The inhabitants of the small Norfolk seaside town of Breezehaven wouldn’t have been human if they weren’t occasionally jealous of their near neighbours in Hunstanton. Oh, there were no barriers or riots, or anything remotely like that, and it was by no means unknown for there to be what were called (only in jest, of course , people hurriedly added) mixed marriages. The good folk of Breezehaven even sometimes expressed a certain pity for their counterparts in Hunstanton. “We can live perfectly well without being the answer to a pub quiz question,” was a remark you sometimes heard. The relevant question was worded in different ways, but all amounted to the same thing, that Hunstanton was on the East Coast and faced West. You see, it was on that arm of the North Sea known as The Wash, which pub quiz devotees may also recognise as the place where King John’s crown jewels were reputedly lost, and the weird quirks of geography meant that journeys from Norfolk to Lincolnshire took twice as long as they would otherwise. One thing in which the inhabitants of both towns were united were in thinking a bridge would be a great idea, but it would never be built.

     The oddity of geography also meant that sunrises and sunsets in Hunstanton were particularly spectacular, and it was nicknamed Sunny Hunny . Some claimed that the town’s name itself came from “Honeyed Stones”, but the general consensus was that it was more prosaic and merely relating to its geographical position on a river, with the suffix “ton” for “town”.      Mary Shaw ran the Violet Villa guest house in Breezehaven. The name sounded poetic, but as she proudly said, unlike some others  (naming no names, but thinking about Castle Hill and Cliff View) it was entirely accurate. The guest house was, indeed, a 1930s villa, and Mary was justifiably proud of her collection of African Violets. But she didn’t go over the top and have the walls painted bright purple of anything like that. Mary was, for the most part, happy enough with her life. She had a business that might not exactly be the proverbial little goldmine, but “washed its face” (how easy it was to fall into using expressions you didn’t like!) and she enjoyed being a proprietor of a guest house, though she determinedly avoided either calling herself a landlady or falling into the stereotype of one. It was a shame her marriage hadn’t worked out, but she and Toby were still on reasonable terms, and everyone agreed their children were a credit to them both. Alice was doing a nursing degree and wanted to specialise in paediatric nursing, and Joe was in the sixth form at school and wanted to be an engineer. She liked to think that at some point in the future she might have grandchildren, but it certainly wasn’t one of her absolute priorities.      Although Mary ran the guest house effectively and efficiently, she had a poetic and thoughtful side, and often, particularly after a rather stressful day (every hotel owner dreads a plumbing emergency, but at least she could rely on Ron to come quickly and fix it properly) she liked to take a mug of coffee, or sometimes a glass of wine, out into the garden, and take a few deep breaths, and enjoy the sunset.

     She was expecting a particularly beautiful one that night. It had been the right kind of day; a day of sunshine and showers, the kind of day that led to shafts and shades at twilight. It was a cool evening, but with the kind of gentle coolness that held the warmth of the afternoon and the promise of the warmth of the next day.      It took Mary a few seconds to realise what was both glaringly obvious and absolutely impossible. The sun was setting in the east. And the sun just did not  set in the East. Weather forecasters both could and did get things wrong, but other things were set in stone, and had been since – well, she wasn’t sure about the Big Bang (though she was always rather taken with the idea that you could hear its echoes in the static on your radio) but for billions of years, and would be so for further billions of years.      Which was fine in theory. But Mary knew her eyes weren’t deceiving her, and she hadn’t even had a glass of wine, settling for coffee that evening. She was the kind of person who could be zany enough to have faith in her own sanity, even after a difficult day. And the sun was most definitely setting in the East.

     Mary decided to look on the Internet. And already reports were coming in.

The Impossible Happens in Small English Coastal Town  was one of the more level-headed of them. Some took it as a harbinger of doom, and though there were some that regarded an odd shaped cloud as a harbinger of doom, there was no denying this was bizarre, and whilst not sharing the apocalyptic warnings, she could understand why people felt that way. But she had seen it, and had not been afraid, baffled, yes, but not afraid.

     It soon became evident that only Breezehaven was affected by this strange and inexplicable turn of events. It extended to the little estate on the outskirts, but no further. It did not impact on the whole country, nor even the whole county. It did not – and the good folk of Breezehaven couldn’t help feeling a certain smug satisfaction at this – even affect Hunstanton. “So let them go on about their little claim to fame,” Mary’s friend Frances at the pharmacy said, “I reckon we double trump it!”      It was not some one-off. The sun in Breezehaven carried on rising in the West and setting in the East. It became the subject of some of the hottest scientific discussion since the splitting of the atom. And nobody could work out exactly why it was happening, as explanation after explanation was offered, even those who offered it plainly just as puzzled as everyone else. Some tried to make out it was like those streams that seem to flow uphill, or those moons that look suddenly enormous, just a trick of the light or the atmosphere or perspective deceiving your eyes. But probably nobody really believed that. It was generally agreed that it was utterly harmless. Which was a relief.      Of course, it wasn’t only the scientific community that was highly taken with what they called the Breezehaven Solar Aberration  as it was officially known. Some people, especially those whose living didn’t depend on the tourist industry, remarked that although it was true Breezehaven Solar Aberration  sounded like some unpleasant illness, the marketing of Breezehaven as The Town that Defies the Laws of the Universe  was somewhat vulgar. The trouble was, it was also true. And also, when it came to the marketing, probably unnecessary. Breezehaven had gone viral. Guests swarmed in as they never had before. There simply weren’t enough rooms to accommodate all their visitors. With laudable magnanimity, they did, if needs must, direct people to Hunstanton, after all, they could afford to be generous. A new holiday village on the outer edges of the town (but still within the range of the Solar Aberration) was built and opened more quickly than a field hospital. Up until now Breezehaven had relied mainly on trade in “the season” (an early Easter was a boon) but now they had become an all year round resort. People wanted to see autumn sunrises and sunsets there, and when it came to the Winter Solstice – well, Stonehenge suddenly found itself playing second fiddle. The kind of people who normally only appear on screen if a solar eclipse were imminent dutifully warned about the dangers of looking directly at the sun, and of course there were right, but to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the Solar Aberration (or defying the laws of the Universe) did not, thankfully, lead to one case of eye damage.

     The good times were rolling, everyone agreed. There was even renewed talk about the bridge project, and this time it didn’t seem so fanciful. It was all like a miracle.      Mary, like so many others, saw her bank account swelling in a most pleasing manner and reflected that perhaps she might be able to make that trip to Australia to see her brother Kieran after all.

     The trouble was, when? There was no such thing as an off-season now, and she had even opened a little annexe in what had once been her conservatory. Although she had been one of the first (she liked to think the first  but there were other pretenders to that title) to see the phenomenon, she now hardly ever got to see it at all. When the sun was rising or setting she was either catching a few hour’s sleep or had to be busy. But she did know that at times it was impossible to catch a proper glance of the sunrise or sunset anyway as the beaches were often packed like chicken batteries with people jostling for position. It was mainly good-natured, but not always, and though actual arrests were rare, there was some bad feeling. In the few hours when the beach was relatively quiet, an army of local council workers strove to clear the rubbish that had been dropped. “I never thought I’d say this, but it has its downside,” Frances said, “I mean, I know it’s great for you Mary!”      “It’s certainly set me up,” she agreed. Or was that agreeing? She hadn’t said it was great because she, too, was beginning to have her doubts. Even as she spoke, she felt an elbow from one of the holidaymakers in the queue, standing behind her, who said, “Sorry,” but in that kind of tone that implies that it wasn’t an accident, and she wasn’t sorry at all. Mary felt a sudden absurd nostalgia for the bad old days of social distancing, though of course nobody in their right mind would want the reason why.

     As time wore on, she realised that many of the visitors were no more seeing the sunrise and sunset than she was. After all, you could see them in profusion on the internet, and they were always the best and most spectacular ones (because the aberration was, in itself, no guarantee of a sunrise or sunset being spectacular). The important thing was to have been  to Breezehaven, to have those bragging rights that rankled with your friends and family until they had been there too. As many selfies were taken by the sign welcoming people to the town as were on the beach. There was a market for little pseudo-passports, all, of course, carrying a warning that they served no official purpose. And they were amongst the least tacky souvenirs that were stacked high in all the shops in Breezehaven.      It was November, which would normally have been one of the quietest times in Breezehaven, with most of the guest houses, Violet Villa included, not open at all. They were open now, as were the holiday villages (for one had now been built on the other side of town, too) and Mary had been struck by the awful thought that she might possibly have double-booked one of the rooms for the Solstice Break which everyone expected to be even more of an event than the first one had, the previous year. Or at least, for more people to flood into the town, for more jostling, for more dropped rubbish, for more short tempers and more buying of useless souvenirs. Sometimes she was hard pushed to keep track what time of day it was. But she did know, if only because of the news programme she had just managed to catch, that it was late afternoon and the sun would soon be setting.

     She knew the double booking issue wasn’t going to go away, and she would have to do something about it, but she desperately needed a few breaths of the clear, cold air of late autumn, needed to feel it on her face and she even half-hoped it was raining.      At first she just thought it was one of the less spectacular sunsets, and she wasn’t even that bothered. It dawned on her far more gradually this time. The sunset, it was true, wasn’t that bright and brilliant and evocative, but was quite undeniably in the West.

     Once more, Breezehaven was in the headlines. Cancellation of bookings began as a trickle, then turned into a flow, though there were those who were as keen to see the ending of something as they had been to see its beginning and its afternoon. But the return of things as they should be has neither, at heart, the longevity nor the newsworthiness of things beginning to be how they not only shouldn’t be, but couldn’t be. And yet, undeniably, were.      It was a shame. Of course it was. And yet, thought Mary, standing on a near-deserted beach one cold and quiet Sunday morning, in another way it wasn’t a shame at all. Perhaps it had stopped just in time! AUTHOR’S NOTE As some readers may know, the Norfolk town of Hunstanton does, indeed, exist, and it is on the East coast facing West for exactly the reasons given in this story. I know and love the place and offer it my apologies for enlisting it as a “supporting actor”. However, Breezehaven, even with sunrises and sunsets as they ought to be, is entirely a product of my imagination and this is most definitely a work of fiction!


