Stop

in

Maggie flipped her sign from SLOW to STOP at the last moment, and the Jaguar scraped to a halt. She knocked on the window. Her tinted reflection rolled away, replacing hard hat and orange vest with with a man: Tarantino-pinched face, tinted sunglasses, too cool to slow down. “What?” he said. “There’s nobody coming. Why can’t I go through?”

“Safety hazard, sir. Never normally do this, but I need to point out a serious problem, if you’ll come out of the car.” He looked suspicious, but got out. Maggie pointed to the front of the car. “Take a look up there.”

His back was to her as he looked. She set down her sign as she talked. “Look at the front bumper.” The bumper had a mirror shine. She took off her vest and hat. “See that? A real danger. Could cause serious damage any time now.”

“Don’t... see anything,” he muttered.

She slipped into the driver seat and restarted the engine. “It’s you, dipshit.” And she drove off.

He’d call the police and call the company, but she’d only worked for them since she’d traded their employee her car for the sign, hat, and vest.

Another asshole served.

Trapped

in

I’m trapped here. I’m pretty sure I built this wall. These bricks. This cement.

Oh, hey, I probably used these tools. There’s some quick-dry cement here... and some extra bricks... and a pointy spatula-thing. Yup. I probably made this wall.

Wonder why I didn’t build it with myself on the outside.

Huh.

Well, I probably had a reason. Maybe there’s a monster or something out there. Or Nazis. Or zombies.

Still, I would have liked to have left me something to eat. And drink.

Maybe a toilet.

There’s not a lot of room in here either. How long do I have to wait until it’s safe? If I’d been expecting not to remember anything, you think I would have remembered to leave myself a note. And more to read by than this bare light bulb.

And... and there are no tools here for breaking out. Just for building. And one light. Did I build a catch into the wall, a secret way to break out?

...

Nope.

Maybe someone else built the wall, and left the tools in here to trick me.

Or maybe I wanted to make damn sure I never left.

I’ll have to think about this.

Forever

in

When I no longer loved her, I broke time. I meant it when I said, “I will love you forever.” Time didn’t break the way I expected. I thought I was freezing time, crystallizing it across space the way ice-nine froze all the world’s water. My love’s ending would end the universe, outward from Earth at the speed of light.

There’s more to time than I understood then. There is a grain to it, or a current, because my seed crystal of frozen time spread unpredictably. It missed me completely; I, time’s first murderer and its intended first victim. She, at least, is forever unaware that I failed to end the universe along with our love. Small mercies.

Instead, time fractured. Most of the western hemisphere is no-man’s land. Anything that goes in bleeds time until it freezes. Interstellar patches of frozen time block out the sun at irregular intervals. It is only our good fortune, or bad, that I didn’t shear the sun in two. And gravity somehow ignores the change, or it would have ripped Earth apart.

It might have been better if I had. I miss her. I think I still love her after all.

The Monster Man

in

The monster was shaped like a man. Its chitinous skin turned knives, deflected bullets. Its terrible strength hurled people against walls with bone-breaking force, ripped limbs from sockets, sheared its human teeth through muscle and bone and swallowed. It killed and ate indiscriminately. The terror brought martial law down on the city. The city protested, and the government fought its people more than its declared enemy.

#

In an abandoned train tunnel, a man lay naked in a pool of sweat. He vomited something pinkish red. Sick, moaning, he picked the splintered bone of a human finger from his emesis. Struggling to his feet, he threw the bone and screamed, and slipped to the wet concrete. Disjointed memories struck him: breaking a soldier’s leg bare-handed; stomping a woman’s head against pavement; biting through a child’s hand and swallowing.

Tears mixed with the bloody vomit. Tucking his knees to his chest, he sobbed without rest. Finally drained of tears, he lifted his dispenser: half empty. He lifted his arm to hurl it, shatter it, but couldn’t. Weeping again, he took his dose and waited for his skin to harden, his muscles to tighten, and for the monster to rescue him.

Regrets

in

“Your parents didn’t die of natural causes.” That would be scary even if the man speaking hadn’t been somehow waiting for Janet in her house and bleeding. Except that her parents were living in Florida. If you can call that living.

“What?” she said.

“If my parents had been taken from me, I’d want to know how they died. I’d want to know why.”

“Well, yeah,” said Janet. “That sounds reasonable, I guess.”

“I’d want to know it wasn’t an accidental gas leak.”

Janet’s mom hadn’t shut up about their solar heating in five years and hated gas stoves. “Look,” she said, “Are you going somewhere with this?”

“I rigged the gas,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was about money, but I wasn’t in control. I--.” Janet got out her phone. “Wait, don’t call--”

“Wait a sec.” Janet made a call. “Hi, yeah. No, don’t, just. Listen, there’s someone here who wants to talk to you.” She tossed the phone over. “It’s my mother.”

He caught the phone, paused, then hung up. “Adopted?”

“I have his nose and her boobs.”

“Is this... 1272 21st Street?

“East or west 21st?” asked Janet.

He was gone before her mom could call back.

It Matters Anyway

in

The glob of spit arced into the coffin. Kate almost couldn’t believe she’d just seen that. She looked around. Mom was looking down into her lap. Brother Ted was across the room talking to a cousin. And this chubby forty-something had just spit on Kate’s father and was walking away. She smoothed out her black skirt and followed him outside. Kate caught up with him halfway across the parking lot. Her tap on the shoulder turned him, and then her fist in the gut bent him over. She pushed him back against a minivan.

“What the fuck was that about?” she said.

“Gak,” he said. He regained his breath just in time for her to hit him again.

“What makes you think you can walk into my dad’s funeral and spit on him? Fucking spit on him!”

“Jesus,” he croaked, “Stop hitting me.”

Kate stared hate at him.

“Your dad,” he said, “abused me as a kid. I hope he’s in hell.”

Pieces fit together in Kate’s mind. Volunteer activities. Time spent mentoring. Time spent alone.

She hit him again, then slammed his head against the car. “You’re a fucking liar. Get out of here before I hurt you.”