He sat there at his desk doing whatever he came to work to do.... which was to fiddle his fingers, apparently. Tap-tap-tapping them against the glass surface.

His laptop was on. I could tell because it’s blue light cast a sinister glow upon his face. He was not focused on the screen, though, rather just above it. His sharp eyes shot a piercing gaze through the glass wall and held on tight to me. If it weren’t for that thin barrier, I’m sure he would have instantly attacked me that very moment.

I stood there staring back-- a deer caught in headlights. My lungs froze and my heart certainly stopped. As we locked eyes, my mouth tried not to show fear, but it also tried not to be too friendly. As a result, my face curled into the countenance of an awkward three-year-old on picture day. He had some kind of effect on me. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. He exuded an intimidating presence, yet, he was irresistibly alluring. His accent didn’t help, either.

Staring into his eyes, I could see everything that must have been going on in his twisted brain. He was hungry for revenge. In his mind, I had wronged him, and he was ready to get even at all costs. I felt guilty somehow, yes. But, in a way, I felt strong, powerful, and confident. I knew that my actions irked him immensely and that in itself was gratifying.

I’m not sure exactly how long I was staring at him for, but before I knew it, he was no longer at his desk. My heart resumed beating- it began pounding. I scanned my surroundings. He was nowhere to be found.

Suddenly, my heart stopped again. I could sense that he was behind me. “I know what you did, Constance,” he breathed on my neck, “And, for that, you will surely pay.” I felt him walk away, so I turned and followed him with my eyes. He glided over to my desk with his slippery smile and reached his long fingers into my candy dish, swiping every last bonbon. His grin bore teeth as he clenched the shiny, crinkly wrappers in his fist.

“Next time, think twice before you call yourself eating my lunch out of the company fridge,” he murmured as he walked back past me and into his office. The wind from his coattails skimmed against my skirt and the chill of his presence rocked my core.

He sat back down in his chair with grand satisfaction of his accomplishment; ankles crossed, feet perched upon his desk. He eyed me intensely as he unwrapped and devoured each confection, still smiling as he chewed.

And, when he was done, I turned away and sat back at my own desk. Staring into my empty candy dish, I wondered what kind of lunch he would have waiting in the company fridge for me tomorrow.

Roads turned into battlfields

People screaming and shouting

There was no time to heal

Always needed to keep fighting

Many years later, the city got rebuilt

A war ended, but a new one started

People's minds covered in dirt

Their acceptance became blinded

Lost its colors many years ago

Nobody tried to bring them back

Darkness has started to grow

Even time lost its track

New generations came to this land

Trying to fix the past mistakes

With no weapons, only a flag in their hands

Asking for their rights, no matter what it takes

We may get banned many times

It takes time to build a country

They may see our work as a crime

But we'll always fight proudly

Let's raise our flags instead of guns

Let's show them how to love

Let's dance under the moon and the sun

Ourselves, let's be proud of

Me. Me. Me.

In my wildest fantasy, I am a self-fulfilled, self-confident young professional at a stable job with a boyfriend and a graduate degree from a prestigious university.

You. You. You.

Still living in LA, like a ghost of years past, you keep coming back.

Her. Her. Her.

Abby is on her back deck, smoking a cigarette and having a glass of Chardonnay at 10am. Texting her ex. Rules don’t apply in quarantine.

——

Our lives once connected, now somewhere far off in the distance. Like the plumes of cigarette smoke cascading off the deck and into the windows of the house next door. Inevitability? Oblivious dreaming? A universe split down the middle, two separate homes, realities.

——

Abby is sitting on her back deck when a neighbor starts shouting next door; she looks up, and this neighbor is, incredibly, shouting at her to go inside.

Fire. Fire. Fire!

Sure enough, plumes of smoke are billowing out from the house directly behind Abby, directly behind her delicate wrist that had just moments before been lifting Chardonnay to the sky. In a toast to the gods, a 10am chink.

Drunk. Drunk. Drunk.

Is this what my destiny is? Pretending to have the life of my wildest fantasies when I’m secretly suffocating?

You. You. You.

As always, LA fires are something to witness and fear. Trees? Gone up in smoke. Gone like Abby.

Quarantine. Quarantine. Quarantine.

Of course this was bound to get its own section. It is sparse and silent. It is their newest natural disaster, lingering over everything like a cigarette haze.

Parallel. Parallel. Parallel.

Wildfire. Wildfire. Wildfire!

You are taking care of business. Calling the fire department when the house behind yours burns to the ground. Always one text away, in my wildest fantasies.

But you don’t text back and everything that brought them together, has disintegrated.

Is a drunken stupor the same thing as having a wild fantasy? Or, is there a split, two sides competing for center stage?