“You gotta be careful with that acid on account of you can do it, and then, you could have a flashback like ten years could pass, twenty years could pass, and then, you get a flashback. So I thought...well that sounds like a good deal.” Norm Macdonald Flashback

It’s Christmas five years ago. His wife isn’t there but he’s not alone. She called earlier in the day to let him know she’d come up the second the snow cleared. That was before the power went out. He’s staring outside his cabin window, staring at the cloud of snow, contemplating the worst possible outcomes. *** He wakes up in the middle of the night. He had a dream about that Christmas five years ago. Again, the snow has cut the power and blocked the roads. Again, he’s plagued with the same panic he felt that same night. Again, his chronic hyperventilation makes him gasp and grow hungry for air. Again, he feels like he has no control over anything. This time, however, his wife is by his side and his daughter sleeps in the other room. He feels strange. A strangeness all too similar to that regretful night. He feels like he’s hungover, but he didn’t drink last night. The ceiling looks like it’s a mile above his head. He looks down. He’s afraid the fall from his bed might kill him. *** The woman he’s with is fixing drinks in the kitchen. He needs to talk to her. To tell her this a mistake. That this can’t happen. His hand shakes. It takes him five tries to light his cigarette. He’s rehearsing the lines in his head. I’m sorry...but this can’t happen. I’m sorry...but this can’t happen. I’m sorry...but this can’t happen. He hears the sound of sugar being muddled in an empty glass as the woman sings Baby, It’s Cold Outside softly to herself in the kitchen. *** He sits up straight and touches his bare feet to the cold hardwood floor. The feeling is painful at first, but quickly, his mind fixates onto new pains. He puts on his slippers and quietly, so to not wake his wife, slides his feet upon the wood panels to exit the room.

He’s in the hallway. He flips the light switch. He remembers the power is out. He wonders why his legs feel so flimsy. Like the bones have slid right out of them. He grabs for anything on the walls to help support him as he makes his way towards the kitchen. *** The woman that isn’t his wife returns from the kitchen. She sets two drinks down on the living room coffee table. She sits herself down next to him and leans into his reluctant arms.

“I’m sorry...but...this probably shouldn’t happen.” He’s ashamed that he just butchered his own lines. “You don’t expect me to leave...now...during a blizzard...do you?” “You can’t be here when my wife gets here.” She grabs his chin with her fingertips and gently turns his head to look at her. “I won’t be. I promise.” She reaches for the two glasses on the coffee table and hands him one. “Let’s just enjoy the night...shall we?” “What’s in it?” “Brandy...Seven Up...and lots of sugar.” He takes a drink. “Mmm...good.” *** He’s forgotten about his legs entirely. His unquenchable thirst is the only thing on his mind now. He’s making himself a drink in the kitchen. He doesn’t know what he’s pouring. Something brown. Something to take the edge off. Something to help him finally forget five years ago. It won’t work. Nothing ever has. As he pours, he contemplates the reasons why the torture is so much more unbearable tonight than all other nights. *** He finishes his drink and sets it on the table. He breaths a sigh of relief. His mind is clearer and in a better place now.

“Feeling better?” the woman asks. “Much better. Thanks. I needed that.” “Well...you’ll be feeling a lot better in just a few minutes.” “Thanks...but...I’m sorry...but this shouldn’t...this should not happen!” “Not what I meant,” she says as she shakes her head sadistically.

“What do you mean then?” “Well...let’s just say I put a little something extra in our drinks. Something to help take the edge off.” He stands up. His chronic hyperventilation sets in. His face goes flush from panic and anger. “What did you put in my drink?!” “Just a little LSD.” She grabs his trembling hand, “Don’t worry...you’ll thank me later. Let’s just sit back...relax...and enjoy the trip together.” He struggles for air like he’s breathing the last bit of oxygen on earth. No matter how long or how deep he inhales, his lungs stay deflated. He’s going to faint. Going to fall and bash his head against the corner of the coffee table and leave a pool of blood on the living room floor. A pool of evidence. Evidence of his infidelity. She lays him down on the couch to prevent the worst. He uses every last breath he can spare to shout out his wife’s name over and over again until he sails off into dream.

*** He sits down in the living room chair with his drink in hand. He grabs the TV remote with his free hand and presses power. He remembers again that the power is out. He looks at the TV. Colors and people appear on the screen. He sees his wife standing in the corner of the living room. She’s watching her husband share a drink with a woman that’s not her. She bends down and her daughter appears by her side. She whispers in her daughter’s ear, “Daddy doesn’t love us anymore.” He falls to the floor crying silently. He’s trying to remember how to breath. *** He wakes up in the same place he had passed out the night before. He doesn’t see anyone else around. He finds his belt on the coffee table. He takes the belt in his hand. Bent in half, he squeezes it tight. The belt widens and then flattens as he presses his forehead into the crease. He sees a note just to the left of where the belt was. The note reads: Thanks for the great night! Hit me up whenever you’re back in town. You know where to find me. Love, Zoe He runs to the sink and throws up. He can’t remember anything. Not after passing out at least. He can’t decide if that’s a blessing or a curse.

He wipes the excess vomit off of his lips with his hand. His wedding ring reflects sunlight from the window and calls his attention. He stares at it. His thumb rotates it around the base of his finger. He recalls how the previous morning he looked upon the ring with pride. He walks over to the light switch. The power is still out. He checks the window. The roads are cleared. A blue SUV pulls into the driveway. It’s his wife and newborn daughter. He turns around and grabs the note from off of the coffee table. He crumples it up and discards it into his pocket. He puts his belt back on, missing a loop in the process. He goes to open the door for his wife and child. *** He’s hearing the words over and over again in his head. This time they’re spoken by his wife: I’m sorry...but this can’t happen. I’m sorry...but this can’t happen. I’m sorry...but this can’t happen. Did it happen? Did anything actually happen? For years he’s agonized over whether or not his paranoia was rooted in delusion. What if that night began and ended the second he passed out? It’s possible. Maybe likely even. He has to know for sure. He can’t go on like this. He pulls himself up off the ground. He grabs his hat and coat and walks to the door with nothing on his feet but his slippers. He remembers that Zoe’s house is only a few blocks down the road. He gave her a ride there during the blizzard five years ago when he saw her struggling in the snow. If only she had gotten out of the car when he dropped her off that night. If only she hadn’t convinced him to take her with him. That she couldn’t be alone for the night. Things would’ve been different. He promised himself he’d never talk to or see her again. He has to break that promise. It’s time to know the truth. He pushes the door open. He’s trudging through thick mounds of snow to reach the highway. He’s holding his hat down so a gust of wind doesn’t blow it off. His other hand shields his face from the snow. He trucks over a snowman he had made with this daughter earlier that day. It was covered to its waist in snow. He carries on. He’s at the road. He can tell its been plowed within the last couple of hours. The snow covering it is matted down and slippery. Nothing he’s never walked on before. He just has to be careful. He slides down it like he did in his curling days. One foot at a time. One ahead of the other. His legs are numb. They’ll be warm again soon. His feet are in the early stages of frostbite. He’s had worse. His face is flushed. His breathing tightens. He’s exhaling more than he’s inhaling. He stops. Hands on knees. Defeat. The wind rips his hat off his head. He sees it land about twenty feet up the road. He slides his feet towards it and slips on his way there. He army crawls the rest of the way. He reaches the hat and takes it in his hand. He sits up straight and beats the hat against his thigh to shake off the snow. He looks up ahead. He sees two yellow lights approaching in the distance. The lights illuminate a thick white cloud of snow as it churns everything in its path. He jumps to his feet to get out of the way. He takes one step to the side of the road. He slips. The lights illuminate a red cloud of snow as it churns everything in its path. The roads are cleared but the power remains out. *** His wife walks into the house carrying their daughter. He kisses both of them. “How was the drive?” he asks. “Good!” she says. “Really good. I think we picked a good area to buy this cabin. They don’t wait around to plow the roads here like they do back home.” “That’s great!”


