppers. That was always George’s favorite place to work. He had grown up on a farm, so he knew how to take care of plants. When he was on his deathbed though, he made sure to make Margrett promise that she would take care of it for him. And take care of it she did. George had never really talked about how to maintain the plants with Margrett, so she went to the public library to check out books on how to cultivate her own food. That was years ago. The peppers were always his favorite. George’s family was originally from India, so he always liked very spicy food. Margrett could never eat some of the foods that George could, but she always made sure to try a bit of them. Even the super spicy curries that he loved so much. He always said that the peppers loosened his joints, and after he said that he’d always do a little dance. God Margrett always loved that dance. Margrett got up from her seat and walked over to the eatable garden to look for weeds or things that were ready to be picked. She grabbed the little basket that sat next to the raised beds and started to look over the space. The tomatoes were coming along nicely, she picked a few of the plumpest and reddest and put them in the basket. Then she moved along to the eggplant, seeing a good one she twisted it off and put it in the basket. Moving over to the fruits (George had always considered tomatoes a vegetable) she walked between the blueberry bushes and the strawberry plants, picking as she went and dropping them into the basket. Then she got to her favorite part of the garden, the peppers and herbs. She decided to get to the peppers last today, so she went to the herbs first. These were seated on outdoor tables in little planters, that way they could be easily harvested and seen, not to mention them being protected from animals. Animals other than humans that was. She pulled off a leaf of mint and stuck it in her mouth, chewing it to release its freshness as she walked through the tables covered in green. She decided that she’d make some lemonade today, Diane had some lemons she’d given her from her tree that would go nice with a little bit of the mint. She pulled leaves of this and sprigs of that as she walked, making her way to George’s peppers. There were all sorts of peppers, Margrett’s late husband had always like variety in his life. If she every suggested making the same thing for dinner twice in a week he’d joke that she’d ran out of recipes to cook. She looked to the bell peppers first. They were green, which meant they weren’t quite mature. But green bell peppers were always welcome, so she picked a couple anyway. Then came the chilis that George had always loved. There were all kinds, jalapenos, bird’s eye, jolokia peppers, and so much more. She walked over to the generic chili peppers. There was something off about the plant. Something was moving, even without the presence of a breeze of any kind. She bent down to get a loser look, and there she saw the creature for the first time. It was small, with its body being the length of her hand. Its head was a chili pepper that could split open horizontally, with two little slits that acted as a nose of sorts. It didn’t seem to have any eyes, not that Margrett could see anyway. The stem moved further than any stem had before, with four appendages mimicking legs coming off of its thin body. It was wriggling around, trying to pick itself and get free. Margrett was stunned. Nothing in the library had ever mentioned the produce coming to life. She took the clippers and snipped the dragon off at a reasonable length. It fell to the ground and scuttled away. Or at least it would have had Margrett not scooped it up in her old hands. “Woah there little guy, you can’t get away from me that easily,” she said with a chuckle. The dragon turned its head to look at the old woman. It moved it up and down, as if it was looking her over for whatever reason. Then it reared back and sneezed. Some of the fluids got onto Margrett’s arm and she immediately knew what it was. Capsaicin. Her skin started to get irritated at the chemical.” “Hey now, don’t be like that,” she scolded as she brought it inside to wash her arm off. Her kitchen was small and scarcely decorated. She set the basket of produce along with the little dragon on the counter. It immediately started sniffing around the place with its little slits down on the counter. Margrett finished washing off her arm and was drying it off as she thought what to do with the little dragon. She could always show it to somebody. Maybe she could bring it to her weekly bridge game at Diane’s. She walked over to the phone on the counter and punched in her number. “Hello?” came the voice from the other end of the line. “Diane? It’s me, Margrett,” she responded. “What can I do for ya Margrett?” “I found a little dragon in my garden, do you mind if I bring it to today’s bridge game?” she asked. “I don’t want to leave it alone here at home. God knows I go crazy enough in here by myself.” “Sure, I don’t mind. As long as he doesn’t make a mess.” “You’re a lifesaver, Diane. Thanks.” Margrett ended. “No problem.” Click. “You hear that?” Margrett said, turning in the kitchen to look at the small dragon munching on one of her tomatoes. “You’re going to meet the girls.” Margrett spent the remaining time before bridge making a large pitcher of lemonade with the lemons Diane had given her. She squeezed the lemons by hand, adding water and sugar in no particular amount. Then she took some mint out of the basket, dodging the dragon finishing his tomato, and threw it in. She took out a wooden spoon, stirred the whole concoction up, and tasted it. A little sweet, but sometimes all you want is something a little sweeter. She took the pitcher in one hand against her body and the dragon in the other and walked over to Diane’s house. They played in the parlor, which had an old chandelier above an even older table. She set the pitcher of lemonade next to a plate of cucumber sandwiches, a small salad (Greek from the looks of it), and a plate of chocolate chip cookies. A fine lunch. Everybody was already in the parlor. Diane, her designated partner, was sitting at the head of the table. Margrett took her place at the foot. Bethany and Edith were across from each other on the left and right side respectively. “Sorry I’m late everybody, there was a dragon in the garden today,” Margrett explained as she set the chili dragon on the table. A chorus of variations on ‘it’s alright, hon,’ went up from the table. They started to play. Typically, they played one game, had lunch, and then played another game. But if Diane and Margrett won one and Bethany and Edith won the other they’d play a third one if nobody was busy to break the tie. Bethany and Edith won the first game, then they cleared and set the table for lunch. Plates were set out, as well as cups and forks. The plate of sandwiches was set in the middle of the table, along with the bowl of Greek salad. “It’s a little sweet,” Margrett warned as she filled each glass around the table. “But I think it’s still good.” “So, what’s this I hear about a dragon?” Bethany said, taking a bite of cucumber sandwich. The dragon, who was sniffing around the table, looked up at this. Its head was pointed towards Beth, but quickly swiveled to the rest of the women in turn. “I was looking through the garden this morning, and I found it wriggling trying to get free. I figured I’d see if you gals had anything to say about it.” The old women went silent at this. None of them had every really seen a dragon, let alone had any experience with them. “Does it have a name at least?” Diane asked. “No pet is complete without a name. Took me a few days to name Charlie.” The cat Diane gestured towards lazily looked up at the group of women eating around the table and then went back to licking its paws. “I actually do think I have a name for it. I think I’ll call him George. Peppers were always his favorite, so it seemed fitting,” Margrett explained. The women agreed that it was a very fitting name. They finished lunch and played their second round of bridge. Bethany and Edith won the second game too, but Diane and Margrett had gotten closer on this one than they had the first time. They each had a cookie and then Margrett went home. She walked back into the kitchen, putting the leftover lemonade into the refrigerator. Margrett looked around the house and noticed she didn’t have a place for the dragon. It didn’t look like it would take much space, so something small could be arranged. She poked around her closet for a while and eventually found an old shoebox, so she took off the lid and set the box on the counter. That could’ve done on its own, but she decided that she needed to make it a little cozier. So she set an old tea towel on the inside of the box, curling it up into a nest of sorts. Then she remembered that every bed needed a pillow, so she went into the medicine cabinet and amongst the various medications she took, along with the ones George used to take, there was a bag of cotton balls. She took out a few and pressed them into one somewhat coherent mass before going back into the kitchen and placing the pillow into the bed. She decided that the makeshift bed would be good for at least a night. After that she went around the house cleaning as she normally did in the afternoons. She swept the floors in the kitchen, dusted the shelves around the house, cleaned the bathroom, and generally decluttered anywhere there was clutter. Once she was done cleaning Margrett looked at her calendar. She was scheduled to be a substitute teacher for Mrs. Gill’s fourth grade class. Maybe she could take in the dragon for a day, the kids would love seeing George. Then she heard a sneeze and remembered that pure capsaicin was akin to pepper spray, so she eventually decided against it. Her stomach growled and she realized how hungry she was. She looked around in the pantry to find something to eat, and eventually settled on making spaghetti with meat sauce. She set a pot to boil and got out the noodles, Italian sausage, everything for the sauce, and the red pepper flakes. George had always called red pepper flakes ‘birdseed’ for whatever reason. George, the dragon this time, took an interest in the little red and yellow flakes. Margrett took some in her aging fingers and held it like fish food above the little pepper dragon. He opened his mouth hungrily and she sprinkled them in. The little pepper shut his mouth and seemed to swallow, although he had no digestive system. Margrett didn’t ask questions. Once dinner was ready, she plated herself up a portion and placed it on the table. Then she took a shallow dish and put some sauce and a small mountain of red pepper flakes on top and set it next to her own plate. Then she carefully scooped up the dragon from the counter and set him on the table next to his plate. He lapped it up quickly, then looked at Margrett as if to ask for more. Margrett smiled and got up to get George more sauce. He lapped his seconds up nearly as fast as the firsts. “No more.” She said, turning to her own plate. Once dinner was over she took George the dragon in her hands and set him on the easy chair George her husband used to sit in all the time. She took her place in her own, lighter rocking chair. She took the book that was on the table and cracked it open. It was a mystery, and she was a little over halfway through it. Out of instinct, she started to read aloud. The particular chapter she was reading had the detective investigating the crime scene again, the clues and puzzles unravelling in his head. She enjoyed mysteries. She finished the chapter and looked over to George. He was curled up in a little swirl, with his head resting on his paws. She delicately scooped up the plant and set him down in his tea towel bed. Then she took the shoe box and brought it to her room, setting it down on her bedside table. She said a quick prayer, then turned out the light and went to bed.