When Abby toasted to the gods, they responded.

We are a univese apart.

Just recently my family adopted a new dog. She stayed in the backyard, but there was a problem: We also had a rabbit in the backyard. Dogs and Rabbits don’t get along together very well. So we brought the rabbit into the house. For 2 weeks the Rabbit stayed in a box: a big, plastic, storage box with a red lid. I have to admit, he was quite happy, but I think he was geting a little bit bored. My sisters offered to house the rabbit in their room because we could not put the rabbit in the living room; my dad is allergic to rabbits.

One morning I heard my sister yelling and screaming at the furry rodent. Turned out the rabbit had eaten half of her math page. My mom was not happy and in the end she had to email the teacher to send another copy of the math page. But thats only the biggining.

The next day the rabbit hopped on to my other sisters bed and scratched it up, leaving behind hair and Poop. My other sister was not happy; both of my sisters were angry. I figured they were about to tell me to take the rabbit to my room and house him. Thankfuly it did not come to that.

So we kicked him out to the garage. He was quite happy there. But one day my brother left a mirror in his box. The rabbit (rabbits are pretty dumb) tryed to frighten the other rabbit in the mirror. As he was trying to frighten the other rabbit, the other rabbit frightened him. He backed off and the other rabbit backed off to. The rabbit seing that this was a good chance to show the other rabbit who he was charged and the other rabit charged to. The rabbit never got his revenge for I had finally relized what the noise had been and quickly pulled the mirror out. Boom! The rabbit hit the side of the box. Confused and bewildered he retured to his bed, not knowing were the other rabbit had gone.

#funny #flash-fiction #rabbit

“Give me a double-shot of your best whiskey, Andy.”

I normally drank a beer or two when I sat at the bar after work, but the success of today’s experiment called for something a bit stronger. I knew I should draft a report to General MacIntyre, but I couldn’t face that chore without some liquid courage. The truth was I was torn between wanting to celebrate, and needing to commiserate. Pride and fear battled for control.

“Tough day?” Andy asked, as he poured golden fire into a crystal glass. He was the closest thing I had to a best friend; the fact that he was my bartender says either something wonderful about him, or something pitiful about me. Hell, probably a little of both.

“You have no idea.” I slammed the whiskey all at once, and felt my eyes turning red as the heat settled in my core and spread through my body. “You ever wonder if maybe life would be better in a different reality?”

“I have enough trouble dealing with my actual life, let alone an imaginary one.”

That was the problem, though. I now knew there was more to the idea of alternate realities than imagination. Knowledge may be power, but the revelation of some secrets can make you wish for the bliss of ignorance. That was the double-edged lesson today’s results had taught me.

“Thanks, Andy.” I laid a twelve-dollar bill on the bar. “Keep the change.”

I stood to leave, and saw Nora Kimble come through the door. She never came in here, and I was afraid that she had even more disturbing news—a thought reinforced by her locked eye contact when she saw me. I made my way over to her, as the whiskey traveled deeper into both my body and my mind. “Nora... what’s wrong?”

“We’ve had another transfer.”

I blanched. This could be bad. “Should I go back upstairs?”

“It won’t matter.” She tipped her head, and I followed her to a table. “Look David, We both know that stream 841-C is the only viable doorway, and this newest transfer is worse than we imagined it could be. I am afraid that when we opened it we may have let in more than just particles and elements from the other stream.”

“It is the only viable doorway SO FAR, Nora. We still have lots of vibrasyne wavelengths to try.”

“Come on. What have we gotten so far? A handful of streams with audible transmissions, and a couple that have picked up some sort of keyed signals that may or may not contain visual data.”

“But finding the doorway to 841-C… Nora, the ability to transfer actual matter changes everything!”

“That’s the whole problem, David, and you know it.” She gave the bar a quick once-over with her eyes, then leaned her head closer and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial level. “How long do you think MacIntyre and his committee will let us keep working on the project? They will want to explore the military potential. Or even worse, they’ll just bury it all, like they do everything that could upset their power-hold on the country.”

“Why do you think I’m here, and not writing a report?” After-Hours was located in the lobby of the building that housed our work, and was a favorite of many of the staff—a place where the beer and alcohol tasted good, and Andy ruled supreme without dictates and oversight groups. “I’m curious though… what happened that has you so anxious you ventured in here?” I knew Nora didn’t drink, and this was probably her first trip inside the bar.

“I knew you’d be here, and I had to tell you about this...” She reached into her lab coat pocket, and brought out a folded piece of paper.

“That looks like an old sheet of infopaper. Where did you get it?”

“David, it IS an infopaper, but it came from the other stream!”