The night sky is always so enchanting, mysterious and full of wonder even to a scientist like me . “Lying on this blanket with you, on this mountain, and watching the sun drop behind the clouds, beyond the horizon below us is a resplendent high. Witnessing the sky turn brilliant oranges, and reds with grey shadows, and streaks of gold is always mesmerizing. When that moment passes and the gloaming sky turns into a velvety, diamond-studded, serene mantle, dreams and dreamers change. Yet, it is still romantic. Isn’t it Dawn?” “Yes, Al. It seems to wrap around us, comfort us, until we recall that each beautiful diamond is actually a furious, powerhouse of energy. Then, I suddenly feel so insignificant under the vastness. That chilly change means we better get inside and start our shift.” “Just ten more minutes, Dawn. Let me dream ten more minutes before putting on my astronomer hat and replacing the romantic dream with our sciences’ dream. How lucky are we to have so many dreams to follow? The observatory powers up quickly and we are early. Breathe this cold mountain air deeply for just ten more minutes.” “Five minutes. I can’t wait to bring the new equipment online for our first look into deep space quad nine.” -sigh- “I’ve been looking forward to tonight too. It’s taken a lifetime to develop our tech to do more than detect neutrinos. Until we had a supernova we could target, there was no point in collecting neutrinos. Come on. I can’t wait to make history with you.” We wrapped our blanket and slowly walked, hand in hand, up to the observatory under dim moonlight. Pausing at the three steps before the door, we kissed passionately before assuming our professional roles. The outer door slid open when we reached the top step. The inner door opened after the outer one sealed. We inhaled the puff of conditioned air from the positive pressurized lab then entered the telescope chamber. The large room in non-reflective, drab, paint was crowded with new consoles and equipment, all surrounding the base of the enlarged, 200 inch optical telescope. “The power reserve level gauge says that we have funneled and contained enough neutrinos to create and control Tacyons for faster than light communication and data transfer. That revolutionary collection with the recent breakthrough on understanding and controlling Quantum elements makes this night possible. I’m so excited!” “Yes, Dawn. The LDPA (Large Disk Planetary Array) is nearly aimed at that ‘empty’ space where LETI (Looking for ExtraTerestrial Intelligence) caught a brief pattern of cohesive bits so long ago. Until this moment, we had to assume it was an empty hole in space. Just challenging that assumption makes this a worthy project. Don’t you agree, Committee 9?” I couldn’t help taunting the bean counters. Maybe that was foolish. I whispered, “Many brilliant minds, project funders, and short sighted politicos are monitoring us right now, in real time. Let’s hope we can find something for them tonight, though we didn’t promise LETI results for several months.” Without waiting for an answer, I continued narrating our progress for the Committee’s benefit and spoke up. “With the power boost from all this new tech combined, we can reach out 100 light years (LY) and scan one billion bands round the clock. Let’s hope computer projections about habitable planets in that area are correct. LDPA is set. Power on the array, Dawn, and sequence in the neutrinos.” “Done. Starting Tacyon stream and enhanced Pings. Brilliant minds had to go primitive to take simple aquatic pinging tech and step it up to reflect LETI data in real time across 100 light years. Impressive!” That’s my woman — helping the politicians grasp how significant this is. I pulled Dawn out of camera range. “This committee must be impressed enough to recommend expanding our program. Only one member has any physics background. I’ll try to give them a simplified taste of what we’re doing. Back to the consoles, love.” We kissed while we had a moment. “Al, pings are already showing thousands of unknown, large planets with reasonable spectroscopic results.” I turned to the room cameras and gave the observers a sarcastic thumbs up. “In less than an hour, we have more data than we can process in detail in a year! This is an absolute success, though the LETI screen shows nothing yet.” I hope the morons are satisfied. Speaking up for all to hear, “We don’t expect LETI results with intelligible data for some time, if ever. Besides distance, timing is a huge issue. At this stage, at least one of those planets must be beyond its version of agrarian and industrial ages. If they progressed as we have, they need to be in a late stage of an early electronics age and reaching out from their own LETI. "Thanks to our new tech, we overcame the reply problem. Without Tacyons, it would take 100 years to hear their message, 100 more for them to hear our response and 100 more to hear their reply — ‘hello, anyone there’ - ‘yes’ - ‘who?’ What a dreadful, slow exchange that would be. What if they won’t get to that stage for another 90 years? We can’t and won’t wait that long. So our initial contact window is small at this time.” From one of the politicos, “So the odds of E.T. contact are still near null and we wasted billions in taxpayer expense and years of brilliance on this boondoggle, as I thought!” “No, Senatoris. Even with no contact EVER with another planet, this project has advanced science and technology by at least 100 years. Electricity, horseless carriages, space flight all seemed to be ‘boondoggles’ too when conceived. Look at how civilization benefitted from those advances. Look at the 1000-fold benefits returned from those programs. There are 1000s of spinoffs already from this project and an uncountable number more that our descendants will uncover. Our expenses are a small investment in our future.” His screen abruptly went blank. I smiled at my victory. “Excuse me, Dr. Al, can you give a layman a simple explanation of neutrinos and this tech?” “Well Senatoris Will, you’d need some background in physics and astronomy to grasp the simple explanation and a PhD to really understand it. So the highlights — neutrinos were theorized more than ninety years ago and proven sixty years later. It took decades to capture their tiny energy.” “But what is it? Dark matter?” “Not at all like that. A neutrino is a subatomic particle that is very similar to an electron, but has no electrical charge and a very small mass. Neutrinos are one of the most abundant particles in the universe. Years ago we achieved transmission of information using a beam of neutrinos. It is easy to transmit, easy to detect and can carry a lot of information over short distances. “The easiest source of neutrinos is from our Sol. Neutrinos are born during the process of nuclear fusion in the sun. In the sun's core, the reactions that fuse hydrogen into helium produce electron neutrinos with energies of 14 million electron volts (MeV). By comparison, photons in the visible spectrum carry only about 1 electron volt of energy. About 100 billion solar neutrinos pass through your thumbnail every second. “We know of four different types, but I won’t go into all that. Quantum-mechanical effects, which normally operate only at microscopic distances, were observed on terrestrial and astronomical distance scales. Neutrino physics and astrophysics is one of the most difficult jobs, requiring us to invent incredibly sensitive detectors and techniques. “The best source is the high-energy neutrinos from outside our galaxy which immediately precede a Supernova. Neutrinos are affected only by a ‘weak’ subatomic force of much shorter range than electromagnetism. If neutrinos have mass, they also interact gravitationally with other massive particles.” Dawn continued, “They are a basic building block, with some investment payback on their own, but are not enough for our purposes. We are now merging Tacyons with them to greatly extend their range and speed and using new knowledge of Quantum Mechanics as well. This 100 LY test is just the first step to interstellar and inter galaxy communication in real time . We already added a Tacyon substream to return the pinged data instantly. “As advanced as our Ping tech is, it too is in its infancy. Once we refine and enhance it, we will communicate with any race’s electronics and maybe even with just sound waves they produce. The exponential knowledge we will gain is unimaginable. I better get back to my console.” So proud of her, I sent her a subtle kiss. Despite two long shifts a day, we found no ‘wow’ communications, but did locate 300 more planets of interest. Other, astonished, astrologers identified red dwarfs, planetary collisions and rogue planets in real time. They analyzed atmospheres, temperatures and seismic activity on hundreds of planets. Seven are habitable by our standards, pending more detailed inspection. ~~~~ Three months later ~~~~ Alarms sounding, “Dawn, look at the LETI screen! That’s real. It’s analog data, but it seems intelligent. Let the committee and the public know, we made contact. One computer is already breaking it down and decoding it.” “Maybe we should wait for more — look, there are more data coming. It reads just fourteen LY away. We can trace it back to the source. I’ll alert everyone and break out the bubbly.” The computer announced the stages of decoding. It found better patterns as the new data continued in a steady stream. When it found no basic alphabet or language instructions, it declared the data was a nonbinary, probably a random intercept and not directed communication. Further, it said the transmission used overlapped AM and FM coding and analyzed them separately. “Dawn, let’s run the signal through an audio amp and the large screen oscilloscope app and see — whoa! Voices. I don’t know what they are saying, but they are clear and there are crowd sounds. Some of their odd language sounds musical and pleasant, but some sounds bellicose. I suppose we should have expected that.” “Al, look at the big screen. There are images. People like us are competing in races and throwing poles and round things. Amazing! There’s a whole section of the crowd dressed the same way. Could those be dark uniforms? Look at the strange salute and cheers from them. We are recording this, right? Good.” “The image is unstable, Dawn. Let’s sweep the signal. Oh no. It’s gone. The AM signal is still streaming.” The computer took days before it could translate the audible gibberish into our real words — most were words. Other bands of AM produced other sounds. Beautiful music, odd crashes, and horns. Our Tacyon beam focused farther along the data path and found another transmission three LY later. More crowds, primitive tech exhibits, another odd language — same results as before. Eleven LY farther, a complex and steady stream overlapped. “Al, the video is back. We are detecting multiple streams on closely spaced frequencies. There’s a red headed woman making faces, fake crying, and the crowd may be . . . laughing? I don’t get it.” “Maybe there’s a hidden code in all this. The computer is checking, but found nothing.” With time, hundreds of data streams flooded us. The main computer separated and processed them. Hours later, “Dawn, we found the source and our pings have detected something small on orbit around one planet so far. Oh, there are many satellites around it. LDPA is locking onto one of them. The satellite is transmitting a digital signal that’s very different from the scattered analog signals which would have covered large areas of the planet. This transmission is extremely tight. Perhaps the analog was some sort of entertainment? This one is different.” “I see that, Al. Again, it’s a mix of audio and video, but the code is unlike the analog signal. This image is absolutely clear. It’s slowly sweeping a ground image. Look! There’s a huge observatory dome on that mountain. The satellite is zooming in on it. OH! There are two live people outside it on a blanket — in real time. Make it louder so we can hear them if possible? OH! We can.” The stopper in the bubbly happily released itself. The computer translated. . . . “The night sky is always so enchanting, mysterious and full of wonder even to scientists like us.”