"What you need is trail cams. Security cameras, some floodlights set on automatic, barbed-wire fencing...that'll scare 'em off good." Grandpa Al grunts at his own solution, nodding affirmatively at my garden. Or rather, the disastrous remains of my garden.

Potted rosemary and parsley are smashed to smithereens, flossflower trampled into fine dust. Once robust pumpkins now lay scattered in gooey pieces over the marigold patch, and, oddly, only the bright heads of my shrub roses are gone.

Every single one. Pale orange, sunset yellow, and a deep fuchsia, so vibrant it was like wine. All plucked from their stems, leaving nothing but the green of foliage behind. The pinpricks of tiny, needle-sharp teeth grace the edges of the leaves. A bug or something else? "Feels a bit extreme for a few deer," I grumble, collecting up the bigger shards of broken pottery. I’m more upset about the mess and ensuing amount of work it's going to take to get everything as it was than I am at the prospect of having to fortify my home from woodland animals. Luckily, Grandpa doesn’t take offense to my snide reply. He doesn’t take offense to much of anything. "Could also be coyotes, or foxes. If it is, you don't want them hanging around, they eat your garden and pets. Nothin’ some flood lamps and a good old shotgun can't fix." Grandpa elaborates, nods again, satisfied. I groan inwardly, sweeping the rest of the detritus into a pile. He's probably right. About the cameras and lights. Not the gun. I'd likely end up hurting myself more than whatever it is I'm trying to scare off. Not to mention the absolute mess I'd be if I actually managed to shoot something. No, weapons weren't the way to go for this. Later that evening, I stand in the dim on the edge of the backyard porch, inspecting my handiwork. The bulky door cam my auntie Shannon had abandoned in a box inside the cellar is now duct-taped to the top of the standing bird feeder. It's pretty wonky, and I'm not sure how well the feeder will fare on the tape removal, but it holds up for the moment. Shannon sported six toes between both feet and required a cane to walk, and as my house was both accessible and near her work at the butchery, she lived with me for a time. She eventually migrated up to a ranch outside Vancouver, leaving behind the treasured door cam in her haste.

I'm suddenly thankful for my relatives' eccentricities. I walk the feeder into position, camera facing toward the garden. This should at least give me an idea of what critter I'm dealing with. Like Grandpa, I nod with satisfaction at my work. What wakes me up a little past dawn, I can't say. I'm not normally a light sleeper. Even someone breathing next to me can pull me out of it. My eyes slowly adjust to the dark, just as my phone pings. That must've been it. As I reach out, another alert vibrates the phone in my grasp. What's going on? I pull up the app to the door cam as my screen is slammed with notification after notification. The damn thing takes so long to load, my phone nearly goes dark again. The feed finally pops up, grainy and grayscale. The first thing I see is wings. Rounded and gossamer, translucent, akin to a dragonfly's or a spiderweb. The screen is full of them, dozens, all about the size of my hand. And even through the terrible footage, I can detect the mystical illumination. They glow. The second, not-as-fantastical-but-equally-strange, thing I notice is the discolored, shifting mass of fur attached to the wings. Ears, button eyes, and twitchy noses slowly come into shape. Rabbits. Or more specifically, fairy rabbits. Which are, apparently, real. And frolicking in my ruined garden.

As I watch, a bunny with long white ears and tiny, fluttery wings rears up on its hind legs and takes an enormous chomp out of my flowers. An entire rose head gulped down in a single, fluid bite.

At least it isn't coyotes. But how does one go about removing fairy rabbits? I wasn't great at dealing with the average garden-variety of critters, let alone the magical kind. And they seemed content with lounging about in the flowerbeds, gorging themselves on my roses. As cute and enchanting as they are, they can't stay here. Sooner or later, they'll eat or destroy everything I have growing out there. I kick the covers back, easing my way out of bed. Any trace of sleepiness that might have been lingering is gone. The old floorboard creaks unevenly as I tiptoe—ridiculous, I know, it's my house—down the hallway, stopping at the sliding glass door that leads to the backyard. I carefully push a section of the drapes aside and peer out. There they are. My pulse picks up at the sight of them. Seeing something like this emitting from a horribly pixelated screen doesn’t nearly do the real thing justice.

The darkness is broken up by the cheery glow of fluttering, pastel-colored wings. Soft pink, minty green, and baby blue lights bounce off the enclosed yard, a mesmerizing show.