“WHAT?” The room seemd to tilt a slight bit off center. “All we got the first time was some air and water… and the samples looked promising. No known pathogens, and the same chemical composition we would expect to find anywhere.”

“Read the topline…”

I picked up the paper. It was thicker than it should have been, with an odd texture and a strange gray cast to it, but the words were in English. The message however, was terrifying: COVID-19 PANDEMIC CLAIMS ANOTHER 200,000 LIVES.

“What the hell is COVID-19?”

“I’m afraid it is a new, and potentially very deadly, virus.”

“Nora, does this mean—”

“I’m afraid it just might. We may have infected the world with something that could kill us all.”

I started to read the article, but something else caught my eye. A small story on the second sheet made me catch my breath. “This can’t be right.”

“What?” Nora craned her head to look at the page.

“We thought 841-C might be what we needed to escape our political and environmental woes, but Nora…”

Her eyes begged me not to give her even more bad news.

“According to this, these idiots not only have a major pandemic, but they elected Donald Trump president!”

Her expression of stunned disbelief spoke volumes. So much for a perfect world.

Dexter was a pig. Not ordinary, mind you: he could blow bubbles in the mud. Dexter lived on a farm, Mr. Greens farm, everybody called it. Dexter got 3 meals a day and had his own pigstye with plenty of mud. Every day he had the same routine:

8:00 Wake up & stretch

8:30 Eat the newspaper

9:00 Eat breakfast

10:00 Lie in mud

12:00 Eat lunch

1:00 take nap

3:00 wake up and sun bathe

5:00 Eat supper

6:00 stretch, yawn & spoke a pipe

7:00 Go to Sleep

This was his daily routine, and he did it every day, unless the farmers wife got the newspaper first. The pig lived right next door to the goose. Now the goose had got into his silly head that he could be smart and build anything, so every night Dexter would hear the goose flying up to where the old barn owl lived to talk the whole, whole night.

All the farm animals were used to it and were used to hearing stuff like ” and to the power of 5″ and “with sodium and titanium”, stuff like that. All the barn animals were also used to the goose sleeping all day. It seemed like the goose had gone completely nocturnal.

After a year or so the goose one day escaped and brought back to his house a string. The next day the goose escaped and brought a bucket with him. Every day after that the goose would escape and bring somthing with him. After a couple months the goose stoped bringing stuff. The goose then started building & mixing different chemicals and materials. After a year the goose and his machine made their grand apearance. All the barn animals Chuckeled. The goose introduced his machine as a portal. The animals laughed and laughed. The goose decided that he would show them that it worked so he pressed a button and steped inside the machine. The machine began to rumble and then the goose disapeared. Then a goose steped out. The goose greeted Dexter, saying”Hi Lester”. The animals thought it was a joke so they decided to have Dexter press the same button and step inside the machine to see if it actually worked. At first Dexter refused, but finally after some urging he pressed the button and stepped inside. There was a whir sound and then Dexter climed back out side.

What he saw astounded him. Then Dexter understood. The goose’s machine had worked, he was in another universe. He looked over. There was a goose. The goose came over and said “lets go home Dexter”. Dexter thought that was a good idea, so they both climbed back into the machine. There was a wir sound and then they both steped out.

Cow said, “this other pig named Lester was here but he climbed back into that machine and turned into you”. Cow looked confused and then chuckeled, “We were about to send horse, but he would have not been able to fit into there very well”. Dear readers, do you know what happened?

#pig

When this life ushers to an end

And I am nothing more than dust

Let me spring anew a flower

Of the wildest, softest demeanor

So vivacious to be immortalized

In the eternal poetry of a writer’s pen

s u f f o c a t e d

in this corner

and shoved in

w o r t h l e s s l y

tossed through

h u r l i n g

through g l a s s

walls

that I can’t

even s e e

shards on my skin

e m b e d d e d

into the amber

that b u r n i n g

blistering blood

r e v e a l i n g the

colors of my own

b e i n g

a spilt array of

r a i n b o w gore

mystical malice dances around me

voices urge my consent

ignored by sounds of birds and wings

that never found descent

this rhythm is odd to a common ear

a disjunct harmony

but when I stand I learn to dance

eyes closed but I can see

in spirit I can sing along

for I have found the escape

a map fabricated by blood

held together with fire tape

the dissonance will never end

only feel its embrace

the ghosts around me tell me

I am infinite in space

the stars are souls who made their way

across the only wall

that keeps us here in solitude

and laughs when we fall

but when you find the sacred key

travel far and wide

break the wall, tear it down

and make your way outside

my heart breathes water

that pumps like the blood I shed

to allow your growth

my mouth spits gently

the words you never expect

until they come out

I've lost your interest

from the moment I spoke to

your flawed persona