Ah, so we meet again. I thought it might have been later than sooner, but FATE decided it so. Looks like she did. So how have you been? An urgent choice must be made, and you want to make unpleasurable small talk? So very like you. Ug, so incredibly formal. Loosen up a little would you? This one’s choice will be easy. Life’s been cruel to him. He’ll choose me. Just wait and see. You do know I hate that phrase with a passion. I do not decide that. Our good friend FATE does. If I had my way, you would not have a job. You’re being cruel again. Don’t tempt FATE, she’d gladly put me out of my job. And then what will I do? You might learn a little empathy. Stop the small talk and let the poor man decide. He might just have a little fight in him yet. This time it is up to him and not the ability of those trying to save him. It does not happen often. He’s going to suffer if he chooses you. It’s long hard road to recovery. Yet there would be a light at the end of the tunnel. I have not met one person who have been happy when you come. What you bring is grief and misery. Well, obviously you haven’t been there when they welcome me with open arms. What I bring then is relief and comfort, and occasionally joy. Most of my occupation revolves around joy. In your occupation it happens like you just stated occasionally . That is the difference between us. Okay, but how can you argue that joy is better than relief and comfort. If someone has joy, but are uncomfortable, then they aren’t satisfied. That can be argued both ways. Yes, I may be tough, but after the suffering comes joy. Yes, the joy of me. Freedom from the suffering. Why are you so cold to me? Can’t we just get along? You and I are polar opposites. It is either you or me, not both. But what if it could be both of us? Do you mean to start the zombie apocalypse? Dead come alive? That sounds unpleasant to say the very least. Zombie apocalypse? That’s very modern of you. I thought you didn’t always keep up with the times. No, I wasn’t thinking of starting the apocalypse. More like right now. Couldn’t we stay like this a little longer? This poor man is teetering at the edge of a cliff, deciding to either leap off it or run to the fireman’s arms. It is pure agony, and you would like to keep him in it? How very like you. That’s such a dramatic metaphor. It’s more like sitting on the fence. Except the fence is electric and there’s a fire on one side and water on the other. And let me guess. You’re the water, and I’m the fire. Not on all occasions. On this one you are though. A traumatized cop who has almost seen more of me than I have? He’d gladly accept the easiness of my open arms than fight for your cold ones. Yes, but you are forgetting the most important thing. Love. He has a family. Everyone has a family. A loving wife with two children and another one on the way. Do you think that he would simply leave them and go easy? Well, he’s definitely considering it. He can’t seem to decide which one of us is the best choice. You would think that choice is simple. Do you hate me? Am I an enemy to you? Enemy no. Colleague yes. And sometimes, opponent on a day like today. That means the same thing. Well, the connotations are different and that is what matters. You are so old fashioned. I, on the other hand, get all kinds of new things. You get all the traditional ways, but then, then you get the creative ways. They are the most fun. You are no fun and all tradition. Actually no. The humans have found all kinds of different ways to keep me around longer. They do not seem to want the same with you. Excuse me? Have you seen the weapons they come up with today? Today, they are finding like a million new ways to bring me closer. More of me, less of you. Ah, so you are admitting that we are opposites. What? No. I believe you just said “more of me, less of you” meaning if you are around, I am not and vice versa. But what about right now? Right now, we are here together. No, we are not here together. Today is an exception. We are waiting for him to decide, either you, or keep fighting for me. Not both. Then I can get on with my job. But there are other days though, when we’re there together, thanks to human tech. Brain dead, on life support. Paralyzed. In a coma. Oh, and would you look at that. Both of them feature you and both of them are terrible situations. You’re trying to change the topic. You’ll see more of me and you’ll just have to accept it. Ag, you are giving me a headache. Would this man just choose me already? Talking with you is like talking with an idiot. Oh, wait. It is talking with an idiot. That was a lame attempt. But it was an improvement from last time. So, what have you been up to lately? I have been busy with all the usual. Babies, car crash victims, more babies, surgeries, plane crash victims, more babies— Yes, yes babies, I get it. Sorry that I asked. And before you ask, I’ve been busy with all of those too. Seems like we meet again in those types of places too. Only sometimes it is a race to see who gets there first with things like car crashes, unless FATE has decided prior, which is most cases. So that does not count. Of course, it counts. We’re both there at the same time! Maybe FATE has decided you and I should be together. I am not ready to start the zombie apocalypse. So, in your dreams maybe. FATE would not be so cruel to me. Okay, that one actually hurt. FATE could be cruel to you. She was cruel to this guy. I mean after all he’s been through, look at him! Shot and dying on a surgeon’s table. He is not dying yet. He has not decided. FATE has not been kind. If he chooses me, I hope FATE will turn his life around. At least, if he chooses me, I know I will be kind to him. I’ll take him out of FATE’s hands. Maybe I was wrong, maybe there is some good in you after all. But you will still bring grief and misery to his family. And you would still bring suffering to him. I think that if he chooses me, after a little bit of suffering there will be great joy. His family, his unborn baby, his elderly father. After they almost lost him, they will love him a little more. That is if he chooses you. Wait, I think he has made a choice. He is reaching out. He’s reaching out to you with both hands. Congratulations. He chose you. Just as he should have. That is so unlike you to say. What can I say? You make a worthy opponent. This one deserves you. Anyway, I should be going. Cheers LIFE. May FATE treat you kindly. Goodbye DEATH. Until we meet again.


Eva frantically rummaged through her blue leather tote.

They’ve got to be in here somewhere, she thought, as she pulled out old CVS receipts, gum wrappers, an extra phone charger, hair pins, unused Kleenex, notepads, pens, everything she seemingly needed to hold her life together, except the one thing she desperately sought.

Why couldn’t she find her sleeping pills? There had to be some left. She only took them once or twice a month, max. Those were the nights that she knew if she didn’t take something, she’d be sitting in front of the TV watching some 1940s Barbara Stanwyck melodrama when the first hints of daylight began peeking through the blinds.

Tonight, would be one of those nights. To make matters worse, even if she was able to find “The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers” or “Stella Dallas” among her streaming subscriptions, nothing could drown out her next-door neighbor, Mr. Sonny Man, firing his gun to bring in the New Year. Besides Eva could never not watch the Times Square ball drop. It’s how she and Russell had spent the last three years of his life. Of course, those years were spent doing a lot of other things, as well; doctors’ visits, chemo, radiation, hospital stays. But even as he played tug of war with cancer, Russell always seemed to summon enough strength to sit on the couch with his wife and watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve.

 Last year, she begged Russell to go to bed. “You’re worn out,” she’d told him. “No, no, no. I’m okay,” he insisted. “This is our tradition. This is what we do.” So Eva dressed him in his fleece pajamas, covered him with two blankets and sat next to him. She could feel all the bones in his hand as she held it, and she knew that this would be the last New Year’s Eve they would ever spend together.

Russell had played football in college and had kept himself in “good shape, somewhat,” he used to say. Eva met him at a car wash. She was vacuuming the floor on the driver’s side of her Toyota when she heard a deep voice say, “Don’t forget the back.” Eva stood up to see this huge, bearded man with a shiny bald head smiling at her. “Don’t forget to kiss my ass,” she replied. “Somebody must have got up early and ate your corn flakes,” Russell shot back. “That’s how much you know, I don’t even eat corn flakes,” she said, trying to stifle a smile. “Well, what do you eat? I need to know before I ask you out to dinner.”

That’s how their romance began. Eva fought it every step of the way. Who could blame her? Ernest Andrew Fulmore had shredded her heart and scattered the pieces to the wind. “I have nothing left,” she would tell the friends who tried to set her up on blind dates. They should know this already, she thought. They were there.

The destruction of Eva LaVonne Durant’s heart was witnessed by 250 of her and Andrew’s closest family members and friends, her pastor Rev. Abernathy, Mrs. Lampkin, the church organist, six bridesmaids, one maid of honor and six groomsmen. Fifteen minutes before she was to become Mrs. Fulmore, Andrew, the man who wooed her for a year, called the church clerk’s office and left a voicemail message. “I’m so incredibly sorry. Please, tell Eva that I cannot marry her today. Please, let her know that it’s not her. It’s me. It’s all me.” Miss Mary Atkins, the church clerk, just happened to be in her office, picking up some of the extra wedding programs, when she saw the voicemail light.

The sequence of the events that followed went like this. Miss Mary, who tried her best to not look like somebody just died, walked downstairs to the women’s dressing room and asked to speak to Eva’s mother in the hallway. “What the hell?” Elaine Durant shrieked, forgetting that she was in God’s house. Hearing her mother, Eva ran into the hallway. When she saw the look on her mother’s face, she knew. She collapsed on the floor, screaming. Her bridesmaids came running. Miss Martha informed Rev. Abernathy, who then made the announcement to the guests.

Eva didn’t leave her apartment for a month. She’d already taken a two-week vacation for her honeymoon. She tacked on two more weeks of sick leave as authorized by her doctor. Maybe a month would be enough time for the office gossipers to get all the whispering out of their systems. Two years later, there was still talk, especially when a new person was hired and gossip extraordinaire Nadine could be heard whispering, “Yeah, that’s the girl that got left at the altar” as they walked past. Eva brushed it off, like dandruff. Her life consisted of working as a middle school administrator Monday through Friday, and attending church on Sunday, with a stop at the car wash one Saturday a month.

She was a 32-year-old woman who had no interest in men nor love. Occasionally, she might entertain accepting a date from one of the guys, her friend, Sasha tried to set her up with. Then, she thought about Andrew and all the humiliation and pain. “It aint worth the risk,” she’d tell Sasha. “Eva, you can’t spend the rest of your life afraid of getting hurt again,” Sasha would say. “Not me. Love don’t live here anymore,” Eva replied. “I don’t want to hurt your friend.”

Why she entertained Russell’s initial flirtations at the car wash, she did not know. Yes, she did. She liked their banter. Russell proved to be a worthy verbal foil. Whatever she threw it at him, he could toss it right back. She was much more attracted to that, than she was to his tattooed biceps. However, nothing beat his broad dimpled smile. Still, it took her a month of phone conversations before she agreed to go out with him, and it was three more months before they had sex. Two months later, Russell proposed and two months after that, they were married by a judge at the city-county building.

The first year, they spent New Year’s Eve among the throngs in Times Square. It was 30 degrees and Eva had left her gloves on the train. She shoved her hands in Russell’s coat pocket and despite being among thousands of people, it seemed like they were the only two people who existed. “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” Russell said as they snuggled in bed back at the hotel. The following year, Russell and Eva hosted a New Year’s Eve party. Eva had spent all day preparing appetizers and desserts, and making sure her champagne flutes were spotless. “Looks like you and love have moved back in together,” Sasha said to Eva that evening, while helping her in the kitchen. Eva smiled. As her guests counted down to midnight, she looked at her husband and whispered a simple prayer, “Thank you, God.”