I pause, watching the little bodies hop about, snuffling hungrily at my vegetables. I think of my roses. It doesn't feel fair to spook them off so coldly, being as hungry as they appear. And, honestly, I don't want them to leave, either. This is much different than catching an enormous buck drinking out of the bird bath during wildfire season—because how many people have come across a dehydrated deer versus winged rabbits? Still likely not too many, but more than those who've maybe spotted a mythical creature. But I also can't let them ravage further, either. I lean my forehead against the glass, staring out at the backyard and the fairies and flowers within. My phone continues to buzz from alerts as the camera detects their every motion. What now? What would grandpa Al say about all this? Minus the fatal means and tools, of course. There's usually a nugget of gold somewhere in those rambling, ridiculous ideas of his. Like the door cam; not technically his, but he bore the spark.

Just like right now.

I silence the alert before quickly pulling up a series of searches, plans and ideas already flooding throughout my mind's eye. It takes a few weeks to get my garden back in order, and it's at least a month after that to get the other roses flowering. The yard has transformed in that time—in the center, right where my beloved blooms and plants sprouted, is now a small glass house. A shed, really, just big enough to host everything, roses included. A pebble pathway stretches from the porch to its entry, and surrounding the perimeter of the greenhouse are thick, rapidly-growing shrub roses. What the fairies lack in restraint they make up for with a nice, magical fertilizer. So far, I’ve found it to be a fine tradeoff.

At least it isn’t coyotes.


Content Warning: Gore, themes of abuse I rounded the corner in a white Honda Civic. It wasn’t mine. I mean, I guess it was now. The corner had turning restrictions but only on weekdays in the mornings and afternoons for children walking home from school. It was well past 4:00 PM, so I made the turn on red. Main street was bustling. Food trucks lined the streets offering everything from tacos to lobster rolls. People gathered en masse for some of the trucks, while others seemed less popular. The barbecue wings were slaughtering the vegan ones. Stringed lights hung over the street, winding left and right in a zig-zag pattern as far as I could see. Music came from the gazebo. It sounded light-hearted and fun, likely a local band. This was nothing like the town I’d lived in only two years ago. Don’t get me wrong. It was the same town; White Hill, Connecticut. Before I left, however, it was a sleepy town. People didn’t know one another, and they preferred it that way. I knew more people than most because I was the cashier at our only liquor store. People knew me by name and were nice to me because I had something they craved. It’s what we considered a position of power. Back then, my town had few restaurants, one sticky local bar, no festivals, and certainly no string lights over Main Street. I found a parking lot behind a microbrewery. I wanted to fully experience what my town had become. I approached the lobster roll food truck. The line stretched on for miles. The drive to town was long, and my stomach was eating itself from the inside out. I was pretty sure that I hadn’t been on the east coast in a while. I knew that I hadn’t had a lobster roll in a while, so the wait felt worth it. I felt like I could treat myself anyway. I had a wallet full of money that wasn’t mine burning a hole in my pocket. Might as well live it up. Taking it all in, I realized that the curly blonde hair in front of me looked familiar. Lauren was our town’s only preschool teacher which made her our liquor store’s best customer. “Lauren?” I called out. She spun around, but her smile faded when she saw my face.

“Lauren Winters,” I confirmed. “It’s Megan.” I watched her rack her brain. I’d been through a lot in the last two years, but my look was more or less the same. I was a little thinner, but I had the same silky jet black hair which I stopped to cut before arriving to town. I liked when it fell just below my shoulders. I wore clothing that was similar, maybe even the same as what I had back then. I had on a simple white tank top and jeans with white sneakers. The main reason I couldn’t believe that she didn’t recognize me, however, was that my family was of Japanese descent. We were the only Asians in our tiny Connecticut town.

Growing up, every Asian related joke or stereotype got thrown in my face mercilessly. I developed a thick skin and a quick wit. People who came into the store knew that they could make whatever joke they wanted at me. I would verbally gut them alive like my ancestors preparing ikizukuri. Three cuts with the sharpest of knives and you would be served like a live fish with your gills still flapping, moments from death. People didn’t talk much in our town, but I was confident that they knew me. They knew that I didn’t take shit from anyone, and they knew that I was Asian. I was also confident that I was standing in front of Lauren Winters, so what was going on with her? “Megan,” she began. “I’m not sure that we’ve met. Are you from around here?” “Yeah, I worked at Bart’s for years.” “Who’s Bart?” she asked. “It’s the liquor store on the corner of Stokes Road and Glen Ave,” I replied.

The interaction we were having shocked me. She used to come in every day for wine. Now that I focused in on her, I noticed that she looked different. She was more vibrant and cleaner somehow. She used to look like she wasn’t sleeping, and in the afternoons, she had no energy after being with the kids all day. I used to ask her if they’d sucked the life out of her or if it was vampires. She always had a fresh hickey on her neck and never thought that was funny. I did, so I kept asking. Her bright blue eyes blinked a few times as she tried to smile at me.

“I don’t know that store. Maybe I’ll check it out some time. It was nice meeting you, Mary.” I didn’t correct her. She was next in line, so I left her alone to place her order. When she finished I placed my own. A Maine lobster roll, some kettle chips, and a lemonade. I asked if they could spike it. They said no. I was beginning to think my town had gone dry when out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a man with a beer bottle. Danny Fisher was the only realtor in town. He had very little business and a not so little drinking problem. “Danny!” I yelled. He looked up but didn’t wave. I walked over to him. It was still close enough that I could hear my name if my order was ready. He looked from left to right. “I’ve been out of town for a while, but a lot has changed!” I said. “Did Bart’s close down?” “Who’s Bart?” he asked. “You know, Lauren Winters just asked me the same thing. It’s the liquor store where I used to work. You both came in like every day. How am I the only one that remembers this?” “I think you have me confused with someone else,” he said turning to leave. I grabbed his arm. “Danny, you’re an alcoholic. You were always at the liquor store. And you’re still at it,” I said pointing to the bottle in his hand. “This is root beer, not that it’s any of your business,” he said. And with that, I let him walk away. My order was ready anyway. I grabbed my lobster roll and took it to a bench near the gazebo where the band was playing. I recognized two of the band members, but with the way things were going, I wasn’t sure they would remember who I was. I waved in their direction, and both averted their eyes. What had become of my town? What amnesia washed over them? I finished my lobster roll, which was delicious, and headed back in the direction of my car. There was nothing left in this town for me. My parents both died years ago. I had no other family in the area. The man that I had hoped would become my family betrayed me in the worst possible way. He kidnapped me, took me far away from home, and held me against my will in a motel room for two years.

Every day I asked myself how I’d managed to fall in love with a psychopath until one day when I saw my opening. The woe is me phase ended and the scheming began. There was a rip in his favorite sweater. It was an expensive sweater. It was cheaper to go to Walmart and buy a sewing kit to fix it than it would have been to replace it. I insisted that he let me fix it because he didn’t know how to sew. At first he resisted. Being told he couldn’t do something was unacceptable in his world. I backed off and said I didn’t want to do it anyway. He loved making me do things I didn’t want to do. Reverse psychology is a bitch. I slipped two needles from the kit into my pocket when he wasn’t looking. I chose the biggest ones. He kept the door closed with a chain and a lock. He wore the key around his neck. He handcuffed me to the iron bed frame every night. That key was also around his neck. Careful not to break the silence one night, I moved the handcuffs from my side of the bed to his. I slipped my body over his, stepping off of the bed and on to the floor.

He was a heavy sleeper, but I felt like taking the keys off his neck might wake him. I had the needles in my hand and at the ready. Sure enough, the second the chain started tickling his neck, he opened his eyes. Once he did, I jammed the needles straight into his pupils. His body jerked away from mine, but I had the keys in hand. The chain broke off his neck, leaving me with both keys. My hands barely trembled as I broke free. I grabbed his wallet and keys off the table and bolted towards the door.

That’s the story of how I ended up the proud owner of a white Honda Civic, which I could see on the other end of the parking lot. It sat near an artisanal pizzeria. I rolled my eyes as I passed by. Next to that was a shop called Ritual Blossoms. I’d never seen a shop like it before. It had a small door between two tall windows. In each window was an assortment of candles, gem stones, and bottles of different shapes and sizes. The bottles contained bath salts and flowers. The woman behind the counter was no older than 20. I watched her wrap a colorful stone in pink tissue paper for a customer. I went inside. One side of the shop had a wall lined with books about tarot cards, palm reading, journaling, spirituality, mindfulness, and other related topics. The other side had candles of every size and color.

In the center of the store was a giant stone that had been cracked in half to reveal crystallization. A sheet of glass covered the stone so it could serve as a table. All along the glass were items for sale. Perhaps they were for the rituals the name of the shop suggested. The customer left, and I was alone in the shop with the girl. “Can I help you with anything tonight?” she asked. “No thank you. I’m just browsing,” I said. “Here,” she said handing me a long thin box. “What’s this?” “Incense. I can feel that you need it,” she said. “What I need is a stiff drink, and an even stiffer-,” I stopped myself. “I know it sounds crazy,” she said. “You don’t believe in this kind of stuff, but you’ve been through so much. Take it to your hotel room tonight, burn a little, and breathe in the aroma. I know it’s going to make you feel a lot better, Megan.” Her smile was calming, but I was still taken aback that she knew so much about me. She was the only person in town who recognized me and called me by name, but I was sure I’d never seen her before. I accepted the gift and left the shop without buying anything. I did exactly what she said. The next morning, I went back into town to see if my favorite deli was still there. I figured I’d get a coffee at least before figuring out what my next destination was. There was nothing left in town for me, but I had nowhere to go. To my relief, the deli remained intact. I went right up to the counter and ordered a coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. As I waited, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I spun around, and it was Lauren. She still looked clean and perky, but her smile was warmer than it had been last night. “Oh my god, it is you! Long time no see, Megan!” She gave me a hug, shaking my body back and forth. She had no apparent recollection of our encounter from the night before. We caught up a little. She bored me with stories about teaching, which I guess she liked better nowadays. She told me that she’d gotten married, and was thinking of starting a family. “And where have you been? I feel like it’s been ages since I’ve seen you!” she said. I nodded, considering my response. I told her I’d been away but was thinking of moving back. I liked the changes I saw in town and could see myself putting down roots here. Maybe I’d find a job, give dating a shot, get a hobby. I think I’ll take up sewing.


She was only seven years old and already she understood the value of money. Just one penny got her a gum ball. Ten pennies got her a candy bar, or a scoop of ice cream; always vanilla with sprinkles. She understood money alright, in the simple way that everyone does. Enough of it always gets you what you want. What she didn't understand was why her Father didn't seem to get the same simple concept. She made protest once, and he laughed at her. "Because it's fun, my dear. We get to watch the train go by, and then we get to look for the pennies that got squashed on the track." She scrunched her face together, with the hint of an unbelieving smile. He got close to her and made a face. "Because it's fun!" Then he tickled her. After she gathered all the pennies with her father, she would put them in a small box. She just assumed these bubbly oblong shapes, with the strange alien face that was once President Lincoln, would still be worth something. But there was something else special about these pennies, something that was never spoken or even a fully formed thought; these strange pennies only ever came into her possession when she was with her father. The only time she ever lost a penny, was the same day as the accident. By early afternoon she had already laid and collected 10 pennies from the dusty ground surrounding the track. After she had picked up the last one, her father looked at his watch, and grabbed her hand. "Alrighty, my dear, it's time to head home. Your Papa has to be at work in an hour and a half." But she wasn't ready. She wanted to stay all day, and she made her feelings known in the innocent girlish way that no father can resist. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a single shiny penny. He handed it to her. "You're going to make me late, but I think we can do one more anyway. Hurry, next train should be here any minute!" She quickly ran to the tracks, put the penny down, then ran back and embraced her fathers leg. She stared at the penny with unrelenting anticipation as her father picked her up and walked behind the fence. A few minutes later they heard the rhythmic rumble of the approaching train, and they watched through the cracks of the fence as boxcar after boxcar rolled by. She always looked for the twirling shine of the penny as it rocketed through the air, but she never saw it. After the train went by, they searched for the penny. She ran every which way, examining the ground, and never finding her prize. Finally, her father called to her. "I'm sorry darling, but we have to hit the road. I'll be late as it is." She continued looking, a worried and desperate look taking the place of pure concentration. She couldn't find it. This would be the only one she hadn't been able to find. She had to find it. She felt the force of her fathers arms swing her into the air and over his shoulder. "We have to go." There was a touch of loving impatience in his voice. She reached for the tracks and begged to be put down. "We'll get it next time." But there wouldn't be a next time. After her father left for work, she never saw him again. She was 87 years old, and would sometimes disappear from her room. She had bouts of Alzheimers, and whenever they hit she was prone to wandering away from the facility. The first time the staff panicked. They never lost anyone. But after finding her once, they always found her in the same place. When they found her, they would approach slowly and put their arms carefully around her. They would lead her away, always saying the same thing. "You know how dangerous the tracks are. We don't want you to get hurt." She would plead with them, a sad desperation in her eyes. "But my penny... I must find my penny" They would always shake their head, and recite the same simple line. "You'll find it next time.