Now, Eva had no words left for God. It was the first New Year’s Eve since Russell’s death and all she wanted was sleep. She could hear the TV in the background, as she searched. Eva always slept with it on, but she couldn’t bear to see the ball drop without him. She knew she had some sleeping pills somewhere. There weren’t any in her tote bag, nor any in the medicine cabinet. Eva began looking on top of the book case next to her bed. There was nothing between the lamp and the alarm clock. She looked at her bottle of blood pressure medicine and wondered what would happen if she took five or six or all of them at one time. She’d probably die. She didn’t want to die. She just wanted to sleep. Dejected, Eva sat on the edge of her bed and looked down at the floor. There it was, the edge of a tiny pack containing two purple pills sticking out from beneath the book case. “Thank you, God.” She downed both pills with one sip of water, got under the covers and began clicking through channels as she waited for them to kick in. Twenty minutes passed. Her eyelids began to get heavy. Five minutes later, as she drifted off, she heard “10, 9, 8, 7 …"


As soon as I saw the tunnel, I knew that it just had to be mine. I knew why and wherefore I wanted it – I knew I would even sell my tiara to obtain enough funds, if I had to. But of course, I wouldn’t have to. Of course not. My mother had always told me about “the light at the end of the tunnels” and she was being her usual ambiguous self. Yet, here it was, in Glorious Technicolor – or as much as an underground tunnel could be thus – and it was what I had visualised all my life. You know those Road Runner cartoons, where a lightbulb switches on above Will E Coyote’s head? Well, a similar enlightenment came to me when I saw this light at the end of this tunnel in Bracknell, Austin territory. I have always been captivated by Great Leaders: the ones behind such fascinating communities such as Aum Shinrikyo, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the Divine Light Mission, Hare Krishna, the Order of the Solar Temple, Sahaja Yoga… too many to mention them all. I read all the biographies of the holy and not-so-holy originators of these groups, jotting down salient points in my journal. I still believe in good old pencil and paper. I learned typing when I had chilblains, and I could only use my indices. In the peak of my youth, I could nonetheless type 100w.p.m., so I never bothered to learn how to touch-type.

If you use a ballpoint to write in the dark, it can let you down; but if you have a clutch of pencils at the ready, all you have to do is feel whether they have a point, and take it from there. You don’t have to switch on the light and annoy whoever is in bed with you, or attract the mozzies. Ignorant people call them cults, but actually they are not all cults, because they all contain truths that are inherent in other… well, beliefs. But I digress. I knew that if I wanted to get rich, rich beyond dreams of avarice, I would have to invent a religion. A religion that would be, of course, The One True Religion for my followers. I wanted a place to be, a place to call my own, unlike no other. I didn’t want a palace, or a compound. I didn’t want a village, or a castle with a moat around it. Actually, I knew what I didn’t want, but I didn’t know what I wanted – until I saw the tunnel. That was the place of my dreams, the just-what-I-always-wanted-but-didn’t-know-it scenario that made me crave to put my signature on the dotted line, as fast as possible before someone else started a bidding war. So, as I was saying, my tenet being If you want to get rich, invent a religion, that is just what I did. It’s logical and financially sound advice. However, for some reason, my instinct told me to refuse the hackneyed “I saw God and she was black” blueprint. And of course, a person of my exquisite intellect would never expect the hoi polloi to fall for that spiel; it’s been done too often – I’ve even got the t-shirt. Knowing that where I live, there were many people who were disillusioned with the paternalistic, male-god religions, whereas at the same time desperate to hold on to the traditional monotheistic waffle, I did my homework. The fact that I had, as I assumed at the time, not gone through any process of enlightenment or revelation means that my detractors cannot accuse me of faking it. My concepts are exceptionally multifaceted with infinitely bourgeoning twists. How can an ordinary person hope to understand my core dogmas, if sometimes, albeit rarely because it is too much trouble to edit my Tome, I make them up as I go along? In my country, there is a legend which tells of how the Earth Mother let her Tears of Loneliness drip into the Great Meniscus of Nothing. Students of physics would know that when droplets fall on a stretch of water, they engender back-jets. Ordinarily, these columns of the liquid shoot up and then fall back into the water, creating concentric ripples. However, this was In the Time of Before, so each back-jet became a Land Place. I decided to work on this myth in order to create my religious group, which would be unlike anyone of the silly cults from which I stole ideas, and transmogrified them to into something totally plausible. And then, ironically, I found out that what I had envisioned and envisaged was nothing but the Truth. Mum spoke to me. It was not a trance, not a vision; she was there, on the beach, wearing a bandana, an aquamarine kimono and flip-flops as the ultimate disguise… my inspiration, incarnate. There are many pictures on the internet of multi-tasking women holding brooms, babies, pots, feather dusters, and more. Kuan Yin is The One with a Thousand Arms – and she has eyes in some of the palms of her hand, with which to see those who need her help. However, please note that I did not make the mistake of others who thought they knew it all – for I really do. I am as genuine and unpretentious as they come. I forbore to give Mum a consort. For had I done so, it would have meant that I had to give her a whole hagiography, philosophy and mythology (and history!) of rivals and offspring – including the equivalent of Nephilim…and, obviously, a couple of bastards to boot. I know on which side my bread is buttered, just as I know that margarine is bad for health. That is why my religion is all things to all men – and women, and children – about which, later. To recruit my first batch of Faithful, I took out innocuous advertisements in the press, peppering them with words like peace and kindness and happiness and every other positive word I could think of. I never mentioned the word ‘religion’ of course, because the people who were silly enough to swallow my bait did not deserve to be told the truth, and in any case, it was beyond their scope. I never asked for membership fees; but I accepted donations. Because people appreciate my humility and my razor wit, and my wish to share what I have extracted from the Universe. I tell them that “of course” they can keep their old religion and believe in Mum, since she is a benign immortal, and not actually a deity. It goes without saying that I had to make a couple of concessions to popular culture: I have included some buzz-words such as spiritual enlightenment, incidental infinity, higher consciousness, mystic wisdom, and more of that ilk. To counteract this, I also use jargon to re-name some common things. Midway along my mission, however, I discovered that money (by this time I was rolling in it) was not really important – and therefore I continued relentlessly in my chosen path, mowing down everyone who tried to nit-pick my theories. After all, Mum is for real. My Faith could run on Automatic Pilot. I devised a computer programme that takes care of the correspondence of my faithful. Every so often, I make a scheduled ‘casual’ appearance at the supermarket, where I sign autographs and hand out baby-teething amber necklaces that are even worn by grown-ups. They come with a certificate of authenticity and exclusivity – because amber beads are not all the same colour, size, and shape and so no necklace is like any other. And then, the Tunnel popped up in a sidebar on my Facebook feed. Oh, with a couple of million €uros of fixing, it was as close to Heaven as does not matter. Serendipity? Happenstance? Fate? Luck? Karma? Who knows? Most people know the story of Noah, and how now it has been proven that the Great Flood did not cover all of Earth, because several peoples flourished at the same time they were supposed to have been annihilated. Well, I come from the Orowignarak of Alaska, and we too have a story of how an earthquake, a storm, and a tsunami, occurred together. Only a few of my ancestors escaped in their skin canoes to the tops of the highest mountains. They didn’t need an Ark. Other Tribes have Great Floods in their history – the Anishinaabe, Choctaw, Comox, Cree, Hopi, Menomini, Mi'kmaq, Nipmuc, Nisqually, Ojibwe… to name but a few. But none are as drastic as ours.

I was playing Chuck Stones with some crystals, to while away the time… but suddenly, I froze. The configuration of their positions made a formation that could only mean one thing: a tsunami was Tripartite Tragedy like the one in my Nation’s annals was in the offing. It was All Systems Go. I over-rode the computer systems and broadcast the news to all Believers, and all Media Stations. Some did not believe me, and cut me off in mid-sentence. Many perished, but many were saved – most of them from my Faithful Fold.  It goes without saying that many of us were sealed inside The Tunnel, and we could hear the waves pound against the walls. To cut a long story short, the religion I had thought was my invention, but which in reality I was enlightened to discover, saved the lives of millions. Governments the world over fell over their feet to contact me about how they may accommodate Mum and me. So here I am, facing a barrage of cameras and monitors, preparing to preach to the almost-converted. I go live on the count of 10, 9, 8, 7…


As the sun set lower in the sky he adjusted the brim of his ballcap against it. The brim already soaked through with sweat, even though the game was barely half over. The day had been hot, and tiring, and the lasting heat was magnified by the sea of asphalt that surrounded the ballfield. The parks and diamonds and courts at the north end of town wouldn't have this issue. There are tall elms, oaks and pines, and expanses of grass, in lieu of the heat reservoirs of the pavement. There would be a working water fountain as well and the dugout was probably nicer in all likelihood. And who knows, maybe even some grass in the outfield? Not here though, no room in the budget, barely enough in there to chalk the foul lines. The early evening glare from the slowly sinking ball of fire hampered Bobby greatly as he peered in towards home. Whomever built the field had the diamond facing East- ish so that the batter doesn’t have to face into the sun at setting time. That, however, lines up the Right Fielder directly facing into the sun. No wonder the pros have those ridiculous flip down shades.

“They look silly, doncha think?” Bobby had once been asked. Oh sure, the other team supposed he wasn’t all that great because he’s out in right, it IS where they put the weak links after all. Little did they know that he used to play college ball for a serious DII program. None of his new teammates knew that either though, in a cruel twist of irony. And so they planned on just lofting it into the sun and then start runnin’ like hell . Usually, the plan resulted in a surefire hit every time. So all in all, not a great place to be. Not terrible mind you, it was a game he was playing after all, it’s just he preferred to play Left Field, is all. Bobby was the new guy on the team, they had been a man down and his coworker reached out to see how he was occupying his evenings. He had demurred at first, white-lying about all the hobbies, house projects, and friends he had to deal with. But, the truth of the matter was, it was a nice way to preclude the thoughts of Beth from entering his brain. Or so he had hoped. It had been 19 days since she moved out. June the 12th was the day she split. For good this time, he knew in his heart of hearts.

And it had felt like a punch in his gut of guts. He hadn’t meant to stray, and hadn’t actually done anything. It was just that waitress slipped that little scrap of torn receipt paper with her number, AND a number of hearts, into his pocket and gave him a peck on the cheek. Surely that wasn’t enough to justify Beth’s running off with her boss, maybe she was just looking for an out? The smudge of the cocktail server’s makeup on his work shirt collar, and perhaps a whiff of her perfume was all Beth needed pack her bags and allow her twelve-years-senior boss to put her up in his condo across town.

“At least, with that zip code there would be no danger of running into her accidentally.” Bobby had remembered thinking at the time. Clang! And the sound of the other team whooping and his teammates yelling direction filled the air. He was snapped back to reality by the sound of the aluminum bat striking the neon green orb that flew past him in the dusty outfield. As the lighting at some of these fields were suspect, the makers of the recreational product on display made the softballs HiVis Green. And Bobby now watched that ball streak past him, reminding him of tracer munitions cutting through Afghani twilight. That brightly colored ball, bouncing now all the way to the fence. One run had scored from his inattention. And now runners on second and third. He got the ball back to the cutoff man and resolved to keep his head in the game.

“Focus dammit !” He scolded himself. This all was further proof that he had let Beth too close. She was the first he had let into his heart. And it felt as if she would be the last, as well. She had always held unnatural sway over him. Bobby watched the next hitter loft a popout to the right side of the infield. Pleased that he didn’t have to battle the sun for that one, Bobby scoffed to himself. “Ball diamonds should point East Northeast, huh? Obviously nobody asked the Right Fielder!” One man down. Another Clang! rang out in the early summer evening. And again the sound of cheers from the other team. A slugger, left-handed this time, had just knocked in the two runs that Bobby had allowed into scoring position with a drive that bounced once and cleared the fence. The now-runner had mishit it slightly but the low fences around the outfield made the line drive’s hop an easy double. That is a danger of Fast Pitch Softball; the speed of the incoming pitch can make it even harder to keep it in the park. Especially with these new CAD designed aluminum bats… Those bats could really “wallop.” That’s how Willy would’ve put it, not that he had approved of computer aided anything. “ Poor ol’ Willy… ” And just like that, Bobby found himself wandering through his thoughts again. Clang! And the hapless Right Fielder was again caught dreaming. This time though, his nearest outfield compatriot had been noticing his inattention and had come to his aid. The team’s aid in all reality. As the ball was lofted into the sun’s glare the Right-Center Fielder got on his horse , and took off on a beeline to the shallow part of the outfield that had been left unguarded by Bobby’s daydream. With a dive, a catch, and a roll, he tossed the ball to the second basemen and dusted himself off with a chuckle. Two men out. “You ain’t in the Beer Leagues there buddy. Get your head in the game!” Said the athletic young man, as he jogged back to his position, shaded slightly his way now. Bobby remembered being that brave once. Before he was sent to “The Sandbox” . The remnants of that sordid experience still clung to him during those hot, sleepless nights. Without her now. Those restless humid nights where she would come to his aid in the moonlight, awakened by his frightened tossing and turning. Holding him tight once he released himself from the nightmare. Comforting him as the faintest of breezes gently rustled the drapes. Now comforting somebody else, leaving him to face his demons alone. “Yes Sir. Cap’n, Sir.” Said Bobby, just a tad too quickly. It couldn’t be helped, it was the training, in there too deep. His subordinate tongue was in there deep too, a remnant from a childhood of questioning authority. Quit with that sass, boy! Bobby had let the self discipline of his tongue slip also, in addition to the long jogs that had been his daily habit. But then, she had been responsible for that too, hadn’t she?

From all he could recollect, the early runs had gotten less and less frequent at her behest. Not that she wanted him out of shape, but knowing that a comfortable man is less likely to stray she worked on him subtlety. And in the mornings when he used to run laps of his neighborhood to try to escape the demons of his deployment, she would instead curl her nude body around his as he made to rise and pull him into a supine position for exercise of a different nature. All that was gone now. Just the memory of her to haunt his night-tortured soul, drenched in the sweat of his terrors. Nobody to hear the groans… No one to hear his sobs. Clang! Again the sudden noise brought Bobby back to the present. It was fortunate that the ball was hit towards him with a good amount of loft. Looking up, he could see that all he had to do to end the inning was to sprint to the spot that the wall would land. This , he knew how to do.

That spot happened to be just at the base of the fence in deep Right Center, well over his neighboring outfielder’s head. He had practiced this very action so frequently in his youth the muscle memory just took over. He felt the familiar burn of his muscles exerting their power and relished the hint of strength hiding just beneath the surface of rust and inattention. Before the nightmares robbed him of his sleep, sanity, and motivation to do anything at all. He made the catch and flipped the ball to the umpire as he jogged past him in to the first base dugout. Always act as if you’ve been there before, son. Slightly winded from his busy half-inning he paused for a sip of something blue from the water jug before sitting at the end of the bench for a minute. He nodded slightly as his team said “Nice catch” and “Good work,” their enthusiasm slightly dampened by his previous gaffes. In his estimation, it was just a routine catch. Ever since he started playing ball, he had always been good at tracking the ball’s flight path off of the bat. He had spent so many hours as a youth chasing popups at Willy’s farm. There was a cobbled together baseball launcher that would simulate a specific flight dynamic, that the older man would deploy often. That machine, along with his meticulous positioning of Bobby in the dooryard during their drills, earned Bobby all that youthful notoriety.

That fielding machine was Barnyard Mechanics at its finest. To start with he had just raided his parts pile, around the corner of the barn tucked under the eaves where it wouldn’t get rained on or covered in ice during the winter. In that pile he found an old bedframe that probably belonged to his wife’s mother or aunt or somebody. He utilized it for the tripod legs the contraption sat upon. Then he fashioned a cup from a coffee can and tack-welded it to a plate mounted on a swingarm attached to a pulley from a closeline. Next, Willy had taken the spring off the milkhouse door and used it to actuate the arm, his rationale being that anybody with good sense knew enough to close ANY door you walk through. A rope and a pin would work to trigger the whole situation. Yessir, the years of living in that old farmhouse had certainly taught unconventional engineering, among countless other skills, some pertinent, some not. Willy was his uncle’s neighbor, and by that designation he was either an Uncle or a Neighbor to Bobby, and with the title, all rights and obligations transferred in kind. As was natural for those parts in that bygone era, he took the matter seriously. Either role was of the greatest import to the raising of a boy in to a young man. Of course your neighbor would look out for you like an uncle, and of course your uncle lived out back, or around the corner. It was just the nature of things out in the sticks. All that was before Willy’s moods changed. Not sure what is was exactly, maybe it was pain finding purchase, maybe it was Reaganomics, or maybe it was NAFTA. But whatever it was, it hit Willy hard. Harder than most, and that was sayin’ somethin’! Suddenly cheers erupted around him, and he glanced up from his thoughts. The commotion allowed for the briefest of respites to gather himself for the moment at hand. As the 6th and 7th hitters in the lineup had done their work and became ducks on the pond, Bobby was up next. First though, he needed to find a bat that would fit his short torso and long arms. His legs were long as well, but that just made for a slow first step and nothing more. It wasn’t like it was the ninth inning or anything, but Bobby felt the pressure anyway. The pressure to perform. It was a strangely familiar feeling for one he hadn't felt in years. He remembered it clearly of course, but that was in college, the early part of it as well! But in this new town, this new team, these strangers, on this shabby field, he felt like he was trying out all over again. And in a sense he was, even in this little podunk league on the poor side of town. He felt he had to perform. He must succeed, for the team, for himself, for the memories of Beth… He just had to… And so he waited for his pitch. And when it came he made sure he did not miss. With a flash he leveled his club and made use of his naturally gifted quick wrists. It was funny that even now, even with the rust, all that natural talent was revealed in his bat speed. And with the pitcher smug at the point of release, he felt everything slow down. The large neon greeny-yellow ball now looked like the size of a beach ball. Luckily the flight characteristic of the softball remained as he met the path of the ball with the path of the bat and made the one leap out of the park. It was a rocket, from the crypt. From the vault of his past. He felt his spirits soar with the flight of that ball. All the turbulence of the past 7 months flew along with the otherworldly colored sphere rapidly shrinking into the distance. As he rounded third and headed back to the bench by way of Home Plate, he remembered that day when the State Championship was won by his bat, legs and glove. And as a sophomore no less! He remembered his teammates hoisting him and mobbing him in the field after “That Catch”, really just another of his routine flies to end the game. And he remembered seeing Willy in the stands grinnin’ like a fool. Reveling in HIS victory, and by his participation making it all that much sweeter. That memory along with the ice cream with the team afterwards. And then, his first sip of beer. Allowed as the season was over and the summer was just beginning and both needed saluting. Sitting with Willy under the eaves of his garage in a couple of shabby lawn chairs, hiding from the sun, finally feeling like a peer instead of a ward.