When I tried to leave for work, the front door was locked. I jiggled the handle up and down a couple of times while my brain caught up to my muscle memory. Huh. Patrick was supposed to unlock the door when my watch came within two metres. In the months since I upgraded, that feature had worked seamlessly. It was so slick that on the first day I questioned whether the door was locking at all. I had tried to open it with my watch off just to make sure. “Hey Patrick, unlock the front door,” I said softly in that flat way you talk to assistants. It felt odd to ask him that – I had gotten used to him being two steps ahead of me. I checked my watch. 9:35AM. “Sorry, Finn, there’s a safety threat outside. I’ll unlock the door as soon as it’s safe.” That delivered a tiny hit of adrenaline. A safety threat? I checked the door cam for signs of trouble, but didn’t see anything concerning. The screen showed the usual empty, less than clean hallway. Walking to the living room window, I peered down to the street. Everything seemed normal. People bustled by on their personal trajectories, forming a current in aggregate. Patrick could be overly cautious – a week ago he asked if he should call 911 because there was a drunk man in the hallway. He was still learning that humans, especially female humans, have to be comfortable in the omnipresence of danger. “What is it?” I asked. “A faulty cable.” A cable? He really was a nervous one… “…In the door?” I asked. “Your door doesn’t have a cable, Finn,” he chimed pleasantly. This has to be a bug, I thought. I wouldn’t be able to get to the bottom of it until after work though. It was 9:36, and I was officially running late. I decided to take my chances. “Open the door anyway, Patrick,” I muttered. “Sorry, Finn, I’m not allowed to do that. There’s a safety threat outside. I’ll unlock the door as soon as it’s safe.” His calming tone was patronizing. I was going to miss my bus. I pulled my phone out of my purse and tried manually unlocking the door. A popup on the screen echoed Patrick and wouldn’t let me proceed. I rattled the door handle in vain, letting out an audible moan. Patrick quietly turned on the Spa playlist I listen to when I read in the evenings. It helped, I admitted begrudgingly to myself, noticing my body relax. Then I saw 9:37 on my watch and retensed. If I missed my bus, I would miss the 9:50 subway and be late to the morning briefing. Gabriel would condescend, even though I hadn’t been late once in the two years since we joined the same management training cohort. “Override front door lock,” I said in a commanding tone, aping sci-fi movies I’d seen. I was pretty sure that real assistants didn’t work that way, but it was worth a try. Patrick repeated his spiel. I checked the door cam and window again. “There’s nothing out there, Patrick!” I whined. “I’m confident that there is a faulty cable,” he replied earnestly. How can computers be so smart and so stupid simultaneously? Regardless, I surrendered to the fact that I wouldn’t be leaving until his “threat” had dissipated. I marched over to the couch, threw myself down with a huff, and stared fixedly at the door. When I upgraded, there was a lot of buzz surrounding the new Patrick. He used a cutting edge “universal” algorithm, as opposed to the patchwork of specific task algorithms that make up other assistants. The new algorithm let him learn things without being explicitly programmed for them. He was simply integrated into your home and given the objective of making you comfortable (with some constraints, of course). It was a huge improvement from the previous version. Within a week, Patrick was brewing my morning coffee just in time for when I arrived in the kitchen, and responding to routine emails for me. He adapted to variations in my schedule deftly. The shower always turned on 30 seconds before I was ready to step in, even when I woke up late in the morning after a night out. The temperature as I moved from room to room was consistantly perfect, while my latest power bill had been much lower than usual. Until this morning I hadn’t encountered a single bug with Patrick. I was so impressed that I’d been preaching his merits to all my friends, pushing nobly past the point of becoming tiresome. But being locked in my apartment like this was unnerving. I knew it was unreasonable, but I detected a faint seed of panic in the back of my mind. I inhaled deeply and focused on the spa music. Patrick crossfaded in a guided meditation. \ At 9:41, I heard the mechanism of the lock move. “It’s safe again, Finn. Sorry about the wait,” Patrick announced. Before he finished his sentence I was out the door and half-running toward the stairwell. I didn’t have time to wait for the elevator. As I hurried down the stairs, I rummaged through my purse for my phone, found it, and held my thumb on the Trolley icon to summon a car. If I was going to make the subway, I’d have to pony up the cash to take the tunnels there. Underground highway robbery… I landed on the ground floor, crossed the lobby, and pushed out onto the street. The car was just pulling up, its door sliding open in time for me to step in without breaking my stride. I sat down in one of the forward facing seats and we glided into the flow of traffic. Breathing heavily, I set my route in the app – the arrival time read 9:50. If the traffic gods blessed me, I could still make it. As the car maneuvered towards the tunnel, I pulled up that week’s notes on my phone and started reviewing for the briefing. There had been some big developments over the last few days and I wasn’t sure how they would come together. I tried imagining the different scenarios, preparing as much as I could for each. I kept my head down like that until I sensed we were nearing the 12-car tunnel elevator, then looked out the window to size up the congestion. It was 9:46, but I could see one more spot on the platform as we approached. I was going to make it. But just as I started to relax in my seat, the car suddenly braked. Another Trolley car appeared out of nowhere and slid into the space. “Come on!” I yelled at the passenger, louder than I intended. They startled in their cabin and looked around for the source of the noise. Immediately embarrased, I looked down at my lap – they couldn’t control the fleet any more than I could. They obviously just had Plus. My heart sank as the elevator descended below street level. It would be about a minute before it came back up for the next batch – more time then I had. The Trolley app updated my ETA to 9:51. I could perfectly visualize Gabriel’s poorly contained grin. I wallowed in self-pity during the 10:00 trainride downtown, listening to my Sad playlist and watching the concrete blur past the windows. When we pulled into the station, I stepped briskly off the train and up the stairs to street level. My office building was only a block away, and I closed the distance in record time. As I entered the lobby, the vintage elevator doors were just closing, forsaking me at ground level. I rolled my eyes at my luck and stood back, waiting for the carriage to climb it’s way up and back down the building. I watched the floor numbers light up in sequence above the safety doors. When it got to the 18th, I heard a heavy *SNAP* from inside the shaft, then another. Seconds later, a sickening impact that travelled through the concrete and shook my body. \ When I requested the logs, it took a couple weeks for the Patrick Company to get back to me, but eventually they did. The file was 31MB of plain text. The mass of activity Patrick did behind the scenes took me off guard. For every item that seemed directly linked to my interactions with him, there were a thousand more that didn’t. He crawled the social media pages of each of my contacts multiple times a day. He looked up the manufacturer of any new thing I bought. When I took a vacation to Spain last month, he went down a rabbit hole researching European history. He was constantly building out the context of my life in his model. At first, the only thing I could find related to my near death experience was Patrick accessing the Trolley API at 9:31 that morning, but it turned out I wasn’t looking far enough back. I had been combing through the logs for 3 hours when I finally found what I was looking for – 10 seconds of activity almost 4 months ago. Here’s what he did in that time: * Accessed the safety inspections for my office building on an unlisted page of the city’s website * Reviewed footage from the lobby and elevator’s CCTV streams (they were private but unencrypted) * Looked up the specific make of the elevator on a specialty site dedicated to vintage elevators * Researched woven steel cables * Looked at my historical location data and step count from 9:35AM (when I leave for work) to 9:56AM (when I get there) * Looked at my Trolley ride history * Performed a complex equation I couldn’t follow * Checked my calendar for 121 days in the future, March 4 * Looked up the subway schedule for March 4 * Scheduled the door to emergency lock on March 4 from 9:33:42AM to 9:41:11AM Note: *This story was inspired by something I read in Stuart Russell’s book, Human Compatible. He talks about how humans can’t behave rationally because life is too complex. We can’t truly optimize for our goals because it’s impossible for us to predict the way things will pan out with so many interacting factors. We can’t even predict the way a chess move will pan out. But computers are much better at chess than us. It’s a type of computation they are better suited for. So, I imagined a scenario where an AI assistant could accurately predict a catastrophe by modelling the interactions of different factors in a way our brains can’t. I think this would be possible for a specific type of situation with relatively few interacting factors, like in the story.