Sipping milk from the teat of life . But all that was before the hospital. Before the Ol’ Man withered away to nothing. The now-ward, the former guardian, wore a weary look. This man a pallorous fraction of his past sum, once virile and strong, now just a frail echo of his younger self. Bobby had only seen him the once after he was admitted. Once was all he was allowed. It had broken Bobby when he got the letter, early into his stint, that Willy had passed. When the time had come, he had just given a squeeze to Beth’s comforting hand and closed his eyes and left. She relayed that his breath had gotten fainter and fainter until it had just stopped altogether. He had always resented her for that, even though he would have hated seeing Willy fade away into his grave. He would rather remember shaggin’ flies with his old friend, their ages four decades separated. He thought of that man now as he settled back into the dugout, in this moment of mediocrity, the bottom of the order in the bottom of the fifth. Willy’s words spoken in his mind as though the man were still live. “Well kid,” Willy would have doubtless said, “ya win some, ya lose some.”

Bobby wiped a tear from his eye surreptitiously and glanced around to see if anybody had noticed. Nobody had. The game had moved on and again Bobby was just left at the end of the bench with his thoughts and a tie game. As if it didn’t even matter if he was here or not today. Maybe he should have just stayed in bed? "Ain't that the truth Pops!"


There was blood on O’Connell Street; I saw it walking home. I didn’t notice it at first. You don’t notice these things all at once when you live in the city and you’re just focused on keeping your head down and not looking anyone in the eye. But all it took was looking up for just half a moment, and there it was. Even in the swarm of the early evening, when tourists nervously wander along in bunched-up groups of three or more and gaggles of college students gather in ragged crowds outside of nightclubs and local pubs, the trail stood out on the pavement: thick boot tracks of browning red which shimmered like dead stars in the dull lamplight of an empty Burger King. In the bitter cold of a January evening, they were already quickly drying into shiny, clumpy shapes of crust on the filthy concrete. There was no puddle, no splatter – no point of origin to be seen whatsoever. They were just suddenly there, like the owner had fallen out of the sky, the soles of their boots already caked in fresh crimson, and proceeded, unbidden, down the street. Not a drip out of alignment, not a drop to be found – just fat globs of red outlining each crease, each crevice and curve, of the scarlet-soaked shoes. I remember it clearly – we’d just past the Spire in the center of town, past the Pennys and the GPO and Abbey Street. I noticed it in the middle of a conversation I was having with a friend – she was prattling on about some make-or-break assignment she was procrastinating on for class. Or something to that degree; all I can remember is suddenly turning my head sharply to the right – like I’d been yanked that way by an invisible line – and spotting an unexpected glimmer of red keeping almost perfect pace with my stride.

Only, they weren’t so casually arranged: the tracks aligned themselves at an unsteady gait, the left foot dragging itself in scuffed-up smears behind the right. They blurred and blurred each detail with every step, so it was almost an effort to study them like I did – an effort like an echo of the effort it must have taken to haul each shattered limb, to drag the body down past the shops and the theatres and the bisecting streets while carefully avoiding a downward-facing crowd which would rather succumb to its own fears of confrontation than look you in the eye. I tried to measure each step as well as I could – the feet were bigger than my own, much bigger, and much heavier to heave when every movement was a shot of agony, scorching up the legs like thorns sprouting from the skin. And in my mind, I suddenly felt the weight like I’d been the body – like I’d been the one to drag myself down a crowded street, head bowed, sweat dripping from my nose and my lips as every movement sent a shock through my bones and my joints. I felt the weight of ages, of time and misfortune, settling into my bloodstream and curdling like sour milk in my gut. It was a weight I could only see – could only ponder – only echoes of the one who left their bloodstained footprints on the sidewalk, but I felt it all the same. Beside me, my friend rambled on, her hands waving excitedly as she recanted the entertainment of the day to me, unaware that I was only listening with half a mind; the other half could only search the evening crowd for a stumbling shadow and wonder, wonder, wonder what I would do if I found it. As I wandered down the road, it began to fade. We were almost to the corner store when I realized that the footprints had started to dissolve into the concrete like phantoms, blurring their forms as the finer details of the spectral shoes smudged into dried-up shuffles. It was like the effort to move had grown too great, the exhaustion sinking in as the body broke down bit by bit and cried, “Enough.” Still, I studied them as I walked, tracing each remaining crease in the soles with my eyes and trying to commit them to an unreliable memory. The effort felt like trying to reattach a leaf to its branch after it had fallen: fruitless, inane, and incomprehensively exhausting. With each step, something was lost: a canyon here, a square peg there, the outline of the heel – everything strewn together into a shapeless, formless mass. Blurred lines became smudges of red that dried into only faint streaks of brown and copper. And then, just before we reached the little café a block away from the tram stop at Parnell, they were gone. The urban earth had soaked them up like water to desperate roots and stripped them of their lost identity, reducing blood of man to just the faintest traces of decay. Whatever might have been left was scuffed over and ignored by the passers-by, whose ground-trained eyes were never so aware as to realize what they had seen. Shaken from my fixation, I turned away; and when we came to our crossroads – my friend to the right, myself to the left – she turned to me with a curious frown and asked, “What were you looking at back there?” “There was blood on O’Connell Street,” I said. My hands fluttered nervously, and I bounced a few times on the balls of my feet.      “Where?”      “Back behind us.”     She turned to crane her neck over her shoulder, but there was only trash and pavement under the muted glow of the corner shop. I could tell by the way her eyes shifted that she didn’t believe me, but still, she looked back at the road we’d left behind and searched amidst the drifting crowds for a sign of what I’d seen – a flash of red, a smear of brown. There was nothing. “Goodnight,” she said, finally.     “Goodnight.” From there, I wandered home, quietly aware of how the balls of my feet burned like I’d taken a stroll through a bed of nails and the hot trickle of blood was soaking through my socks with every step. Behind me, there was nothing – still nothing but shadows in doorways and vacant bus stops and gray, muck-covered stone. That night, I sat at my desk and scoured the news for something I had missed: a brawl, a mugging, a drug deal gone wrong. But like the late evening, the news was quiet, keeping its secrets locked up in desk drawers under piles of papers to never be published for the public eye. Blood on O’Connell Street? Who’d ever heard of such a thing? Not here, not on our O’Connell Street, not in the clear view of hundreds of people who’d surely have done something , said something if it was there, which it wasn’t. As I laid down to sleep that night, what I’d seen – what only I had seen, what only I had caught in the crowd of hundreds milling about between the shops and the streets and the lamplight glow – was stained in my memory, alongside one last, ruminating worry: So much blood, and no body around.


The click of a mouse filled the silence, the screen light filled the dark, the purpose filled the void. Nora’s blank face was awash with a pool of blue light, her pupils as small as the eye of a needle. Her irises swelled with colour, her glassy eyes reflecting her avatar who bobbed back and forth on the screen. Right click. Collect confetti. “Are you doing the Green Orcas quest?” The white text appeared above a familiar avatar, an avatar with a saturated green cape: barbieblows94 . “I am,” typed Nora, the white text filling the silent space, stretching out across the empty arena. The arena was like a ghost town, a ghost town illuminated by ghastly white lights, the breeze whispering through both avatars’ knee-length hair, tickling the ends of Barbie’s green cape. After a concert, absence was tangible, silence was tangible; and it was the stark contrast that did it, the half hour that divided this vacuum from its prior fullness. It was like a black hole having swallowed up gas, dust, moons. And there they stood in the aftermath, as though the black hole had been defused, scraps of stars on its edge like bits of soup in the corners of one’s mouth. Collect confetti. “We both know I’ve already completed the quest,” said Barbie. “Did you need some confetti?” “I’d rather collect it myself tbh ,” said Nora. “It’s cathartic, I guess.” Plastic cups, cans and confetti littered the patches of grass, grass bleached white by the sterile lights. “Yup,” said Barbie. “I’ve got four capes already.” “Isn’t there another quest you’d rather do?” “Nup,” said Barbie, hovering over a crushed soda can. Nora scanned the arena for more litter, the click of her mouse prodding the silence as she collected another colourful lump of confetti. There was the crumple of aluminium as she fished a crisp from its packet, a crunch as she popped it into her mouth, her jaw pulsing beneath the blue light of her screen. Crunch, crunch, crunch. “And did you like the concert?” she typed. “I’m just here for the aftermath, really,” said Barbie. “I’m here for the silence; it feels a little louder after the sudden absence of so much noise.” Pause. The white text danced across Nora’s irises. She popped another crisp into her mouth, chugged back a mouthful of coke. Silence. Silence feels a little louder in the sudden void left by so much noise, silence echoes here in this emptiness. “…and I’m here for the privacy,” continued Barbie. “It’s a little more personal after the sudden absence of such a large crowd.” “You should write a book.” “Piss off,” said Barbie. “I’d flip you off if I could.” “Damn, what a shame,” said Nora. “But no, really, it’s a death of sorts.” “I guess.” I guess? Wasn’t it? It was as though the crowd had carved out the flesh of a kiwi, had occupied its hollowed skin and then left; it was as though they’d stretched the space like a hair tie, and it would never regain its prior form, it would never bounce back. They’d expanded the space and had then evacuated it; and what was once so whole was left loose and hollow. There was always a before, and always an after. Noise preceded silence, and presence preceded absence. Here, in the after , silence was louder, and privacy more personal. “You guess?” said Nora. “I keep coming back,” said Barbie, “because it makes me feel alive. I feel more alive in the aftermath of something, than I do in the absence of something.” “But they’re both absence.” “They’re a different kind of absence.” One was a before, and one was an after. Nora clicked on her inventory. She needed fifty more lumps of confetti and twenty-three more cans, then she too would earn a green cape, she too would have a sense of fulfilment, however trivial. She dusted the crumbs from her keyboard as she popped another crisp into her mouth. She too felt alive here in this semblance of death. She hadn’t understood it though, not really, not even now. She placed an oily hand on her mouse, double clicked a red can, twenty-two, click , twenty-one, click , twenty. “Did you like the concert, then?” asked Barbie. “Yeah, but Jade looked exhausted.” “Did she?” “I swear she almost fainted during Offline Love,” said Nora. “Don’t they all?” Idols lived so intensely that they burned through life like dynamite. They’d never stood in the aftermath, like this, here, now; they’d never had the time to live. There was so much life, constant life to plough through, and everything blossomed in their wake. And somehow this made the slow pace of monotony and mediocrity sacred. Nora had the time to live, the time to feel her joy, to feel her pain, the time to process them; and yet she didn’t. She ran from the void, she covered the void, she filled the void, but she’d never dived right in, she’d never examined its lungs, its heart, its skin. She double clicked on confetti. Forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven. The click of a mouse filled the silence, the screen light filled the dark, the purpose filled the void. “Woops,” said Barbie. “I gtg .” “Night.” Barbie’s avatar vanished, and Nora stared into the screen, the empty arena, the lights. Her irises swelled with colour, her chest swelled with the void. Exit to Lobby. Double click. Nora rose from her chair and waddled towards the wardrobe, her shoulders hunched. There was a girl in the mirror glowing blue with light, there was a girl in the mirror with acne and vacant eyes; she had oily lips, and crumbs in the corners of her mouth, but this didn’t constitute an aftermath. She hadn’t swallowed gas and dust and moons, she hadn’t burped up stars. There was no before, and no after; there was only this pristine and perpetual absence, as white as an unsullied napkin tucked into one’s collar. She craved collision, a before, an after, and her stomach grumbled for more. She wiped the crumbs from her lips with the back of her hand, and fell into bed, fell into ennui, into self-pity. Lobby music filled the silence, the screen light filled the dark, but nothing filled the void. Why couldn’t we sit in that space? The tranquillity of ennui allowed us to transcend this, here, now; it allowed us to speak to ourselves, our minds, and not merely our biology; and yet, it bored. It yawned so widely it swallowed us whole, and there we sat in its stomach, isolated and infected with its sleepiness. Why couldn’t we revel in the dreamlike languor? Why couldn’t we lie in bed and stare up at the ceiling, at the gotelé , at the objective self departing our body and floating above like a balloon? like a balloon attached to our core by an invisible umbilical cord. Why couldn’t we examine the subconscious? Nora reached towards her desk and shut her laptop, rolled over and closed her eyes. Her lids fluttered, her limbs twitched, her body sighed, and her mind swelled with colour. Silence reigned, darkness reigned, and dreams filled the void.