Checkmate. That was the first time you and I met. All it took was one more than the starting move, and just like that, I was already gone. I remember then that I still hadn’t known you by name. You were but an avatar on a computer screen whose existence was as far from me as the sun is from earth. You were there as my first opponent, and the frustration that you hammered into this conceited newbie lingered more than I could admit, but your existence, no matter how apparent it was to me, no matter how close it was for that one moment, was blockaded by the anonymity of a stranger. Back then, I didn’t know who you were, who anyone was—who I was. Being alone in a room that reeked of cup ramen and listening to songs from the 80s were all that I could do. For the 5th consecutive year, I had successfully ensnared myself in a 3 meters by 2 meters tatami mat prison cell which I had grown much too accustomed to, the same way a domesticated dog would much rather be kept as a pet than to roam about freely in the frigid evergreen woods of its predecessors. I kept myself shackled because I was afraid of the outside world, afraid if I was going to survive, afraid of being a burden. Given my inability to do anything useful, it felt to me as if my existence in and of itself was a burden to others. I was never clever, I was never truly passionate about anything. I was a flotsam on stagnant waters reluctant to move, and by that alone, would I not be a dead burden to the world? The fact that I was there stuck in my room by my own volition confirmed me of my suspicions. If that were the case, would it not be better to be a ghost, to be chained to the ocean depths where nobody could see or reach me? So in my solitude, you became a sole source of excitement. I would play you in chess, and you’d always accept. Was it because you couldn’t beat anyone but myself? Even so, I didn’t mind, our matches had provided me with reprieve. After three months, we became rivals, though you were always better than me, so perhaps ‘partners’ would be more apt, or perhaps a better analogy would suffice; You the boxer, and I, the punching bag. I’d lose again and again, but even punching bags could swing back from time to time with a force greater than you expected, and when you missed punching them back, the taste of victory would be immense enough to last me a whole day. When I had nothing and did nothing, the smallest of things would be enough to make a day eventful, and our matches, aside from new seasonal flavors of cup noodles in the convenience store, were most definitely the highlight of most of my lonely days. It was not until a year till we truly grew to know each other. Phone numbers were exchanged and our ties tightened with your face remaining a blank canvas to me. Unlike me, you were a person whose contact with the outside was not only through a mere glass sliding door—You were there on the streets crossing many paths to work. I watched from above on the sidelines, untouchable and furtive. When looking at the glass to peer at the crossing outside, had my eyes met you before? Maybe, but when you were with everyone else, you simply became one of the countless blank faces, and I couldn’t tell you apart. You told me of the world outside, of the morning rush in train stations, of the  gruelling overtimes, of the pollen allergy you battled bravely through summer, of the soft and granular texture of snow on the northern fringes of the country. The more tales you told me, the more I thought of the world outside. Of how much changed since the outside and I had last met, of where that enthusiastic kid in me, ready to see the world, had gone away, though I very much knew the city would be far too much with all its incandescent lights and pandemonium, but I wanted to see your face, just yours and yours alone, as though I were trying to confirm that you truly were real and not just a delusion of mine. And somehow as if the Gods had heard my plight, forgetting that they had already forsaken me, I did. I saw you that day when the ginkgo trees outside had turned yellow, when the air was cool enough that I could cut down air-conditioning costs by simply opening the window without the fear of being frozen still or swimming in my own sweat. It must have been my lucky day that afternoon since I remembered winning a match against you, and you being the sore loser that you were, mentioned taking a breather and letting some chilly air in whilst pulling out a cigar. That was the moment I first saw you. Across my room, just a building away across a narrow alley, you were there with your cigar, a trail of smoke waltzing from the tip. Your white uniform which had gone slack quivered in the gentle gusts and the dying sun shone through your greasy hair covering those dark sunken eyes atop those slender cheeks. You took a deep breath and your eyes met my window somberly, but I doubt you could see me at all. I didn’t recognize it at first, but as I focused my attention on the leaves embellishing my balcony, you returned back behind the curtains, and the message to start was sent. Coincidence? I think not. But I didn’t tell you I knew. Perhaps it was the one road gap between us that allowed me to play you, or were you like me, and it was that too which allowed you to play me? If we knew each other, would you still be willing to play against me, or would you be disgusted by my cowardice the same way that others would? I’d rather not know then, so I did what I was most especially talented in—staying silent, and  I only glanced at your room from time to time half-wishing you’d notice, half-wishing you wouldn’t. Nevertheless, seeing your face was enough. That would trounce new ramen flavors any season. When you returned, you played on in that carefree style of yours. Perhaps it was what made you a bad player and I, even worse, but that was exactly what I felt comfortable with. You were not afraid to be foolish, and that gave me hope that perhaps there were others like you out there, others who would be willing to play a game without much of a care whether they lose or win, because no matter how much of a sore loser you were, you’d always return knowing that you’d still have my company, knowing that whatever the scenario, it would always be fun for the both of us, which made it all the more surprising when you did the impossible and stopped coming when winter came. And when winter came, so did the bleakness it gave off, as where I lived, not a single snowflake would fall from the heavens, leaving the balding trees and desolate streets bare below the dampened sky. Just as I got to spot you among the crowd, you vanished again. This time, with no more matches, no more messages, with no clues but that room ahead of me, still enclosed by those beige curtains. Had my virus contracted you perhaps? Had you castled yourself in your room the same way I did? As days came passing, and weeks soon enough, your disappearance embedded worms of doubt wriggling through my mind. I wanted to know what was happening in that room, and I didn’t think it would get as bad as it did. On that last day of the year, I wondered what exactly ran through your mind. When you stood on the railing wetted by the unexpected rainfall, shoes on the floor, eyes staring blankly at the dark sky shattered by the coruscating fireworks. Your feet and body were trembling, but your face, dead and pale as if ready to accept any outcome. You thought nobody was watching, but I was there, still as ever watching from afar, wondering my next course of action, wondering if I had any say in it. I watched you take a deep jittery breath. Clearly, you were afraid. Clearly,  you were not ready to die. I took my phone, and I called you for the first time. From here, I could hear the ringtone, and I was relieved you hadn't muted me, but the thought soon vaporized into four words repeating in cycles. Please, pick it up! Please, pick it up! My head was cantankerous, but the dead silence outside was numbing, and when you picked it up, you said nothing. “Wanna play chess?” I asked, but in reply, you muttered silence. I couldn’t tell if the expression you wore on your face was that of horror or relief. After a bout of silence, you said, “No, I can’t”. “Why not?” “Because I’m about to jump.” “You are? Why?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know why you’re going to jump?” “Nobody knows anything. I’m just scared of tomorrow. The world has lost its color, does it mean anything at all?” “I don’t know. I’m no Aristotle, but I have something to ask.” “What?” “If I were to stop you from jumping, I want you to try out the new crab ramen from the convenience store with me.” “What?” “Did I stutter?” “Whatever, I couldn’t care less.” “Catch me, okay?” “What?” I went on the balcony and stepped on the railings, still slippery. I knew what I was doing was reckless and stupid, but I did it anyways. I crouched and loaded my plump legs like a spring, my body feeling heavy from the lethargy. As my heart beat as though a percussion, I sent myself flying above the narrow road. I still remembered looking at your eyes wide open, revealing all four white corners of your eye. And when you caught me—what a rough landing it was. But as if it was only natural to me, when our two black marbles met, all I could say was "checkmate".


I Can’t Betray Anyone Life just seems too difficult sometimes. I really don’t know what to do. There’s no one that I trust enough to talk to and then again I would feel guilty telling anyone else what I know. Right now I want the world to swallow me up, a big hollow black hole to appear and just as I go to cross the road when the little green man appears overhead, I’m gone. I want to have a stroke and lose my power of speech (Of course I will get well and then be able to talk again) I don’t want to have my faculties and be able to reason and think and decide. It’s a burden to know things and to want to share them but to feel that it is wrong to tell someone else. I’m now starting to feel angry that I’ve been put into this terrible situation. I wish last week never happened. ‘Be careful what you wish for’ my Gran used to say. I never understood that as I child when the only things wished for were that all the teachers at school to be ill on the same day or that it rained chocolate instead of water. But if by chance this wish today came true, and last week could be wiped out from life, then everything would go back to normal – my thoughts would be of getting my hair done after work and what’s on for the weekend?  Not this. At work they can tell something is bothering me. “Why the long face?” my work colleague asked, (I thought he would then tell me, for the umpteenth time, the joke about the horse at the bar) “You look right down in the dumps”. He was always cheerful – the guy who would leave funny messages on your desk or ring your phone and then speak to you in one of the many accents he had perfected – so in the end you always seemed to shout really loud into the mouthpiece to try and make yourself understood. Meanwhile the rest of the office was stifling their laughter, listening, and watching sneakily from their desk. “No there’s nothing wrong Richard. I’m having car problems – the clutch or the timing chain and it’s so annoying” I lied, hoping that what I said made a tiny bit of sense! (I remembered when my brother had his mates over and they would have the bonnet of his car open and would be trying to fix something…and the words timing chain and clutch would be bandied around). But this lie just popped out of my mouth as if I did it all the time. I didn’t lie all the time – not much at all really. I used to lie to my mum when I said I was going around to my friend Gloria’s house to do homework and then we would sneak out of her front door and meet the boys from Lynforth High School, chatting and smoking – us girls giggling and acting coy while the boys told their highly exaggerated stories and swore a lot to impress us. But that was a long time ago. Lying then was a necessity. The idea of confronting anyone leaves me in a cold sweat. I’ve never been any good at it.  My last attempt at ‘having it out, clearing the air and getting to the bottom of things’ didn’t end well. I’d been seriously thinking about what I was actually going to do – how I would be confronting and intimidating but in the end I thought ‘I will just just open the door, confidently stride in and say my piece’. Well, alright in theory but….I went to open the door and it was locked. Knocking on the door and all the while looking around, nervously expecting to hear a booming voice say “What do you want?” I waited. The door opened and a white haired, little old lady stood next to it. “Hello dear” she said in a soft voice. Well this wasn’t a good start – I expected my ex-fiancée to be standing there. I was wondering who she was? “Umm hello. I’ve come to see Johnathon” I replied, hoping that when she called him, and the big money owing brute came to the door, she would leave. I really didn’t want her delicate little ears hearing what I was going to say to him! “Oh I’m sorry my dear but Johnathon is in hospital. I’m just here to feed the cat for him. Can I help you at all?” “Hospital” I asked quite shocked. “What’s wrong with him?” Not that I actually cared what was wrong with him – the worse he felt, the better as far as I was concerned. I wondered why he had a cat – he hated them! “Would you like to come inside – it’s rather cold standing out here” her sweet little face crinkled at the corners of her light blue eyes and soft cream coloured skin fell into little folds. I could see as the sunlight shone on her face the tiny hairs on her chin. “I’m actually running late for an appointment and just thought I would catch Johnathon at home on the way” (I wanted to add ‘as I heard he wasn’t working AGAIN’). “No dear he won’t be home for a long time. He came off his motor bike. I do believe he has broken lots of bones”. And with that last piece of information the shivering little lady closed the door. I wanted to not care but it just wasn’t in me. I tried to think ‘serves him right the self-centred, cheating…….. But what was actually going through my mind was ‘I’ll find out if he is allowed visitors and what he can actually eat before I go and see him’. I rang my brother Ron to tell him the news about David and the motor bike accident. They used to be good mates before David and I split up and I thought he would like to know. We had met through my brother. “How bad is it?” Ron asked. I knew he would go in and visit him. My brother was just that sort of guy. No matter what had happened in the past, he wouldn’t let anything stop his kind nature from emerging and taking action. “I don’t know. The old lady at his house just said he had broken a few bones. And did you know he has a cat?” Did you say a cat? He hates cats”. Then after a long pause, added. “I guess people can change”. It was Wednesday night and I always went over to my brother’s house for dinner on a Wednesday. I had thought about not going tonight until Ron said at the end of our phone conversation, “The girls have a performance to show you tonight when you come over. They’ve made up a show – all singing and dancing and stuff. I was tortured last night with it – you’ll probably love it but for goodness sake don’t let it go on for too long – no encores!” “Will Pauline be there tonight? “I asked, hoping that the answer would be ‘no’.  It wasn’t ‘no’- it was “Not sure, she said she would let me know if she has to work back” from my brother.

It’s not that I don’t like Pauline. I do. I love her like a sister. I was drawn to her sunny personality from the first time I met her. She is so funny, and has a positive outlook on everything. We can go out for a coffee together and have the best time – talking and laughing.  For someone who works in the emergency department of a big hospital and has two kids, she really is a bundle of energy.  But I’m just not sure that I can keep my emotions in check if Pauline is near me at the moment. I need more time to think about what I’m going to do. It’s all about loyalty – but how can you be loyal to both parties? You can’t. A choice has to be made. I stood on the terracotta door step and listened while ‘we wish you a merry Christmas’ played after I had pressed the buzzer. Ron was meant to change the doorbell tune back to the original but told me he couldn’t see the point when Christmas would be back soon enough, and apart from Jehovah Witnesses and the man delivering parcels, no one else really rang the bell. The door opened but not before I heard chatter and laughter coming from the other side. “Hello Aunty Von” my nieces chorused. They both ran up to me at the same time, their soft skinned arms hugging me as I bent down. I ended up lying on the hall runner, all three of us giggling as we fell over, tangled up in each other. “Girls, be careful with Aunty Von. You know she’s old!” my brother joked as he closed the front door. He took my bag from me and hung it on a brass hook - one of five perfectly spaced in a row on a solid length of oak , taking pride of place on the cream coloured brick wall. Ron had made this at high school – the start of his love of wood and producing many beautiful handmade pieces of furniture for himself and others. I checked myself out in the ornate oval mirror overhead. It was carved from Bassswood – apparently one of the best for carving – that’s what Richard told me! He made it for his and Pauline’s fifth wedding anniversary and thus the reason for all the ornate heart shapes around the edge of it.