They say that light always wins, overpowering the darkness, be it fiction or reality. Everyone glorifies the light, the yang, shunning the darkness and thinking of it as the 'wrong way of life. But without the dark, we wouldn't know of the light. This is my story. A story about darkness. A story where one surrenders to the orphic shadows which our demons thirst for. A story where yin triumphs. * * *

In the faraway lands of Galaecia, the kingdom of hope, righteousness, beliefs, and love stood. For all that people knew, merry days was what the future held for the kingdom... Yet none spoke about the dark truth of the lands, the forbidden secret which was left unsaid since eons, and now forgotten. Its existence nothing but spun folk tales narrated by the few elders of the lands.

All the happiness of the kingdom depended on one person. The happiness of others dependent on one soul who would be eternally cursed to feel nothing but pain and desolation. Born to the king and queen of Galaecia, one would assume my life was nothing but rainbows and sunshine. No, my life was dark dreams and monsters, thirsting for a release of emotion. One peculiar thing I never quite understood was that whenever I was out of the palace, it felt as if people didn't want me around... Some even refused to look at me and some threw me nasty looks. Conflicts and little brawls used to start erupting all around me. The soldiers of the kingdom had to escort me back to the palace every time, saying that it was 'dangerous for me to be out here. But as soon as I made my way out of the streets of the kingdom, I could hear light laughter and joyful conversations. I could sense the frolicsome environment, all of which made me bitter inside. Hatred coursing through my veins and anger in my bones. As soon as I turned sixteen, I was barely allowed out of the palace. Growing up, I was an obedient child, taught to never question my elders and respect tradition. That habit stuck and I never was able to get rid of it. Keeping all my emotions and questions to myself and remaining stuck inside the palace for hours and hours, I felt like Rapunzel. But at least she had her pet chameleon, a horse, and a happy ending. I didn't have either of those and I didn't expect one anytime soon.

I found slight solace in the company of the sea, feeling the wind in my hair, inhaling the salty ocean breeze, and gazing at the vast body of water from the 'comfort' of my room's balcony. The sea was right in front and all I wanted was to reach out for it. It was so close yet so far...Never was there a picture as enchanting as the ever-evolving sea. Today, whilst I was gazing at the infinite blue sea and the crescendo of the waves as it rose and fell into somewhat of a beautifully choreographed ballet, I saw the guards of the kingdom carrying a man into the dungeons. Never was I ever curious about any of our prisoners, probably because we barely had any, but this time, something pulled at me to take a chance this one time. Sneaking away to the dungeons, I saw him, lying on the cold hard ground. "You shouldn't be here.", came his voice in a stone-cold rasp. Stepping aside from behind the stone pillar, I took a good look at him. "Says you. We've barely kept any prisoners in Galaecia. What did you do that you ended up here?" "And why should I tell you?" "Maybe I can help you break out." "Why would you do that?" I remained silent. After a minute, he sighed and continued "I said some things about the kingdom. About how it was cursed and all. And how they're living under a facade. And how I could help them." My head almost had whiplash at the word 'cursed'. "What do you mean 'cursed'?", I asked. "There is a legend revolving around this kingdom. Said to have been forgotten by most, but I have my trusted sources. They say that this kingdom is destined to greatness at the hands of one but its people won't be happy any longer." "And what? You were planning to invade with a one-man army?" "No, I was hoping for a different turn of events. I was hoping I could get them to trust me and then I'd figure out the rest." "Don't you think it's brainless of you to tell me all this when you barely know who I am? I could snitch on you, though it won't make much of a difference.", I said wistfully. He laughed lightly, a melodic rasp I'd say, "Oh I very well know who you are. Valerie, princess of Galaecia, rather, the cursed one. How does it feel, to know that everyone around you is content and cheery at the cost of your happiness? And poor little you suffer in agony, and rage...", This time, he met my eyes, and oh the flaming anger in them was as beautiful as it was terrifying. "What are you babbling about?" I asked, my voice slightly shaky but in the back of my mind, I knew what he was saying wasn't wrong. It did connect everything. Would my parents really do that? Sacrificing my happiness for their kingdom...Did they know this all along?

"You know I'm right.", he got up and said, tapping his fingers on the metal bars of the cell. I looked away from him. All this happened but none of it came across as much of a surprise to me. "Well, what are you going to do now since your 'plan of invasion' was very stupid. If you think about solely gaining all the time, without thinking of the problems which would arise, something like that is bound to happen.", I said, squinting my eyebrows "That's all that life is about, no? You gain, you lose, the cycle repeats, and then you die. But, when power comes along the way, life takes a turn. It's in your hands to make it better or worse." "Greed sounds like your God." "No, greed bows to me." "Yet it failed you. " "Not yet it didn't." "And your God?" "I only favor those Gods which bring me a fortune." "I don't think Gods work that way." "Oh, but it does. I am here right now, aren't I?" "What about your fortune?" "I am looking right at it.", he said, a hungry gleam in his vivid emerald eyes. Upon my frazzled expression, he let out a chuckle and said, "The Kingdom, I meant. Aren't you tired of living like this? Being miserable while others around you are celebrating and are happy for some stupid reason at the cost of your happiness. Think about it, if you come with me, you won't have to suffer any longer. We'll be strong together. We'll be unstoppable. I don't want to rule your kingdom. No, you can have that. But what I want, is a share in the power. Think about yourself this once. You can finally experience what you've always wanted to. It's a win-win. Think about you, Valerie. You." By this point, I was in the front of his cell. Since I used to remain in my room for most of the time, I had mastered the art of picking locks. Taking out a pin from my hair, I inserted it in the keyhole. The cell door opened with a satisfying

click . "I'd never thought someone seducing me to the dark side would be so tempting." I almost whispered. Stepping closer to me and tugging around a few tendrils of my hair, he whispered near my ear, "What are you waiting for then?" Giving him a wicked smile, I whipped out a dagger from his grey leather belt. The dagger had a gleaming sapphire attached to the pommel, the hilt-a vintage silver color. "You had this all along. Why didn't you use it?", I asked. "How else would I have come to meet you? If I killed those guards, I'd be dead on the spot.", he said. "You had this all planned?!", I asked, surprise evident in my voice. "To every last bit.", he said. "How'd you know that I would follow you?" "I didn't. But, I took a chance, just like you." Noticing me admire the carvings of the dagger, he said, "I won it in a duel, along with other merchandise. I almost lost my eye that day but you should have seen the other guy." Grabbing the collar of his quilted vest, I said dragging the tip of the dagger and making random patterns on his crisp white shirt, "Must be very precious to you then?" "No,", he let out a chuckle, "I've had better. And be careful with that dagger, ay. That ain't no toy." "Well, I best be careful then." The act was swift and sudden. The blade of the dagger sliced into his heart. A cold sheen of sweat covered him and he gasped, his eyes bulging in disbelief. From his open mouth came gurgling and sputtering sounds. "I should've ....known..", he coughed out blood.  I tipped his chin upwards to meet his eyes, "Yeah. Do you know what your problem is, based on what I figured out in this five-minute conversation? Though you are quick-witted, you assume too fast. But you know what? I don't like to share at all. I didn't have anyone to share with when I was young, and I guess the habit stuck. " I patted his cheek. I polished the dagger clean with the cuff of my sleeve. Without sparing the corpse another look, I stepped over it and walked away. Anger and wickedness coursing my veins, my entity was to be feared. And it was about time I confronted some people, starting with my dear father. It seemed as if the sinister smile I had on affected the waves of the sea as well as it crashed against the shore, wild, turbulent, and... unforgiving.