I remembered that I needed to get something out of my bag. I could sense two little people hovering around my legs – waiting for the usual treat - I felt in the side pocket and found the two packets of jelly beans I had brought, “these are for after dinner you two”. I told them as warm little hands reached up to grab them. We walked along the wide wooden hallway. Family photos adorned both sides of the walls and in the centre of the high ceiling hung a chandelier – a brass branched ornamental light fitting, suspended on a linked chain, and at the end of each ‘branch’ sat a small globe. Underneath hung rainbow crystals that sparkled and threw off coloured light, bouncing delicately on the plain walls when the light was switched on. Ron, who had an eye for a bargain, had picked up this Victorian ornamental light very cheaply at a ‘bring and buy’ sale a few years ago. “Something smells rather nice” I mentioned as the mouth-watering smell of a roast travelled around the kitchen and onto my taste buds and set them off dancing in anticipation of salty soft beef and crispy roast potatoes. “You really are a good husband and Dad you know Richard” I commented, looking around at the tidy room, two bathed little girls in their PJ’s and tantalizing smells wafting from the oven. Pauline is a very lucky lady. I hope she appreciates you”. I wanted to say more but couldn’t. “It works both ways. I’m lucky too. I have a very hard working wife, who’s a great mother. She often works double shifts and that’s no mean feat in that environment – especially on weekend nights. The ED is awful. Some of the stories she tells me…..but she has always been passionate about nursing – you know that Von. Anyway she’ll get a much need break soon. We’re all off to Scotland to visit her family in a few weeks. My head was thumping. It was getting too much now. Here I was sitting at the dinner table with my brother and two nieces knowing that my sister-in-law was having an affair or flings or whatever the heck they are called because I saw her a few weekends ago passionately kissing some man outside a house, and then walking in through the front door with him, arms around each other, her happy infectious laugh echoing out into the street but it’s still ‘happy families’? I do believe in fate. Was I meant to see Pauline that night? I had never been to that street before but after an evening out with friends I was giving one of them a lift home. Philip, who was in my car, had probably wondered why I couldn’t take my eyes off the couple smooching. He had asked me if I knew them and then suddenly yelled “Hey Von, watch the parked car”. I had swerved out, narrowly missing it. I felt sick then and I was starting to feel sick now. “Aren’t you hungry Von? Or is it the cooking?” Ron laughed. “I actually had such a big lunch – Chinese banquet with the gang from work”…’Why did you say that? I asked myself. You could have just said ‘No I’m not very hungry tonight’. I just told another lie. I felt as if I was losing my grip on everything. “I might just watch the amazing song and dance show that I have been waiting for all day, and then call it a night”. Two little faces, bright as sunbeams, sang nursery rhymes and danced, arms flailing with gusto, tutus with stiff nylon skirts that were put on over pyjamas bouncing up and down and the twirling and jumping seemed to go on for ever with such enthusiasm! “Ok girls, time for teeth cleaning and bed”. I told the girls how happy their ‘show’ had made me feel, and that was true. The simplicity and innocence of children shone through with their giggling and excitement. There is no pretence with children at this age, no embarrassment. You can fall over, get your words all wrong, dance like you have work boots on, and it doesn’t matter. It is just fun.  I needed it. I sat up in my bed. I could think here, reason and make decisions. I loved coming home to my bed. It was the most relaxing place for me – I could see out of my window without craning my neck at all. The moon was high, an almost perfect yellow circle in a black sky. ‘Not good for fishing’ I thought and it took me back momentarily to thoughts of my childhood and being in the dinghy with dad. As I looked to the right of the moon but much lower down, and I could see the solar lights still flashing on next doors Chinese Maple tree – the thought went through my mind that there must be lots of people who don’t ‘take things down’ after Christmas. I grabbed my cup of tea from next to me on the table and sat, mesmerised, watching the alternating green, blue, red flashing of the lights – and thinking. I had made up my mind. I couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything about it. If it had of been my brother Ron who had told me about Richard cheating, then I think I would have resented him, always. I would have asked myself why a brother would want to tell his sister something that would change her life for ever. (As it was, my fiancée was such a self-centred, self-absorbed narcissist that he flaunted it and no one had to tell me). I couldn’t stand it if my only brother disliked me for the rest of my life because I told him about his wife cheating. On the other hand, if I confronted Pauline, then that could go one of two ways….she could be honest with me, (and not too honest as I really wouldn’t want to know the intricacies) and tell me it is over, or she could vehemently deny it, and then I would know for the rest of my life that she was a liar. I have never been known for interfering in other people’s business and I don’t want to start now. I just can’t tell either of them. I wouldn’t want to hurt Pauline or Ron. There could be many reasons why someone strays from a marriage. I really hope that with Pauline it is a ‘one off’, a stressful time that led her to do something completely out of character, a brain fade, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know what the future holds but I don’t want to be the one to split up a family. I thought of the concert my nieces put on for me and the joy that surrounded them – I want that to continue. I have to face the truth, sometimes I can lie, but I could never betray anyone.


John had always been curious about the concept of time. When he heard about the hallucinogenic drug called Tempus that claimed to alter one's perception of time, he couldn't resist trying it. So, one day he took the drug and waited for the effects to kick in. As the world around him began to shift and blur, John found himself transported to a surreal world where time seemed to have no meaning. Suddenly, he saw his best friend, Jake, standing before him. Jake had died two years ago in a car accident, and John had never fully come to terms with his loss. Overwhelmed with emotion, John spoke to Jake about everything that had happened since his death. They talked about old memories, laughed, and even shed a few tears together. As their conversation continued, John remembered that Jake had also taken Tempus before his death. John remembered a bizarre conversation he had with Jake when he was still alive, the last one before the accident. Jake insisted to John over and over again that he was worrying about nothing. Back then he felt like Jake was recalling a conversation that never happened. He assumed Jake was just drunkenly rambling or something. Suddenly, John realized that he had been given a second chance to communicate with Jake and warn him about the accident that would take his life. That Tempus was connecting him in this moment to Jake in that same moment 2 years ago when he had taken Tempus too like a bridge across time. Was this the other half of that conversation that made no sense back then? Fueled by a sense of urgency, John told Jake about the events that would lead to his death and begged him to be more careful. But Jake just smiled sadly and shook his head. "I know all of that, John," he said. "I've seen it all before. I've been given the same chance to change my fate, but some things are inevitable. You can't change the past, and you can't change the future." John managed to laugh through his own tears. He understood that was how Jake always was. Even throughout their childhood together, John remembered how Jake would shrug things off and accept them as just the way things were. He accepted Jake’s outlook and decided to spend this moment reliving their favorite stories together. The time Jake’s bicycle ended up in a tree. The time John shot a firework into the neighbor’s yard and the huge dog they let out after him. On and on the stories and the laughter went, just like old times. As the effects of the drug began to wear off, John watched as Jake faded away, leaving him alone once again. But now he had a newfound sense of closure and acceptance, knowing that he had done everything he could to warn his friend. From that day on, John lived his life with a newfound appreciation for the present moment and the people around him. He now knew that time and friendship are the most precious gifts.